Only 9% of sales managers are strong at all three competencies that build elite teams —coaching their teams to get a prospect’s commitment to make a decision, having supportive beliefs about coaching, and bringing passion for coaching.
Nine percent. The rest are running pipeline reviews, chasing dashboards, and calling it sales leadership.
The gap between managing activity and actually developing a sales team is where most organizations bleed. Top sales performers get promoted into management for hitting their number, then get buried under admin work with no plan, no framework, and no time to do the one thing that moves performance: coaching.
In a recent Sales Leader Council webinar, Shawn Buxton, Head of Sales Leadership at The Sales Collective, sat down with Objective Management Group CEO Ben Tagoe and Director of Products Steve Yonchak to unpack what actually separates a sales manager from a sales leader — and why sales manager coaching is the skill most organizations neglect.
The Battlefield Promotion Problem
Most sales managers didn’t apply for a leadership role. They got a battlefield promotion.
Top rep hits their number three years running. The reward? A title change, a team, and zero guidance on how the job just fundamentally shifted.
Ben Tagoe: “No one tells that person who has just been promoted into leadership that their job has fundamentally changed. Your job is no longer to generate your own revenue. Your job is to replicate yourself for all the people who report to you.”
And it gets worse. The organization doesn’t just expect them to lead — it expects them to keep selling. Same book of business. Same personal quota. Plus four direct reports who need development.
Tagoe: “Go out and develop these salespeople. Oh, by the way, that number that you delivered last year? I need you to deliver that number plus another 20%.”
The whole structure is rigged against them. Competing priorities pile up, the manager defaults to what they know — selling — and coaching never happens.
Why Sales Manager Coaching Gets Buried
Most managers aren’t avoiding coaching because they don’t care. The system buries it before they get the chance.
“About 70% of the teams that we survey, the salespeople say they are being coached less than once a week,” Tagoe said. “If you’re being coached less than once a week, you might as well not be coached at all.”
Ben shares three forces conspire to kill coaching before it starts:
1. The organization defines the role as administrative. Managers are inundated with Gong summaries, forecast calls, CRM audits — until their calendar has no room for a single development conversation.
Tagoe: “We like the administrative stuff from our managers because it’s something we can easily touch, measure, hold them accountable to. So what do we do? We just pile more of it on.”
2. The manager’s beliefs haven’t shifted. Many promoted managers still carry individual-contributor beliefs: I need to rescue deals. My people will never figure it out. I’m the closer. Those beliefs don’t support coaching — they support a command-and-control structure where the manager swoops in, saves the deal, and calls it a good week.
3. There’s no coaching plan. Without a framework, coaching becomes random tips based on personal experience. What worked for you as a seller isn’t what your team needs.
Tagoe: “What worked for you and made you successful is not necessarily going to translate for the people who report to you. Just relying on that is not going to help your people be successful.”
What a Real Sales Manager Coaching Plan Looks Like
A coaching framework does two things: it reduces friction for the manager and increases value for the salesperson.
Steve Yonchak: “Having a plan makes it easier for them to be prepared, gives them more demonstrable outcomes to get to, and helps them manage time — because they’re not investing cognitive energy in figuring out how to do the coaching session.”
When the manager walks in prepared with a structured plan — here’s what we’re working on, here are the three things to focus on, here’s what to watch for, let’s practice together — the rep walks away with something real. They start looking forward to coaching instead of tolerating it.
Shawn Buxton framed the distinction sharply in the webinar: management is monitoring, measuring, reporting. Leadership is helping people get somewhere they could never get on their own.
“If people stay at the same level when they work for you, you weren’t really much of a leader.”
The difference between a mediocre manager and an elite one comes down to belief and structure — managers who believe coaching matters, who have the organizational support to actually do it, and who have a coaching framework that turns intention into behavior change.
How to Motivate a Sales Team Without Rah-Rah Speeches
Motivation is the most misunderstood sales leadership skill. Every manager has been asked the same question: How do I motivate my team?
Wrong question.
Buxton: “It’s a little arrogant to think that I can get you motivated better than you can motivate yourself. It’s really about understanding what motivates them — not trying to create motivation inside your team.”
OMG’s assessment data breaks motivation into three types: intrinsic (mastery, personal growth), extrinsic (money, recognition), and altruistic (helping others succeed). Every salesperson has a different blend — and figuring out that blend is the actual work.
Steve Yonchak: “One of the challenges of a leader is to find out what is the secret sauce — what are the chemicals that go into a good mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators? It’s not usually a one-size-fits-all blend. It’s something unique to each person.”
