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THE DATA
COACHING
STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
THE HOOK
Teams coached weekly hit 76% quota attainment. Teams coached quarterly or less hit 47%. The cleanest performance lever in the 2026 research, and most organisations are leaving it unpulled.
The 29-Point Gap: What Weekly Coaching Does to Quota
THE DATA · A 4-MINUTE READ
THE STATE OF SALES LENS
How we judged this: MySalesCoach's State of Sales Coaching 2026, surveying 3,700-plus sales professionals, cross-read with Gong's revenue intelligence data and the wider coaching research. A 29-point attainment gap with one variable between the groups: how often coaching actually happens.
01 · Frequency is the whole game
Weekly coaching: 76% of reps at quota. Monthly: 56%. Quarterly or less: 47%. The drop-off is immediate and non-linear. For a 25-rep team carrying £500K quotas each, the gap between quarterly and weekly coaching is roughly £3.6M in covered quota. Gong's data adds the deal-level view: reps getting one structured coaching conversation a week win 19% more deals than reps getting none.
Frequency beats intensity for the same reason spaced practice beats cramming: behaviour change needs a short feedback loop. A quarterly session lands 13 weeks of feedback in one go, most of it about calls the rep barely remembers. A weekly session catches the habit while it is still forming, in either direction.
THE NUMBER 76% vs 47% attainment, weekly vs quarterly coaching.
THE MOVE
30 minutes per rep per week, in the diary, protected like a client meeting.
02 · Leaders think it is happening. Reps disagree.
64% of sales leaders believe they spend more time coaching than a year ago. Meanwhile 45% of reps now rate the coaching they receive as below average, up sharply from 29% last year. The gap has a simple explanation: leaders count pipeline reviews and one-to-ones as coaching. Reps experience those as conversations about the business's needs, and they are right.
The audit is worth actually running. Sit in on three "coaching" sessions this month and count the minutes spent on deal status versus minutes spent on skill. Most leaders who do this find the ratio runs 90/10 towards the forecast, which explains both the leader's confidence and the rep's rating in one sitting.
THE NUMBER 45% of reps rate their coaching below average.
STEAL THIS
A deal review asks "where is this deal up to?" A coaching session asks "what will you do differently on the next one?" Audit which question your managers actually ask.
03 · Nobody coaches the coaches
76% of managers have never received any training on how to coach. And the reps who most need development get the least of it: low achievers are twice as likely to receive no coaching at all. The struggling get left struggling, then managed out, then replaced at full recruitment cost, and the cycle bills itself as performance management.
Manager training does not need to be elaborate to work. A shared coaching framework, a scoring rubric for calls, and managers observing each other's sessions once a month fixes most of it. Coaching is a skill with a craft to it. Promotion does not magically confer it.
THE NUMBER 76% of managers were never taught to coach.
DO THIS THIS WEEK
Before buying another rep tool, budget one coaching-skills programme for your frontline managers. It compounds across everyone they manage.
The verdict
Managers spending three-plus hours a week coaching see team attainment near 94% in the 2026 data. Almost nothing else in the research moves the number that far for that little money.
If it is not in the diary, it is not happening.
THE ONE THING
Weekly, thirty minutes, per rep. The least glamorous line in the budget and the highest-yielding one.
Got a take on this one? Hit reply. We read every single one.
Every week we sit down with the operators actually moving revenue.