Imagine Arsenal sign a promising new winger. He arrives at London Colney on Monday morning and spends the first couple of days being onboarded. Someone talks him through the club’s philosophy, explains the tactical system Mikel Arteta wants to play and gives him access to a set of videos showing what good performance should look like. There is some work on positioning, a few examples of how Arsenal want to attack certain situations and perhaps a short assessment at the end to make sure he has understood the basics. Then, on Saturday afternoon, Arsenal send him out to play. From that point onwards, most of his development happens during competitive matches. There is little structured practice because everyone is busy preparing for the next fixture, so he is expected to improve largely by experiencing more football. Every few weeks, Arteta sits down with him and asks how he thinks things are going. The player says he feels pretty good, perhaps admits that he could be more clinical in the final third, and they agree to revisit it later. Before leaving, he is reminded to update Salesforce. The scenario sounds absurd because no serious football club would develop players this way. Yet if you remove the football references, it begins to resemble the way plenty of sales organisations still approach development. We recruit people into roles where they may eventually be responsible for millions of pounds of revenue. We put them through onboarding, introduce a methodology, provide product training and perhaps give them a few opportunities to practise before releasing them into the real world. From that point onwards, the overwhelming majority of their development happens while they are actually doing the job. They practise discovery while conducting discovery. They practise negotiation while negotiating. They develop their ability to navigate senior stakeholders by speaking to senior stakeholders. They learn how to handle objections when real customers raise them and, if the conversation goes badly, someone may discuss the outcome afterwards. If it goes well, very often nobody looks at it at all. Football takes a very different view of human performance. The match matters enormously, but the match is not primarily where development happens. Players train, perform, analyse what happened, work on specific elements of their game and then try again. The entire environment is built around the assumption that talented professionals do not become better simply because they continue playing football. Sales often behaves as though they do. That makes the comparison between football coaching and sales coaching much more interesting than it might initially appear. The two environments are obviously different, but the principles behind improving performance are remarkably similar. Where they diverge most sharply is not in what good coaching looks like, but in how seriously the two professions build coaching into everyday performance. Sales has confused experience with practice There is a meaningful difference between repeatedly doing something and deliberately practising it. Someone who has worked in sales for ten years has undoubtedly accumulated experience, but that does not necessarily mean they have spent ten years systematically improving. It is entirely possible to spend one year learning and the next nine becoming increasingly efficient at repeating the same habits. This distinction sits behind much of the research associated with deliberate practice. The basic idea is that expertise develops not simply through repetition, but through focused work on particular aspects of performance, combined with feedback, adjustment and another attempt. The exact contribution deliberate practice makes to elite performance is debated, and it would be simplistic to pretend that practice alone explains why one person becomes exceptional and another does not. Talent, environment, opportunity and many other factors matter. What is far less controversial is the distinction between experience and improvement. Football understands this instinctively. If a striker has difficulty finishing with their weaker foot, the answer is not to wait patiently until another chance happens to fall that way during a Premier League match. The training ground creates a controlled environment in which the movement can be isolated, repeated and adjusted. The player can attempt it again and again without every failure carrying the cost of three points. That distinction matters because competitive performance is a poor environment for developing every skill. The stakes are too high, the situation is too complex and the performer has too many things competing for their attention at once. Salespeople rarely get the same separation between performance and practice. If a manager listens to a salesperson and decides they need to improve the depth of their discovery, what happens next? In many organisations, the seller simply goes away and conducts more discovery calls. The assumption is that greater exposure will naturally produce improvement. Sometimes it will. More experience can absolutely help people recognise patterns and become more comfortable in difficult situations. But experience can just as easily reinforce existing behaviour. If a seller asks the same superficial questions, misses the same signals and moves away from difficult subjects at the same moments, another 50 customer conversations may simply make those habits more deeply embedded. The issue is not a lack of activity. It is the absence of deliberate development. A football coach would isolate the behaviour. They might recreate the situation in training, ask the player to try something different, stop the exercise, give feedback and repeat it. Sales coaching can often skip this entire stage and jump straight from identifying the problem to asking the seller to perform again in front of another customer. In effect, salespeople are frequently expected to use the match as the training session. That is a fairly extraordinary