Why sales leader coaching is your most underused growth lever

My purpose is simple: to support individuals and teams to achieve outcomes and performance greater than they ever thought possible. I do that through coaching, through workshops, and by force-multiplying both through sales leaders.

At Intuit, I lead our sales leader enablement and coaching programs. And over the past few years, what I've seen again and again is that the biggest untapped lever for growth isn't new technology, more headcount, or a shinier sales methodology. It's the quality and frequency of coaching happening between sales leaders and their teams.

So let me walk you through what we've learned, what we changed, and why it matters.

The two things that actually move the needle in coaching

When I think about coaching programs, I focus on two things: quality and quantity. Or coaching quality and coaching frequency, if you want to be precise about it. Both matter. You can't shortchange either one.

On quality: I ask sales leaders a genuinely uncomfortable question. Are you coaching your sellers at a level of quality that they'd be willing to pay for? Does your coaching rival what a professional external coach offers?

I have an executive coach. A life coach. A fitness coach. And I pay all of them hundreds of hard-earned dollars, week after week, month after month. I rebook them every single time. So when I sit down with a sales leader, I ask them: for every one-on-one, every coaching session, would your sellers willingly rebook you? And if the answer is yes, what would it look like to raise your rates?

That's the bar we're aiming for.

On quantity: If a sales leader's primary indicator of success is how well their team performs throughout the year, they should be spending most of their time coaching. That's just logical. But when we looked at the reality, frontline leaders were spending roughly 10% of their time actually coaching their teams. The other 90% was eaten up by everything else.

Think about that for a second. There's no championship coach spending 10% of their time on the field and 90% of their time dealing with logistics, media, and administrative tasks. That's not coaching. That's barely managing.

What was eating up all that time

When we dug into what sales leaders were actually doing with that other 90%, we found they were often doing other people's jobs. Product's job. Operations' job. Marketing's job. Sometimes even enablement's job.

So we made a deliberate change. We gave those departments back their responsibilities. They're probably better qualified to handle those tasks anyway. And we took that freed-up time and scaled coaching from 10% to a target of 50 to 70% of a leader's time.

Why 50 to 70? Because if you aim for 70% and miss due to a fire, an HR case, or whatever else comes up, you'll still land around 50. And 50% is a meaningful floor. If you're coaching your team less than half your time, you're essentially a part-time manager. That's a hard question to sit with, but it's worth asking.

Getting to this number required real organizational support. Our Chief Sales Officer came into the year wanting to double everything. Two x revenue, two x growth, all of it.

When you're trying to grow at that scale, there are a few levers available: invest in technology, invest in headcount, or invest in the frontline leaders and the people you already have. When the first two options hit budget walls, that third lever became the priority. And it worked.

Want to take this further?
Pulling coaching apart from everything else on a leader's plate is easier said than done.

At the Sales Enablement Summit in Sydney on 27 October, IBM's Gabriel Tsavaris is tackling exactly that in Sales coaching: the missing link between sales leadership and revenue performance.

He'll show how coaching shapes pipeline quality, conversion and deal progression, and how to measure it like any other revenue lever.

Main stage, 11:15.

Save your spot

The parallel between sales calls and coaching calls

Here's something I find genuinely useful to walk through with sales leaders, and I think it'll resonate with you too.

Picture a standard sales call. It usually follows a pretty consistent arc regardless of methodology. There's an introduction. Then a purpose and agenda for the call, sometimes an upfront contract to align on time and goals. Then discovery. Then a recommendation or solution. Then a close or a clear next step.

Most of us in enablement would agree that the biggest gaps in seller performance tend to cluster around the same areas. Weak introductions. Shallow discovery. Loose or unclear next steps. Those are the coaching focus areas that come up again and again when you listen to calls.

Now here's the thing. When I run workshops with sales leaders and ask them how they open their coaching sessions, the answers are often pretty revealing. One leader told me with complete confidence that he starts every coaching session by sitting down and saying, "Hi, how can I help you?"

And I asked him, how are your team's call introductions going?

He said that was actually a big area of coaching focus right now.

Of course it was.

Because the same gaps we see in sellers show up in their leaders. No clear intro. No agenda. No upfront contract. Then they shortcut discovery. They jump straight to the solution. "You're not hitting your numbers? Make more calls." That's the coaching equivalent of a seller skipping straight to a pitch without understanding what the customer actually needs.

And then there's the biggest miss of all: no clear accountability plan at the end.

The areas where we coach sellers are almost identical to the areas where we end up coaching leaders. Weak intros, shallow discovery, vague action plans, and no accountability. The parallel is hard to ignore once you see it.

The shadow you cast as a leader

There's a broader point here that I think is easy to underestimate.

Sellers look to their sales leaders and to enablement professionals as role models. We're the ones who made it. We're the ones they're watching. And whether we intend it or not, the way we show up in one-on-ones and coaching conversations is teaching them what good looks like.

So when a leader walks into a coaching session with no agenda, no clear goal, and a vague question like "so what's going on with your biggest deal?", they're demonstrating exactly the kind of call behavior they're trying to coach their sellers away from.

The reverse is also true. When a leader shows up with a clear agenda, does genuine deep discovery, and closes the conversation with a specific action plan and accountability structure, they're modeling the exact behaviors they want to see on customer calls. That shadow multiplies. Sellers see it, absorb it, and replicate it.

The most tactical thing you can do is help your leaders recognize this. Every one-on-one is a coaching opportunity and a modeling opportunity at the same time.

