Are You Coaching "Effort" or "Skill"?

By Shawn Hamilton, M.S., DBA(c) Shawn Hamilton is a leading sales leadership advisor and doctoral researcher at the University of Houston, specializing in Sales Leadership.

Are You Coaching "Effort" or "Skill"?

Last week, we identified the "Activity Trap": the common managerial mistake of measuring inputs (dials, emails) over impact (quality conversations).

When a rep like "Tom" is failing, the manager stuck in this trap—let's call her "Jane"—defaults to one "coaching" solution: "You need to make more calls. Your activity is down. Get your numbers up."

Jane is coaching effort.

She's not actually making her rep better; she's just asking him to be busier. This approach not only fails to solve the underlying problem, but it also burns out the rep and creates a culture of "logging to the dashboard" instead of "selling to the customer."

A true sales leader, by contrast, coaches skill.

The Difference: "More" vs. "Better"

A leader understands that Tom's problem isn't a lack of effort; it's a lack of effectiveness. Coaching "effort" is telling him to run more plays. Coaching "skill" is showing him how to run the play correctly.

• Coaching Effort (The "What"):

  • "You need to make 100 dials."

  • "You have to book 10 meetings this week."

  • "Why is your pipeline coverage only 2x?" This is just activity management, and as we saw in Week 4, it's a hallmark of "Outcome Coaching"—focusing on the result without fixing the cause.

• Coaching Skill (The "How"):

  • "Let's listen to three of your call openings. What did you notice about the prospect's tone?"

  • "When they gave you the 'no budget' objection, what discovery question could we have asked before that to understand their financial sign-off process?"

  • "In your email, you listed 10 features. Let's rewrite it to focus on the one outcome that matters to a VP of Finance."

This is the "Behavioral Coaching" we discussed in Week 4. As research from the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management confirms, coaching that is focused on developing a rep's skills and behaviors has a significant and lasting impact on performance (Onyemah & Tuli, 2013).

Coaching "effort" creates temporary compliance. Coaching "skill" creates long-term competence.

Actionable Takeaways: How to Coach Skill, Not Effort

Your job as a leader is to be a "skill-builder," not an "activity-inspector."

1. Isolate the "Moment." You can't coach "selling." It's too big. But you can coach the first 30 seconds of a cold call. Or the way a rep handles a pricing objection. Or the specific email they write to ask for a referral. Get granular. Pick one skill and one "moment" in the sales process to fix.

2. Use "Game Tape" (Call Recordings). Stop asking reps how their calls went. Listen with them. But don't just critique. Ask them: "What would you rate that call, 1-10?" "What's one thing you did well?" "What's the one thing you'd change next time?"

3. Define What "Good" Looks Like. Your reps can't hit a target they can't see. Do you have a "Gold Standard" call recording for how to open a call? Do you have an email template that shows perfect objection handling? Give them a clear, tangible model of the skill you want them to emulate.

Stop asking your team for "more." Start showing them "better." That's the shift from manager to leader.

References

Onyemah, V., & Tuli, K. R. (2013). An analysis of the effect of the frequency of managerial coaching and its key components on the performance of salespeople. Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, 33(1), 35–50.