I once heard a great sales manager describe some of his peers as zoo bears. They rose the ranks as reps in a frothy market, with plenty of marketing-qualified leads and a good product. They hit their numbers and got promoted. They got fed like bears behind a gate at the zoo. They never had to hunt or forage, so they can’t teach their cubs to do it either.
The managers who worked the brakes
Some senior sales leaders remember when managers worked the brakes on optimistic forecasting. The best sales managers I’ve worked with ran every deal review like a discovery call.
They inspected early, and they never let a rep get away with a guess. They put accuracy ahead of optimism, and they inspected what they expected to close with the sales skills that had made them great sellers. They read what the rep entered in the CRM, and then ran discovery on the rep about the details. They asked the rep the same questions they expected the rep to ask the prospect:
- What problem is this buyer trying to solve?
- Why is it coming up now?
- What have they tried so far, and how long has this been going on?
- What’s it costing them in time, money, or resources?
- If they like our solution, what happens next?
- Who’s the one person who can say no and end this?
When the answers got vague, those managers leaned in. A rep would say, “I think the CFO could kill it.” The manager would come right back with, “When you say you think, it sounds like you aren’t sure. How can you find out?”
Those managers called their numbers closely because they scrutinized them closely.
But now, that skill has disappeared on many sales floors because managers lack the sales skills to truly inspect deals, and your forecast pays the price. Some teams have plenty of pipeline and still struggle because their reps won’t disqualify tire-kickers.
Companies lost the art of deal inspection when the leadership deprioritized sales skills for managers.
If that describes your company, you can build deal inspection as a skill. Ask the managers to sit down with each rep and ask the six questions above. Write down every answer that starts with “I think,” coach them to ask a follow-up question, and in the following 1-2-1 check whether each gap closed.
Accuracy is the goal
Companies don’t outperform their managers, and the forecast is where that shows up first. As a company grows, forecast accuracy matters more than pipeline size because leaders make hiring and spending decisions based on that number. A 20% chance on a $10 million deal gives nobody anything to act on.
Accuracy is only the baseline, though. A sales leader once told me he didn’t want managers who could only call the forecast. He wanted managers who could change it. That takes coaching skills as well as sales skills.
Inspect early, then coach the gap
1. Inspect early. Review deals during or right after qualification and discovery, before the demo. That’s where an intervention can still change the outcome. Once a deal reaches the bottom of the funnel, a rep has a much harder time clawing back information they never collected.
2. Diagnose the gap. Use your active listening, your deeper questions, and your excuse handling to get to the truth. Accept no fuzzy answers. You want an honest picture of what the rep knows and what they skipped.
3. Prescribe the fix. Work with the rep on how to get the missing information, run the step they skipped, or disqualify the deal. You caught it early, so there’s still time. Great managers make every opportunity earn its promotion to the next stage, and they send it back when it hasn’t.
4. Follow up. Check that the rep did it. This is the step we see missing most often. The manager coaches, asks “You good?”, hears “Yep, I’m good,” and moves on. Two weeks later, the same gap is sitting in the same deal.
Two places reps get stuck
Pain nobody quantified. A rep can describe the buyer’s problem in detail and still have no idea what it costs. If the rep can’t give you a number, coach them on the questions that will get it in the next conversation.
The difference between a coach and a champion. Champion is one of the C’s in MEDDPICC, and it’s the one reps fool themselves on most. Doug May, whose career spans Splunk, Databricks, and Harness, draws a clear line in a recent post. A coach hands you information because it costs them nothing. A champion spends their own capital on you. In Doug’s words, “A coach tells you which bank to try. A champion co-signs.” Reps rarely find out which one they have, because asking is a test and tests can fail.
Help the rep pick one crucial ask before the demo, like an introduction to the economic buyer or the contact’s name on the business case. Then follow up and see what happened.
Follow-up is where managers most often get stuck.
There are a lot of moving parts, but coaching that moves the forecast is possible, and it’s why we built CoachEm, a Manager Operating System that gives each manager their own Chief of Staff to drive consistent coaching, action, and accountability at scale. See how CoachEm works.