approach when you consider the commercial value of the situations in which they are being asked to learn. You wouldn’t coach football from the match report Football coaching is also built around direct observation. Managers do not simply look at the final score, ask the players how they thought the match went and base the following week’s coaching on those recollections. They watch the actual performance. Modern professional football has taken this to extraordinary levels. Matches are filmed from multiple angles. Positioning can be analysed. Running distances are measured. Tactical patterns are examined. Individual decisions are replayed and discussed in detail. Coaches want to understand what happened rather than relying entirely on somebody’s memory of what happened. There is an obvious reason for this. Memory is selective, perspective is incomplete and outcomes do not explain themselves. Imagine if a football manager approached performance analysis in the way sales managers have traditionally approached opportunity reviews. Rather than watching the match back, they simply asked the player how the first half felt, whether their positioning was good and what they might do differently next time. The player would probably offer a perfectly reasonable account of events, but it would still be an account filtered through their own memory, perspective and interpretation. No serious football club would regard that as sufficient evidence on which to base coaching. Yet sales managers do something remarkably similar all the time. A seller comes out of a discovery meeting and is asked how it went. They say it went well, explain that the customer has some important efficiency challenges and report that there is enough interest to justify a demonstration. The manager then begins discussing the next stage of the opportunity. What often disappears from the conversation is any examination of what actually happened during the meeting. Which questions created useful information? Which answers deserved further exploration? Where did the seller move on too quickly? Were important signals missed? How effectively did they respond when the customer introduced something unexpected? The problem is not that the salesperson is deliberately providing an inaccurate account. They simply experienced the meeting from inside it. Like any performer, they cannot simultaneously participate in a complex conversation and observe every aspect of their own behaviour objectively. This is precisely why football coaches watch the match rather than relying on players to reconstruct it afterwards. Modern conversation intelligence gives sales managers the ability to do something similar. They can return to a specific moment in a conversation and examine the judgement behind it. A customer might mention that another department has been struggling with the same problem, for example, and the seller might acknowledge the comment before moving straight to the next prepared question. On a CRM record, that moment disappears entirely. On the recording, it becomes an opportunity for useful coaching because the manager can explore what the seller heard, why they decided to move on and what they might have discovered if they had stayed with the subject. That is a fundamentally richer coaching conversation because it is anchored in behaviour rather than recollection. The technology itself, however, is not the point. Recording conversations without doing anything with them is not coaching. It is merely collecting evidence. The value comes when the evidence informs practice. You would not coach football from the match report. Sales should be equally cautious about trying to coach customer conversations from the CRM. The coach cannot keep running onto the pitch There is another difference between football and sales that becomes particularly interesting once managers become involved in live performance. Imagine Bukayo Saka is having a difficult afternoon against an excellent full-back. His movement is not quite working, he has lost possession a few times and Arsenal are struggling to create anything down his side. Arteta decides he needs to help. In football, everyone understands the limits of that help. He can change the tactical structure, give Saka information, make a substitution or adjust what the team is trying to do. What he cannot do is take off his jacket, run onto the pitch and play right wing for ten minutes until things improve. Nobody would call that coaching. Sales frequently allows a much blurrier boundary between coach and performer. A seller gets into difficulty during a senior customer meeting and the manager takes over the conversation. A commercial negotiation becomes uncomfortable and the manager starts leading it. The seller struggles to articulate the business case, so the manager explains it instead. An opportunity stalls and the manager contacts the buyer personally to get things moving again. Sometimes those interventions are necessary. There are commercially important situations in which leaders should absolutely become involved. Football managers intervene too. They change shape, make substitutions and alter the game plan when circumstances demand it. The problem arises when intervention becomes the default method of helping. The immediate outcome can actually improve. The customer gets a better answer, the negotiation progresses or the meeting becomes more controlled because the manager is more experienced than the seller. From a short-term perspective, the intervention can therefore look entirely rational. The development question is different. What has changed for the salesperson? If the next difficult situation appears a month later and the manager once again needs to step in, the organisation may have solved two commercial problems without developing the person responsible for handling them. This is the tension at the heart of coaching. Solving somebody’s immediate problem and developing their ability to solve future problems are not the same objective. The