Stop Calling It Sales Coaching
What happens in most 1:1s is deal triage wearing a coaching costume — and until you separate the two, neither one gets better.
Sit in on ten manager 1:1s and count how many times the word "coaching" gets used honestly. Most of what happens in that half hour is a rep describing a stuck deal and a manager telling them what to do next: who to call, what to offer, how to word the follow-up. That's a legitimate, useful conversation. It is also not coaching. It's deal triage, and calling it coaching is the reason most sales organisations can point to a calendar full of 1:1s and still can't tell you which competency any given rep improved on last quarter.
Two different jobs wearing one hour
Triage answers "what do I do on this deal." Coaching answers "what do I need to get better at, and what will I practise before the next one." They feel similar in the room because both start with a rep describing a situation. They are not similar in what they produce.
Triage: "Acme's gone quiet since the demo, what do I do?" — "Send the ROI one-pager, loop in the champion, offer their ops lead a working session this week." Good advice. Solves nothing beyond Acme.
Coaching: "Before we get to Acme — walk me through the demo. Who else was in that room who could have become a second champion, and why didn't you get their direct line afterwards?" That's aimed at a named competency — multi-threading — and it's still true on Tuesday's call with Globex, whether or not Acme ever signs.
Why conflating them guarantees a double failure
Triage advice doesn't transfer. Telling a rep exactly what to send Acme this week does nothing for Globex next month, because Globex's stall point will be different. And coaching that ignores the live deal in front of the rep feels irresponsible to both people in the room — the deal is on fire, and "let's talk about your discovery competency" sounds like a non-answer. So managers default to triage, every time, because it's the one that feels defensible in the moment. Then review time comes and nobody can point to a competency any rep actually moved.
Put a number on it. A manager running six reps on a weekly 30-minute 1:1 cadence has three hours a week of coaching time on paper. Audit the actual content of those calls — most managers who do this for the first time find 65–75% of the minutes are deal-specific. That leaves under an hour a week, split six ways, for anything that will still be true after the deal in question closes or dies. Roughly nine minutes per rep, per week, of anything resembling skill development.
Run the audit before you fix anything
Pull the notes or recordings from your last five 1:1s with one rep and bucket every question asked: deal-specific, or skill-specific. Most managers are surprised by the ratio, and the Manager Time-to-Coach Ratio Calculator gives you a faster way to get the number than doing it by hand. Don't skip this step and jump straight to a fix — the ratio tells you whether the problem is time, or scope.
| Question in the room | Bucket | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "What do I say to get Acme to sign by Friday?" | Triage | Deal-specific, doesn't transfer to the next account |
| "Why did you stop asking questions once the champion agreed?" | Coaching | Targets a named, repeatable competency |
| "Who's the economic buyer on Globex, have we met them?" | Triage | Account fact-finding |
| "What's the pattern across your last five calls when price comes up?" | Coaching | A pattern across many deals is a skill signal; one deal is an anecdote |
What separating them actually looks like
The fix isn't a longer 1:1. It's a narrower one, run twice. Deal triage belongs in pipeline review, async in Slack, or in a 15-minute huddle before the call that needs it — fast, specific, disposable. Coaching belongs in its own slot, anchored to one recorded call and one named competency, with something concrete the rep will practise before the next session. The SBI Feedback Model Cheat Sheet is the fastest way to keep that slot from drifting back into "here's what I'd have said instead," which is triage wearing a coaching outfit. If the competency in question is discovery, the Discovery Questioning Skill-Builder Cheat Sheet gives you something to coach against that isn't just the manager's own instinct for the deal at hand.
Coaching and triage aren't rivals. They're different tools for different problems, and duct-taping them into one calendar slot means the deal limps along on borrowed advice and the rep's skill sits exactly where it was in January. Split the hour. Name the skill. Then coach it — and let the deal get triaged somewhere that doesn't pretend to be development.