What good coaching discovery actually looks like

Let me be specific about what I mean by going deep in discovery during a coaching conversation, because "do better discovery" is advice that's easy to give and hard to act on.

Good coaching discovery in a one-on-one goes well beyond "what's going on?" It sounds more like:

What's the goal we're working toward today? Why is this goal important to you? How will we know we've been successful? How are we going to track it? What's getting in the way right now? What happens if you don't achieve this?

That's the difference between surface-level coaching and coaching that actually shifts behavior. When you shortcut discovery in a coaching session, you're reducing your impact the same way a seller reduces their value when they shortcut discovery on a customer call. You end up with generic advice that doesn't stick because it hasn't been grounded in what's actually going on for that person.

Getting to root causes, limiting beliefs, and real barriers takes time and genuine curiosity. It's not always comfortable. But it's where the real coaching happens.

Why accountability is the piece most people skip

After discovery, after the action plan, there's one more step that I see skipped constantly. The accountability plan.

Not just "what are you going to do?" but "how are we going to make sure you actually do it, and how will we know?"

Let me share something a little embarrassing to make this concrete.

I have a fitness coach. Two simple targets: 10,000 steps a day and under 2,000 calories. I have a smartwatch that coaches me to stand up and move around. I have MyFitnessPal giving me nutritional guidance and tracking my progress. I have dashboards, AI tools, and two dedicated coaches. All the infrastructure for success.

And then one day I stepped on the scale and gained seven pounds in a week and a half.

My fitness coach had to have a genuinely hard conversation with me. Was my health actually a priority? Was I really committed to this goal? And what I realized was that I had the tools, the data, and the coaching, but I didn't have a real accountability plan. What we landed on was that I'd send him screenshots of my steps and calories. Because if I had to show him the numbers, I'd be far less likely to let them slip. The social accountability mattered. The human element mattered.

That's the point. AI coaching tools are genuinely useful. They free up sales leaders to have the harder, more important conversations by handling the routine stuff. But there are things only a person can do. Having a hard, honest conversation about whether someone is truly committed to a goal is one of them. Creating an accountability structure that actually sticks is another.

If you want behavioral change to hold, the human coaching relationship and a real accountability plan are non-negotiable.

Using data to focus your coaching

One more piece of the puzzle worth covering: how data fits into all of this.

Data doesn't lie, and it can be a genuinely useful coaching tool when you use it to work backwards from outcomes.

At Intuit, we think about it roughly like this. Start with productivity. Then look at customer-facing time, because volume of activity only matters if real conversations are happening. Then assess conversation quality. Then pipeline health. Then actual outcomes and revenue.

If outcomes are off, you can usually trace the problem back up this chain. Is it a productivity issue? A conversation quality issue? A pipeline issue? That tells you where to focus your coaching energy rather than guessing or defaulting to the same conversations every cycle.

We also track coaching quality directly. Sellers take NPS-style surveys on how well their manager is coaching them, and we directly ask whether they'd be willing to pay for that coaching time. We put a number on it, sometimes $100, sometimes $200, to make it concrete. And we track coaching frequency with the expectation that leaders are hitting at least 50% of their time in coaching activities.

When leaders aren't meeting that expectation, it shows up in their performance reviews. This isn't a soft guideline. It's a real standard with real accountability behind it.

How we build coaching capability in leaders

Running a two-day workshop with sales leaders is one of the most important things I do. And one of the most valuable parts of that workshop is something that sounds simple but is often overlooked: fishbowl role play.

We'd never let a new seller jump straight onto a live customer call without shadowing first, without seeing what good looks like, without practicing in a safe environment. But we regularly let first-time sales leaders step into coaching conversations with no frame of reference for what great coaching actually sounds like.

In the workshop, leaders get to watch other strong leaders coach. They get to try it themselves. They get feedback. They get to build confidence before they have to do it for real. For leaders who already hold ICF certifications or have professional coaching backgrounds, this kind of practice and feedback is just part of the job. For everyone else, it's often the first time they've had that experience.

We also do a calendar audit. Leaders open their laptops and actually look at where their time went over the past few weeks. What was coaching. What was clearly something else. What was somewhere in between. We define those categories together as a group, and we look at what can be moved off their plates to create more space for actual coaching.

It's a grounding exercise. And it tends to produce some uncomfortable realizations that are worth having.

The third lever you might be underusing

If your organization is looking for growth and the conversation has been mostly about technology investment or headcount, it might be time to pull a different lever.

Investing in your frontline sales leaders, in their coaching quality and their coaching frequency, is one of the highest-leverage moves available to an enablement team. It's also one of the most durable. When you improve how a leader coaches, you improve every seller on their team, every conversation they have, every deal they work.

The math compounds quickly.

If you're already doing sales leader enablement work, I'd genuinely love to compare notes. And if you haven't prioritized it yet, I'd encourage you to start with the basics: give other departments back their jobs, set clear coaching frequency expectations from the top down, help your leaders understand the shadow they cast, and make sure every coaching conversation ends with a real accountability plan.

Quality, frequency, modeling, accountability. Those four things, done consistently, will move your numbers more than most other investments you could make.

And if your sellers would willingly pay for their manager's coaching time? You're already winning.

Editor's note: This article was based on a talk given by Alex Dillon, Global Sales Coaching Enablement Leader, Intuit, at our Sales Enablement Summit, Chicago, 2025.

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