first is usually quicker. If a salesperson asks what they should do next in an opportunity, an experienced manager can probably provide a reasonable answer very quickly. Speak to finance. Bring procurement into the process. Rebuild the business case. Multi-thread the account. Challenge the proposed timeline. The seller leaves with a plan and the manager feels useful. Coaching requires more patience because the useful conversation is not simply about the answer. It is about the thinking that produced it. A coach wants to understand what the seller believes is happening, what evidence supports that belief, where the greatest risk sits and what alternatives they have considered. The aim is not to withhold expertise for the sake of it, but to use the situation to improve judgement. That can occasionally feel less helpful in the moment because the manager could simply provide the answer and move on. But there is a difference between creating dependency and creating capability. Football coaches understand that they cannot play the match for their players. Sales managers sometimes need to resist doing the commercial equivalent. Good coaching is individual because performance is individual Nobody would expect a goalkeeper and a centre-forward to have identical development plans. They operate within the same team, contribute towards the same objective and work within the same tactical system, but the capabilities required to perform their roles are different. Even two players in the same position may require completely different coaching. One winger might need to improve their decision-making in the final third. Another may need to become better at receiving the ball under pressure. A young player might need repetition and confidence, while an experienced international requires small tactical adjustments that produce marginal improvements at the highest level. The system is shared, but the development is individual. Sales organisations have a tendency to reverse this. We introduce a common methodology and then allow that methodology to become the coaching programme. Everyone gets MEDDPICC. Everyone attends discovery training. Everyone completes negotiation training. Everyone attends the same workshops and receives the same set of expectations. There is nothing wrong with this. Teams need common frameworks, shared language and clear standards. Football teams have tactical systems too. But training a team and coaching an individual are different things. A salesperson who is excellent at discovery but weak at qualification does not need another generic session on discovery. Someone who has enormous credibility with senior executives but struggles to challenge them requires something completely different. Another seller may understand exactly what they should do but lack the confidence to do it, while someone else may possess confidence in abundance but poor judgement about when to use it. This is where coaching becomes diagnostic. The manager has to understand the performance gap before attempting to close it. That sounds obvious, yet generic feedback remains remarkably common in sales. Sellers are told to ask better questions, become more commercial, challenge the customer more, take greater control of meetings or build stronger champions. All of these may be perfectly reasonable observations, but they describe desirable outcomes rather than the behavioural change needed to produce them. A football coach telling a midfielder they need to “control the game more” may be directionally correct, but the useful work begins afterwards. What is currently preventing them from doing that? Which situations are causing the problem? Is it positioning, awareness, decision-making, confidence, technique or something else entirely? Sales coaching deserves the same precision. The more specific the diagnosis, the more useful the development becomes. A good result does not always mean a good performance Football also understands something that sales can struggle with because revenue exerts such a powerful influence over how performance is judged. Sometimes you win despite playing badly. Sometimes you lose despite playing well. Managers talk about this constantly because the scoreboard tells you what happened without necessarily explaining how it happened. A team can win 1-0 despite giving away several excellent chances, while another can dominate possession, create far more opportunities and lose to a deflected goal. Sales outcomes contain exactly the same problem. A salesperson can run a mediocre sales process and still win. Perhaps the buyer already knew the company, the product was clearly superior, there was an existing relationship or the economic buyer simply wanted the solution from the beginning. The commission gets paid and the CRM records a closed-won opportunity. Everyone celebrates. But the outcome can accidentally reinforce poor behaviour. The reverse happens too. A salesperson can conduct excellent discovery, build a compelling business case, navigate stakeholders carefully and lose because the customer freezes expenditure two weeks before signature. The CRM records a loss. If managers coach only outcomes, they risk teaching the wrong lessons from both situations. Good coaching requires the ability to separate performance quality from performance outcome. Of course salespeople are ultimately paid to produce results. Football teams are judged by results too. Nobody gets a trophy for excellent underlying performance while finishing 14th in the league. But development requires more sophistication than simply looking at the final number. The manager has to ask whether the behaviours that made success more likely were present. Was the opportunity properly qualified? Did we understand the business problem? Had we created enough stakeholder support? Did we understand how the decision would actually be made? Did the seller respond effectively when circumstances changed? These questions are really about repeatability. A good outcome produced by poor