Which is exactly why blanket incentives miss the mark.
Tagoe: “Only about 25% of salespeople have extrinsic motivation styles. If you’re going to provide a monetary incentive when three-quarters of your team aren’t driven by that, you’re tossing good money after bad.”
That means SPIFFs — the default motivational tool — only land with a quarter of your team. The rest need something different.
For intrinsically motivated reps, the play is recognizing mastery. Make them the subject matter expert. Let them teach. Give them the “teach one” opportunity that reinforces their own competence.
For altruistic reps, storytelling works — showing them the concrete impact their work had on a customer’s outcome.
Buxton summarized the leader’s real role: “Your job is not to motivate the team. Your job is to create an environment where self-motivation is expected, incentivized, encouraged, and supported. You give them a place to invest their self-motivation — and they get the ROI because you’ve created an environment that’s ready to give them a return.”
Sales Team Accountability: Offered, Not Held
Accountability is the hottest word in sales leadership. It’s also the most misapplied.
Most managers think accountability means holding people’s feet to the fire. Tighter tracking. More check-ins. Consequence-driven management.
Buxton reframed it completely: “People don’t really want to be held accountable. I want someone to offer their accountability to me as a leader — because they feel like I’m going to help them get somewhere they could never get on their own.”
The distinction matters. Command-and-control accountability produces compliance at best, resentment at worst. Offered accountability produces ownership.
And the lever is closer than most leaders think — it connects directly back to motivation.
Yonchak: “Giving somebody something to be accountable for that’s linked to their intrinsic motivation — those drivers are at least as powerful and probably more powerful than the threats and financial rewards, the carrots and sticks you might normally offer.”
So how do you get people to offer it?
Tagoe: “Accountability starts before the person even starts in the role. It starts with how you define what success is going to look like — what are the behaviors you expect, what are the outcomes you expect to see.”
That means clear expectations at 30, 60, 90 days. Documented standards. Defined metrics. When those are set upfront, the accountability conversation changes from “why aren’t you performing?” to “here’s what we agreed to — let’s talk about what’s getting in the way.”
Buxton pushed this further with his clients in The Sales Collective’s Trident program: start with a 3–5 year team vision, work the math backward to quarterly and weekly standards, then make the expectations so clear that the right people opt in and the wrong people self-select out.
“When you do that, the great people say, ‘I want to be part of that,’ and they offer their accountability. The people that don’t say, ‘No thank you’ — and that’s cool. They’re not bad people. Maybe they want to work somewhere else.”
The leader also has to model it. When you miss your own bar, raise your hand publicly and own it. That builds the safety for your team to do the same.
Are You Managing Activity or Leading Performance?
The shift from sales manager to sales leader isn’t a title change. It’s a fundamental rewiring of how you spend your time, what you believe your job is, and how you develop the people around you.
The takeaway is clear. Elite sales leaders coach with a plan — not random tips from their selling days. They understand individual motivational drivers instead of defaulting to SPIFFs and pep talks. And they build accountability cultures where standards are so clear that people opt in willingly, using tools like the Sales Manager DNA assessment to diagnose exactly where each manager needs to develop.
The impact is material. Organizations with strong coaching cultures see measurably higher quota attainment, lower turnover, and faster ramp times. The fact that only 9% of managers are strong at all three elite coaching competencies represents the single largest performance lever most companies aren’t pulling.
The question isn’t whether your managers are busy. It’s whether they’re building something.
- Take the Sample Sales Manager DNA Test — See what the assessment reveals about leadership coaching competencies
- Explore Sales Leadership Training — Learn about The Sales Collective’s Trident program for sales managers ready to lead
- Watch the Full Webinar — See the full Sales Leader Council conversation on YouTube
FAQ
What is the difference between a sales manager and a sales leader?
A sales manager monitors metrics, runs reports, and tracks quota. A sales leader develops people — coaching them to perform at levels they couldn’t reach on their own. The skill set is fundamentally different, and most promoted managers never get trained on the leadership side.
Why do so few sales managers coach effectively?
Three reasons: organizations define the manager role as administrative (dashboards over development), promoted managers keep their individual sales quota alongside team responsibilities, and most managers have no coaching framework — they default to sharing personal tips instead of structured development plans.
How do you hold a sales team accountable without micromanaging?
Set clear, documented expectations before someone starts the role — define what success looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days. When standards are specific and agreed upon upfront, accountability becomes a conversation about alignment, not enforcement. The best teams have people who offer accountability because they’ve opted into a clear standard.
