Sales Manager Coaching
You got promoted because you could sell. Nobody taught you how to make somebody else sell. Those are two different jobs and you were only ever trained for one of them.
If any of this sounds familiar.
- 01
Your one-on-one is a number read-back. He knew he was at four. You knew he was at four. Twenty minutes later he still doesn't know which part of his day to change.
- 02
You take the T.O. and close it yourself. The deal gets saved, everybody's happy, and the salesperson learned nothing — which guarantees you're taking the next one too.
- 03
You can name the two people who need you most, and you've been meaning to sit down with them since the eleventh.
What actually happens in the first month.
- 01 / 04
Week one I stand at the desk. How the pencil goes out, how you take a T.O., what gets said when a deal dies at four o'clock.
- 02 / 04
Week two we pick one person and one behavior. Not the floor. One person, one thing.
- 03 / 04
Week three the one-on-one changes shape — it ends with something to do, not something to know.
- 04 / 04
Week four we check whether the behavior actually moved. If it didn't, the setup was wrong. We don't relabel the person.
How do you coach a car dealership sales manager?
You coach a sales manager on developing salespeople, not on closing deals — they can already close. The work is turning the one-on-one into something that produces a specific next action, converting the T.O. from a rescue into a teaching moment, and narrowing focus to one person and one behavior instead of addressing the whole floor at once.
Find the break before you coach the person
Nobody has a general selling problem. The funnel breaks somewhere specific, and where it breaks tells you what the conversation is.
Contact rate low — that's CRM behavior, not phone skill. Contact-to-appointment low — that's what he says on the first call. Set-to-show low — the appointment was never firm. Show-to-write-up low — that's the walkaround, the demo, or the move to the desk. Write-up-to-close low — that's objections, T.O. timing, or the trade walk.
Five different problems. Five different conversations. "You need to sell more" addresses none of them, and it's what most one-on-ones amount to.
The things you're actually wondering.
Bring me one thingthat's stuck.
Thirty minutes. No deck, no pitch, no follow-up sequence you have to unsubscribe from. If it's useful we'll keep going. If it isn't, you'll know inside thirty minutes and so will I.