- October 2, 2026
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Categories: Analogies, Baseball and Sales, Bible and Sales, Understanding the Sales Force
Last Sunday’s gospel was Matthew 21:28-32, the parable of the two sons.
A father tells the first son to go work in the vineyard. The son says, “I will not.” Later he changes his mind and goes. The father tells the second son the same thing. That son says, “I will, sir.” He never leaves the house. Jesus asks which one did the father’s will. They answer, “The first.”
Listening to the reading got me thinking about sales managers.
Not the theology. The meeting after the meeting.
Every sales team has both sons. You know which salespeople you like better, and you may have it backward.
The second son is the one who makes the debrief feel successful. You walk him through the call, you show him where he presented before he had a problem, where he accepted “send me a proposal” as progress, where he never asked why it mattered. He nods. He says, “Got it. I’ll do that on the next one.” He might even write it down. Then you listen to the next call, or you review it in the CRM, and it is a rerun of last week’s calls. Same early presentation. Same proposal. Same “they’re thinking it over.”
He said yes. He didn’t go.
The first son is the one who ruins your coaching. “That won’t work with my accounts.” “They won’t answer those questions.” “If I push like that they’ll end the call.” You end the coaching wondering why you bothered. Two sales calls later, the coaching has gotten through, and he gives it a try. It wasn’t smooth. He asked the question you gave him, stumbled a bit, and the prospect actually answered. For the first time in four months, something changed.
He said no. Then he went to work.
Jesus was not praising the argument. He was praising the change of mind that produced the work. A permanent no is not coachable. It is a refusal with better manners. The parable only rewards the son who went to the vineyard.
That is where most managers misread the work they do. They grade the meeting, not the effect of coaching.
The agreeable rep feels coachable because he makes you comfortable. The resistant rep feels uncoachable because he makes you work harder for what seems like no return. Comfort is not compliance. A nod is not execution.
A lot of the “yes, sir” is need for approval wearing a coaching smile. Agreeing is how he avoids the conflict with you. Doing the thing would create a perceived conflict with the prospect, and he has spent his career avoiding both. In Objective Management Group’s recent data, only 49 percent of salespeople are strong in not needing to be liked, and only 39 percent are strong in taking responsibility. You can hear both gaps in a single pipeline review. “You’re right, I should have asked.” That is the smile. “Their procurement process doesn’t allow it.” That is the excuse. Neither one is a trip to the vineyard.
The second half of the reading is the sharper point, and sales managers overlook it. Jesus says the tax collectors and prostitutes, the ones who looked wrong and changed, are entering the kingdom ahead of the religious leaders who looked right and did not. On a sales team, it is the same split. The rep who grumbles through the role-play and then uses the question on a live call outpaces the rep who can recite the stages of the sales process in the pipeline review and still ends up presenting in minute four of the first call.
Production does not care which one you enjoyed coaching.
In baseball, hitting coaches learn this every spring. One hitter hears the mechanical fix, says “got it, coach,” and reverts to the flawed swing in his first Grapefruit League at-bat. The other says the adjustment feels wrong, takes it into a game anyway, and stays on a fastball he used to roll over. Only one of them changed his mind. The box score is not interested in who was most cooperative in the batting cage.
One caution, because the analogy breaks if you force it. The vineyard is the work: the questions, the qualification, the discipline of not closing before you have earned the right. You are the one who asked them to change. If the tactic is bad, the son who said no and stayed home might be the one paying attention. The parable assumes the ask was the right ask. Yours has to be too.
So stop scoring the nod.
This week, pick two reps you think are the most coachable and two you have written off. Review the conversations they have with their prospects after you coach them. Not their biased, spun-up recap, but the actual conversation. Look at what they asked and how their prospects answered. Did the agreeable one follow through, or did he narrate? Did the resistant one try it, even awkwardly?
Coachability is not the answer in the meeting. It is whether they changed their mind and went to work.
The son who said yes is still in the house.
Coaching isn’t easy, isn’t for everyone, but can make a huge difference. We can train you to coach more effectively, coach you to coach for impact, or you can take advantage of our AI-assisted sales coaching debriefs which are especially helpful if you lack time or interest in coaching.
This is the ninth installment from my Biblical Sales Force series. Read the prior installments here:
