Your sales managers are not data analysts. Stop making them pretend they are. Research spanning hundreds of studies on sales performance consistently points to one primary driver: selling-related knowledge. Product knowledge. Market knowledge. Customer knowledge. That knowledge transfers through coaching, field time, and conversation - not through dashboards. Yet most organisations have quietly converted their sales managers into data intermediaries, and they’re wondering why coaching doesn’t happen.
What the Research Says
The academic literature on sales force effectiveness is unusually consistent on this point: selling-related knowledge is the variable that most reliably predicts rep performance. Not CRM adoption. Not call volume. Not forecast accuracy.
This knowledge doesn’t appear in reports. It lives in a manager who knows how to position a product against a specific objection, who can model a difficult conversation before a rep walks into a room, who remembers what it took to turn around a territory.
The transfer mechanism is also consistent across the research: coaching. Direct, time-intensive, human coaching.
Where the Time Actually Goes
Ask your sales managers to track a week honestly. The time breakdown is rarely flattering.
Research consistently shows that managers at most organisations spend a very small fraction of their time - often under five percent - in direct coaching activity. The rest goes to administration, reporting, data compilation, meetings about data, and explaining why two systems disagree with each other.
The technology stack was supposed to help. CRM to track activity. BI tools to analyse performance. Dashboards to visualise trends.
Instead, it created data obligations that consume management bandwidth. “Pull the weekly numbers.” “Explain this variance.” “Why does the dashboard show X when reality is Y?” “Update the forecast.” “Reconcile these two reports.”
Each task is reasonable in isolation. Together, they crowd out the work that actually improves performance.
The Artefact Trap
Here is the mechanism that makes this so sticky: field days don’t produce artefacts. Dashboard reviews produce reports. Reports feel like work. Field coaching feels like absence.
Organisations have inadvertently optimised for appearance of productivity over actual development. The things that look like work - the reports, the slides, the weekly summaries - are the things that displace the work that actually matters.
Managers who should be coaching are cleaning data. Managers who should be developing reps are creating reports. Managers who should be in the field are behind screens.
Nobody decided this was the strategy. It accumulated, one reasonable-sounding request at a time.
What to Actually Change
The fix is not motivational. It’s structural. Telling managers to “make time for coaching” without removing the reporting obligations is not a strategy - it’s an aspiration.
Reduce reporting requirements. Every report a manager has to produce is time not spent coaching. Ruthlessly question what is actually necessary versus what has simply always been asked for.
Automate data compilation. If managers are pulling numbers manually, the system is not serving them. Data assembly should be automatic so managers can focus on interpretation and action rather than extraction.
Measure coaching time. What gets measured gets managed. If you want managers to coach, track how much time they spend doing it. Make it visible. Make it matter in performance conversations.
Simplify dashboards. Managers do not need 47 metrics. They need the five that actually predict performance. More dashboards means more time looking at dashboards and less time doing something about what they show.
Protect field time. Block calendar time for managers to be with their teams. Make it non-negotiable. The meeting that feels urgent on Monday rarely is by Friday.
The Uncomfortable Question
Ask your best sales manager how much of their time goes to data versus people. The honest answer will be uncomfortable.
The gap between what managers should be doing - developing their teams - and what they are doing - managing information - is usually larger than anyone wants to admit.
Your sales managers are not data analysts. They are coaches who have been given an analyst’s workload.
Coaching produces performance. Reporting produces artefacts. The two have been confused for long enough.
Time to reallocate.
