Coach in the moment: ad hoc coaching for sales managers

The best time to coach a rep is within a few hours of the call or deal review, while it's still fresh for both of you. Five minutes that afternoon will change more on their next call than a polished half-hour in next month's one-on-one, and with call recordings and AI summaries you can now do it for calls you weren't even on.

I wrote the first version of this in 2016, after more sales and leadership courses than I care to count. They all teach something useful. Very little of it sticks unless someone helps you apply it to what you did an hour ago.

Why the monthly one-on-one is too late

Something happens on a Tuesday. A discovery call goes sideways, a rep asks a great question, a deal gets handled beautifully or badly. The manager makes a mental note to bring it up at the monthly review. By then the moment's cold, the rep has half-forgotten the call, and the feedback lands as an abstract point.

People give far more weight to what happened recently. It's why "greatest of all time" polls tend to favor players from the last few seasons. That works against the monthly review, and for the manager who coaches the same day.

Plenty of reps don't get coached at all. In Salesforce's 2026 State of Sales survey of 4,050 sales professionals, 46% of Gen Z reps said they rarely get feedback on their sales conversations, and that group named lack of manager time as the biggest obstacle to good enablement. Those are usually the newest people on your team, with the most to gain from it.

The scheduled one-on-one still has a job: career, the wider pipeline, how someone's doing overall. The coaching that changes what happens on the next call belongs in the small moments right after.

GROW, in plain English

GROW is an old, simple coaching model with four steps, and I keep coming back to it because it fits in five minutes. You ask, they think. Telling a rep what they should have done is faster and feels like helping, but it teaches them to bring you problems instead of solving them, and people rarely own a lesson they didn't reach themselves.

• Goal. What were you trying to achieve? "What did you want to happen on that call?"
• Reality. What actually happened? "What did you do to move it forward? What did you expect them to do, and what did they do instead?"
• Options. What else could you have tried? Let them list a few before you add yours. If you've got a suggestion or an example from your own deals, steer the questions toward it.
• Will. What will you do next time? One specific thing for the next call, in their words.

You don't need to know the answer before you start, and they'll often get there faster than you expected. Use it on the good calls too. Reinforcing something a rep did well, while it's fresh, is as useful as correcting something they didn't.

One caveat. A brand-new rep with no frame of reference doesn't need to be asked about their options. They need to be shown how the job is done. Direct the beginner, coach the veteran, and switch between the two depending on who's in front of you.

Coaching calls you weren't on

In 2016, coaching in the moment mostly meant the call you overheard or sat in on. I've led teams spread from New Zealand and Australia to the UK and the US, and at that distance you don't overhear anything. The moments you could coach were the handful you happened to be on.

Recording and AI summaries have changed that. An hour after a call ends, a manager can read the summary, jump to the part worth discussing (the pricing question, the objection, the vague next step), listen for two minutes and talk to the rep the same day. Across a team, the same tools can show you where people keep caving on price or missing the objection underneath the stated one, which you'd never spot sitting in on calls one at a time.

The time is there. A Gartner survey of 210 sales leaders, published in May 2026, found AI is saving sellers an average of 4.8 hours a week, and 72% of sales organizations report low reinvestment of that time in high-value work. If AI is handing your team time back, same-day coaching is one of the best places I know to spend some of it.

There's one trap. The dashboard can't be the coaching. An automated scorecard emailed to a rep on a Friday afternoon changes nothing. The signals tell you who needs coaching and on what, and then a person still has to sit down with them. Call summaries like these are part of our AI for revenue teams work. The conversation afterward is still yours.

What a week of it looks like

For a manager with four to eight reps, this is what I'd aim for:

• After any call you're on, take two minutes once the buyer drops off, before either of you opens another tab. Goal, Reality, Options, Will.
• Each week, pick two or three recorded calls per rep from the AI summaries rather than at random: the stalled deal, the pricing conversation, the first call with a new kind of buyer.
• Coach the same day, by voice. A five-minute call or a voice note beats a long written critique nobody rereads.
• Coach inside deal reviews. When a rep says "they're keen, it'll close this month," ask then and there what the buyer has done to show it. Loss reviews are some of the best coaching material you'll get.
• Keep a one-line note of each coaching moment. At the one-on-one, read the notes back and look for the pattern.

You can do all of that without adding a meeting, in the ten-minute gaps you already have on a Tuesday afternoon.

It only works if it's safe

A rep has to feel safe sending you a bad call. The moment they learn a rough call gets used against them, they stop sharing it, and you go blind. Respond to "I messed that one up" with help, every time.

Coaching with questions is also curiosity, the same skill you want reps using on buyers, turned on their own performance. Francesca Gino's research, written up in Harvard Business Review, found that curiosity helps leaders earn more respect from the people they lead, and encourages more trusting, collaborative relationships between colleagues. I make the same argument in Curiosity: you teach curiosity by being curious about your people.

If you're a founder still carrying the number and nobody has time to coach, that's one of the gaps a fractional VP Sales fills. Otherwise, don't put anything in the calendar. Pick one call from today and ask the rep what they wanted to happen.