behaviour is difficult to reproduce deliberately. Good behaviour provides a stronger foundation for future outcomes, even when an individual result goes against you. That is why elite football teams analyse wins as well as defeats. Victory does not make the performance irrelevant. Sales should take the same view. The best players in the world still have coaches Perhaps the most interesting cultural difference between sport and business is what coaching implies about the person receiving it. In many organisations, additional coaching still carries a faint suggestion that something is wrong. Coaching is often concentrated on the new starter, the salesperson below target, the individual who failed certification or the person struggling to convert opportunities. High performers are frequently treated very differently. They are delivering the number, so managers understandably decide not to interfere. The assumption is that they already know what they are doing and should simply be left to get on with it. Sport treats this idea very differently. At the highest level, the coaching environment generally becomes more sophisticated rather than less. Elite footballers are surrounded by coaches, analysts, strength and conditioning specialists, medical teams and increasingly large performance departments. Their games are repeatedly analysed despite the fact that they are already among the best people in the world at what they do. Nobody watches an elite footballer receiving coaching and concludes that they must be struggling. Receiving coaching is part of being a professional. That may be one of the most useful ideas sales can borrow from sport. Imagine if the best sellers in an organisation actively demanded coaching because they associated it with improving performance rather than correcting failure. Imagine an experienced enterprise salesperson finishing an important meeting and immediately wanting to examine the recording because they knew there were moments they could have handled differently. Imagine if managers spent as much time developing their strongest performers as rescuing their weakest. The cultural shift would be significant. Experience creates a particular risk because the longer we perform a job successfully, the easier it becomes to assume that our habits are evidence of expertise. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are simply habits that have never been challenged because the results have been good enough. A seller can hit target while carrying weaknesses for years. A strong territory can hide poor qualification. A great product can compensate for mediocre discovery. Existing customer relationships can make stakeholder navigation much easier than it would be elsewhere. Success is valuable, but it can also protect people from scrutiny. Sport has built coaching cultures around the assumption that there is no natural finishing point to performance development. Someone can already be excellent and still become better. Sales should not find that idea particularly controversial. Perhaps the two forms of coaching are not very different after all Football and sales are obviously not the same. One takes place in front of tens of thousands of people with clearly defined rules and a visible scoreboard. The other involves complex organisations, uncertain buying processes and outcomes influenced by factors sellers cannot always observe. Footballers also have a structural advantage when it comes to development. Their organisations deliberately create time to train. Salespeople have customers to speak to, pipeline to build, forecasts to submit and quarters that seem to arrive faster every year. Creating protected time for practice is therefore much harder. But the underlying principles of performance are not particularly mysterious. People improve when somebody can observe what they actually do rather than relying entirely on what they say they did. They improve when feedback is specific enough to change behaviour and when they can practise difficult situations without every attempt carrying a real-world commercial consequence. They improve when coaching reflects their individual performance rather than simply repeating a generic methodology, and when managers help them understand the judgement behind decisions rather than constantly making those decisions for them. Most importantly, they improve when the cycle between performance, feedback, practice and another attempt is short enough for learning to become continuous. Professional football has built its environment around those assumptions. Most serious clubs would find the idea of giving players two days of training at the beginning of the season and then expecting competitive matches alone to develop them completely absurd. Yet sales organisations can invest heavily in onboarding and methodology training, release people into territories and then wonder six months later why behaviour has not changed as much as expected. Perhaps the real difference between football coaching and sales coaching is therefore not the nature of coaching itself. It is how seriously the two professions take it. Football treats coaching as part of performance. Sales can still treat coaching as something that happens around performance, usually when enough time remains after forecasting, reporting, internal meetings and trying to get the quarter over the line. That distinction matters because people do not reach their potential simply by doing their jobs repeatedly. Experience gives people opportunities to learn. Good coaching turns more of those opportunities into improvement. Perhaps sales organisations should therefore start thinking about the training ground with the same seriousness that football clubs do. Not literally, obviously. Although watching a sales manager appear in a full tracksuit because somebody has failed to identify the economic buyer would certainly make Monday morning pipeline reviews more interesting. Aaron Evans 4 September 2026 Share : URL has been copied successfully!