Sales leaders keep talking about pipeline pressure, forecast discipline, territory design, quota math, and repeatable rep performance. Those topics matter, but the problem sits somewhere more fundamental.
Many organizations are throwing their front-line managers a “hospital pass.” In football, a hospital pass is when the quarterback throws the ball in a way that leads a defenseless receiver straight into a defender, who will send him to the hospital while his eyes are focused on the ball.
Many CROs are asking managers to deliver consistent performance without providing the time, systems, or support structure to do so effectively.
This is an epidemic of manager neglect. Companies invest heavily in CRO visibility, RevOps sophistication, and CI tooling. They built out a polished GTM slide deck. They analyze deals across 12 dashboards. Yet the most decisive performance lever in the revenue engine, frontline managers, get whatever scraps are left at the end of the week.
Great managers want to coach. Most of them simply can’t or don’t have time. They lack a coaching operating system for one-on-ones, team meetings, skill development, and follow-through. They rely on manual prep, scattered notes, and a crowded calendar. They end up doing rep work and pushing deals over the line. They manage symptoms rather than develop people.
What We Learned from Working with Thousands of Sales Managers
1. Coaching is happening late, not early.
Most sales leaders admitted that coaching starts after the third missed quarter or when a deal is dying. That timing guarantees reactivity. It also guarantees pressure that drives managers away from skill development and into crisis management.
2. Reps can’t articulate what they are working on.
The majority of managers said that their reps either guess or vaguely reference a pipeline issue when asked about personal development priorities. Without a defined coaching rhythm, reps improve by accident. That shows up in inconsistent quota attainment.
3. Manager effectiveness varies widely within the same team.
Organizations reported one strong manager, one overwhelmed manager, and one manager who is doing their best with no structure. That variability is a revenue risk; it slows onboarding, weakens process adoption, and creates uneven performance across territories.
These three themes point to one reality. FLMs are not working inside a defined operating system. They are surviving inside a swirl of tools, pressure, and competing priorities.
The Shift CROs Must Lead in 2026
If 2026 is the year to stabilize, scale, and predict revenue performance, then it must be the year CROs stop treating managing and coaching as soft skills and start treating them as operating disciplines.
CROs told us they want managers to be multipliers. Multipliers need clarity, consistency, and a way to turn data into practical coaching actions. They need a platform that reduces prep time, focuses attention, and creates accountability for both the manager and the rep.
That is why we built CoachEm as an AI-Powered Manager Operating System. It pulls signals from CRM, call intelligence, calendar data, and performance metrics, then translates that information into a structured coaching path for every rep. Managers get clear learning interventions, prep for one-on-ones, recommendations for team meetings, and a simple way to track progress. Reps get transparency. Leaders get consistency across every team.
The goal is not more data. The goal is usable direction that fits inside a crowded week.
How CROs Can Start Closing the Manager Gap
1. Give FLMs a defined one-on-one coaching framework.
Remove guesswork from weekly development conversations. Reps should always know what skill they are working on, why it matters, and how it connects to outcomes.
2. Standardize team meeting structure across managers.
Consistency drives culture. A shared rhythm for pipeline health, skill review, and execution priorities prevents territory-by-territory variability.
3. Build coaching into the operating cadence, not on top of it.
Managers need coaching to be embedded in workflows they already follow. That increases adoption and reduces missed conversations. It can’t be an add-on initiative.
4. Provide AI tools that limit prep time.
FLMs don’t need more screens. They need fewer. They need synthesized signals that point directly to the next coaching action.
5. Track coaching execution with the same seriousness as forecast accuracy.
You get what you inspect. When coaching becomes visible and measurable, it becomes repeatable.
A Call to Action for CROs
The gap between expected manager performance and supported manager performance is widening. Many organizations will keep adding more training programs, more dashboards, and more deal reviews. That creates motion without improvement. More and more reps are missing quote… We are up to 64% now!
If you want your managers to become multipliers and your sellers to become effective, they need a reliable operating system. 2026 is approaching fast. You can keep hoping your managers figure out how to get the results you need inside a crowded role. Or you can give them a system that makes performance improvement a predictable part of the operating rhythm.
If you want to explore what that looks like, we are ready to walk you through how an AI-Powered Manager OS can support your team.
