How Can Pipeline Meetings Be a Coaching Opportunity?

As a sales manager, I’m sure you have pipeline meetings often. But, do you ever ask yourself, “How can pipeline meetings be a coaching opportunity?” If so, you’ve come to the right place.

Let’s start with an analogy: You wouldn’t expect a rookie with no training to pick up a bat in a major league baseball game and knock it out of the park on his first try. Similarly, if a sales manager is only spending 30 minutes a month coaching each of their reps, it’s unreasonable to think that manager is going to improve rep performance.

But these pipeline reviews should be true coaching sessions — not data-scrubbing meetings. Salespeople become more capable of closing deals only when managers actively coach them, not when they’re badgered about getting the forecast right. Unfortunately, many pipeline conversations resemble the latter more than the former. Today, let’s review the best pipeline coaching strategies.

What is pipeline coaching?

Pipeline coaching is when a sales manager mentors a sales rep during a pipeline management meeting. You’ll discuss the health of the rep’s pipeline and discuss strategies on how to improve their performance — addressing elements of a sales process like closing more deals, reaching out to more prospects, or demoing more effectively.

Reviewing a sales rep’s performance data won’t help if they don’t know how to improve in the areas where they’re lacking. However, sales managers might not know how to approach this, so how can they conduct effective pipeline management coaching sessions? Let’s review some strategies below.

Pipeline Coaching Strategy Tips

1. Talk about early-stage deals as well as late stage.

Even though it’s tempting to only address the deals about to close, it’s important to spend time on deals early in the selling process as well. Why? It’s an opportunity to get bad deals out of the pipeline early so reps don’t waste their time and offer reps some valuable insight.

Obviously, closing is the final (or second-to-last if you count retention) step of a sales process, and a sales pipeline represents the sum of a rep’s opportunities — along with where they stand in each stage of that progression.

If a rep is going to learn, grow, and ultimately become as well-rounded a salesperson as possible, they need to have perspective on their opportunities at every stage — even if they don’t end in closed-won deals.

That doesn‘t mean you have to dig into a thorough investigation of every last qualified lead in a rep’s pipeline during these kinds of meetings — but you shouldn’t focus exclusively on late-stage deals either.

It‘s a tough balance to strike — as you don’t want to exhaust too much of your and your rep‘s time — but a rep’s pipeline isn’t limited to the home stretch. Make sure you cover those additional, earlier bases as well.

What we like: Sales managers can have a greater impact on a deal in its early days, increasing the likelihood of earning the business.

2. Spend more time on fewer deals.

The natural inclination of sales managers is to get through the entire pipeline during each meeting, but in my opinion, this isn’t the best use of time. I recommend focusing intensely on a handful of deals, and doing a deep dive into each — the competition, the buyers in the organization, the rep’s approach, and so on.

As I touched on in the previous section, you don’t want to spend too much time on pipeline coaching — especially if you have a larger team of reps to account for. You’ll stretch yourself too thin, and in many cases, too much pipeline coaching can have diminishing returns.

When it comes down to it, discerning which deals in a rep’s pipeline deserve extra attention is a judgment call. If possible, I would try to strike a balance between highlighting some wins and constructively touching on some deals that show room for improvement.

There‘s something to be learned from both opportunities that go well and ones that don’t pan out — so try to offer a mix if possible. That said, don‘t indiscriminately cover every last opportunity in depth each time you have one of these meetings. You’ll likely wind up being redundant and wasting time if you go that road.

What we like: A manager can change the trajectory of a deal if it’s at risk of going awry, or address emerging problems.

3. Coach more, inspect data less.

Managers who have been promoted from reps earned their management role by selling well, not inspecting data well. And yet, data-scrubbing is often the focus of pipeline management meetings. While accurate data is important, more time should be allotted to coaching reps through deals than cleaning up the numbers.

If you can, use data to inform the coaching session as opposed to dominating it — let the numbers guide where the conversation goes, but don‘t just sit there rattling off figures and then sending reps on their way when you’re done.

Corny as this might sound, sales is — at its core — a fundamentally human practice. Any data your sales org gathers is ultimately people-driven. If a rep‘s numbers aren’t where they should be, use that as a starting point in a pipeline coaching session.

From there, you can dig into the elements of their efforts that might be skewing those figures away from their goals. There’s a difference between simply relaying information to a rep and helping them make sense of it. Be constructive — and teach more than you dictate.

What we like: By spending less time inspecting data, your sales managers can mentor reps on their process and give advice about live deals.

Overall, a good pipeline management session is more forward- than backward-looking. Strive to influence live deals today rather than merely documenting their outcomes later.