B2B sales coaching can have huge impacts, but you should be sure you’ve set your team up for success.
October 15, 2025
By Rachel Smith
B2B sales coaching for your team can make a huge difference in the length of your sales cycles, the size of your deals, and your conversion rate. But how can you ensure your B2B sales coaching effort is a success? Do you have the right frameworks and structures in place? Are you committed to the behaviors necessary for making sustainable changes? Do you have the right people on your team for coaching in the first place?
We’ve heard all of the excuses for why you can’t record your sales calls. We’re not buying it. You can record at least some of your calls if not all of them, and it’s critical that you do. Just as a sports coach sits down with an athlete to review film, you, as a B2B sales coach, need to dig into call recordings with your salespeople in order to identify what’s working, what’s not working, and what needs to be practiced.
Your sales team can learn a lot from listening to their own calls, but don’t stop there. Listen to call recordings as a team so everyone can learn from each other. After listening to a recording, have each person provide “I likes” and “I wishes.” What were some things people liked about the call, and what were some behaviors they wish they had seen?
Lacking a culture of accountability is going to sabotage any B2B sales coaching efforts. Holding people accountable means coaching them on behaviors and activities, and then making sure those behaviors and activities are happening. And if they’re not happening, it needs to be called out.
As a coach, you also need to hold yourself accountable for following through on holding your team accountable. It’s meta, we know. The fact is that if you’re not prepared to hold your team accountable, you can’t be the coach.
The quickest way to convince your B2B sales team that something you taught them isn’t that important is to not do it yourself. Are you instructing them to provide three time windows when asking for a meeting? You should be. And you should also be providing three time windows in your own correspondence. Are you driving home the importance of asking open-ended questions since they provide more information? Then you need to be modeling asking such questions.
Not everyone is willing to be coached. If those people are on your team, your coaching calls are going to be combative and contentious. There are ways to test for coachability when conducting interviews. That’s for a different blog, but know that if you did not assess people for coachability when they were hired, you’ll be testing them for it once you start coaching. It will quickly become evident who has a growth mindset and who doesn’t.
By coaching your prospective hires throughout the interview process, you have an opportunity to observe how they respond and whether they follow through. Sales is mostly science, which means sales skills can be taught. It’s much more difficult to instill someone with coachability.
No matter your skill level, consistent practice is key. Encourage your sales team to use tools that allow them to practice. GoTensai is a great platform for practicing question trees. Share it with your team and have everyone commit to seven minutes a day.
Have team members roleplay with each other or with you to practice handling specific situations. Roleplay with the group as a whole. There is so much that can be learned by watching others, and a great way to motivate sales-team members is to have them practice in front of their peers. There are plenty of AI tools that can help your team with roleplays as well. [[whistle image]]
The most successful salespeople follow a process, so you need to have one in place that you coach your team to follow. It can be BANT. It can be MEDDIC. We prefer DRIVE. What’s important is that you are committed to one, and that everyone on your team is following it.
We like DRIVE because, rather than being just a sales qualification framework, it’s an information-gathering framework. It outlines all of the important information you need to de-risk your deal.
The point of providing B2B sales coaching is to increase the velocity of sales. But a sale doesn’t begin and end with your sales team. What about marketing and customer success? What about your subject-matter experts (SMEs)? If your salespeople are accelerating things, but they can’t get the collateral they need from marketing at the same pace, or they can’t get their SME on the phone that day to keep a deal moving, you’re setting them up for frustration. The best B2B sales training programs reach beyond sales. [[coaching image]]
Accepting constructive criticism is not easy. If you, as the coach, treat some people leniently and hold others to a higher bar, your feedback can quickly be seen as personal. It’s true that different people on your team have different personalities and levels of expertise, but you have to be consistent in how you deliver feedback.
Human brains are wired for stories. We remember them better than facts alone, and we’re more likely to accept information in story format. We coach our sales teams to sell using stories, and similarly, you should teach using stories. Share your own sales stories as you coach. Are you coaching your team on why it’s important to do a tech check? Share your horror story of not doing one and what happened. Then share how you approach it now, and why. [[reading image]]
Your team isn’t going to get every detail right every time. What are the things you think are most important for them to learn? What are the behaviors or activities that will have the greatest impact on your organization’s success? Is it sending three times in a meeting request? Maybe it’s making sure you always schedule the next meeting before you get off a call.
You have to determine what you think is most important—the things you will not let slide. After all, if everything is a big deal, then nothing is a big deal.
B2B sales coaching has great potential for sales teams, but it doesn’t just happen. It requires consistency, dedication, and the right approach from both the salespeople and the sales coach.
Reach out to us if you have questions about your own coaching practice or if you’re looking for external B2B sales coaches. You can find us at mastery@maestrogroup.co! It’s also your last chance to sign up for Maestro’s Revenue Summit, October 20–21 in Washington, DC. It’s free! Click here for more information and to grab a spot before they’re gone.
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