Consistency beats charisma in frontline sales leadership. In this episode of Coach2Scale, VMware Carbon Black’s Head of Sales Development, Victoria Abeling, shared what it takes to build a high-performance team when everyone’s overworked and every 1:1 is at risk of being replaced by a pipeline review. She unpacks why many reps view coaching as punitive, how that culture was unintentionally built over decades, and the mindset shift required to make coaching a trusted, productive habit, not a compliance exercise.
Victoria offers a pragmatic breakdown of how she uses quarterly operating cadences, individualized development plans, and coaching conversations grounded in deal inspection to uncover skill gaps, not just red flags. You’ll hear how to coach for discovery, disqualify with confidence, and push back on the myth that high performers don’t need help. If you’re a sales leader tired of playing firefighter, or a CRO wondering why the pipeline isn’t growing with headcount, this conversation will reframe how you think about performance management and the role cadence plays in building trust, accountability, and results.
If you lead a revenue organization right now, your frontline sales managers are probably overwhelmed, and your reps know it. One-on-ones are getting skipped. Deal reviews are passing for coaching. And everyone’s chasing pipeline while quietly wondering why the team isn’t getting better.
That’s why this week’s Coach2Scale conversation with Victoria Abeling hit a nerve in the best way.
Victoria leads Sales Development at VMware Carbon Black, but more importantly, she’s spent her career living the exact tension most sales leaders feel today: how do we build a coaching culture that actually lasts, especially when time is short and pressure is high?
Here are the key lessons CROs should take away from the episode:
1. Coaching is not performance management. It’s performance enablement.
The biggest myth Victoria called out? That coaching is only for the reps who are struggling. This belief runs deep, and it’s toxic. When coaching feels like punishment, your top reps avoid it, your underperformers resent it, and managers burn out trying to do both development and damage control at once.
Victoria reframes it: “My goal is to make you better than me.” That’s a manager’s job: developing people for the next role, not just pressing them for this quarter’s number.
2. Cadence is the operating system of a coaching culture.
Your team doesn’t need more “coaching moments.” They need a coaching rhythm they can rely on. That means structured, documented, and expected time to focus on development, not just the pipeline. Victoria runs her org with a clear operating cadence: weekly rep coaching, quarterly development plans, and consistent manager 1:1s.
It’s not always perfect. But when that cadence breaks, everything downstream breaks with it.
3. Reps don’t have a pipeline problem, they have a disqualification problem.
Victoria made a simple point most CROs overlook: “If the deal hasn’t moved in a month, it’s probably dead.” When managers are trained to inspect deals but not coach discovery, reps keep the wrong opportunities alive too long. This bloats forecasts and erodes trust across the org.
Great managers teach reps how to qualify and disqualify early. It’s not just good pipeline hygiene; it’s a skill that multiplies quota attainment.
4. Stop inspecting activity. Start coaching skills.
Managers don’t need more data. They need help translating data into action. Victoria leans into deal inspection as a window into coaching, not as a scoreboard, but as a lens into what’s missing. Did the rep run discovery well? Are they moving the deal or just updating the CRM?
This is where most managers get stuck. They’ve been trained to forecast, not coach. And they don’t know how to translate a pipeline review into a coaching opportunity.
5. Even experienced managers need feedback, and most don’t know how to take it.
When Victoria was told early in her career that she came off as “defensive,” it stung. But instead of fighting the feedback, she used it. That lesson, owning perception and adjusting your response, is at the heart of any great coach’s growth.
You can’t ask your frontline managers to coach their people if they haven’t learned how to be coached themselves. And if your managers are uncomfortable giving or receiving tough feedback, you’ve got a development gap in your leadership bench.
What CROs Should Do About It
If your pipeline is stalling, your coaching culture isn’t just “soft stuff.” It’s a hard lever. But here’s the kicker: you can’t improve what you can’t see. Your FLMs need visibility into their reps’ behaviors, not just activity dashboards. They need clarity on where to spend their time, how to structure a great 1:1, and when to push, pull, or pause.
Victoria’s interview reinforced a simple truth: high-performing teams don’t just work harder. They work with rhythm. And rhythm requires coaching. Consistent. Focused. Skill-based coaching.
Most companies say they want a coaching culture. Very few put the systems in place to support one.
If you want to build one that lasts, start by asking: Do my managers have the tools, time, and cadence to coach?
And if the answer is no, it might be time to see what CoachEm is doing to change that.
🎧 Listen to the full episode: The Cadence of Modern Sales Leadership with Victoria Abeling
📍 Available wherever you get your podcasts. Or watch on YouTube.
🔗 Learn more at CoachEm.io
