I Sat In on 40 Sales Manager 1:1s. Here's What Almost None of Them Were Doing.
Forty real 1:1s, one pattern: status updates dressed as development, and the two or three specific moves that separate the handful that were actually coaching.
Over about four months, across six sales orgs, I sat in — silently, notebook only — on forty manager-rep 1:1s. Different industries, different quota sizes, different tenure on both sides of the table. I wasn't there to grade anyone. I was there to find out what actually happens in the thirty minutes every sales org calls "coaching" and treats as sacred. Most of it wasn't coaching. It was a status update wearing coaching's name badge.
What the notebook actually showed
I bucketed every session into one of four categories after the fact, based on what filled the majority of the time and what — if anything — the rep left with to go and practise.
| Rank | Category | Count | Why it ranks here |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Status readout | 24 of 40 | The largest category by a wide margin. Deal-stage recitation, forecast commentary, "where are we with X." No skill was named in these sessions. Nothing was prescribed to practise. It ranks worst because it's forecasting wearing a coaching label — useful for the manager's own roll-up, worthless for the rep's development. |
| 2 | Firefighting / deal rescue | 9 of 40 | The manager and rep problem-solve this week's stuck deal together. Better than a readout because real tactical thinking happens — but it's deal-specific, not skill-specific. What gets solved is this renewal, not the rep's negotiation opening in general, so nothing transfers to the next deal. |
| 3 | Venting / rapport check-in | 3 of 40 | Genuinely valuable for retention and trust — reps need a human check-in and burnout goes unnoticed without one. But it isn't development, and every manager running these called them "coaching" in their calendar, which quietly lets the org believe skill-building is happening when it isn't. |
| 4 | Actual coaching | 4 of 40 | The rare ones. A specific skill was named, a specific practice rep was set, and the manager followed up on that exact thing the next time. Ten percent of the sample. |
Ten percent. Not because the other thirty-six managers were lazy or incompetent — several were sharp, likeable, clearly cared about their teams. The format just wasn't built to produce the four moves that mattered, so it defaulted to whatever filled the calendar slot most easily: the pipeline.
The three moves the good ones all shared
Across those four sessions, independent of company, industry, or manager style, the same three things happened in the same order. Every time one was missing, the session drifted back into category one or two.
- The skill got named specifically, not vaguely. Not "your calls need work" — one manager said, verbatim, "you're caving on price the first time the prospect pushes back, before they've even asked twice. That's the thing we're working on." A named skill is checkable next time. "Your calls need work" isn't checkable by anyone, including the manager who said it.
- A specific practice rep got prescribed before the next live call. Not "keep at it" — a scheduled fifteen-minute role-play, or a specific upcoming call the rep was told to record and bring back, aimed at that one named skill. Vague encouragement produces nothing to check; a scheduled rep produces evidence.
- The manager followed up on that exact thing next time, not a new topic. The best of the four opened the following 1:1 with, "show me the recording — did you hold the number this time?" That single follow-up question is what separated coaching from a well-intentioned pep talk that evaporated by Friday.
A GROW Model Coaching Conversation Script forces roughly this structure by default — it's mechanically hard to run a GROW conversation and end up back on pipeline stage, because the model insists on a named goal and a committed next action before the conversation closes.
Why the other thirty-six didn't, even with good managers in the room
The honest answer isn't laziness. It's structural. None of the thirty-six had a shared vocabulary for naming skills consistently — "communication" and "needs more confidence" stood in for something specific in almost every readout session. None of them had an expectation, from above, that a 1:1 should produce a checkable follow-up the next week; the only follow-up anyone above them checked was the number. And without a rubric, "better" stayed a vibe — nobody could point to a level the rep had moved from and to, so there was nothing concrete to report even if the manager had wanted to.
A Coaching Effectiveness Scorecard for Managers is worth running on your own 1:1s the same way I ran it on these forty — most managers are startled by how much of their own calendar is category one wearing a coaching label. And a written Sales Coaching Plan Template (30-60-90) solves the follow-up problem structurally, by making next time's opening question a matter of record rather than memory.
None of the four managers running actual coaching were smarter than the other thirty-six. They'd just started writing down what they said they'd check next time — and then, unglamorously, checking it.