The Coachability Problem: Why Sales Coaching Does Not Reach Performance

Executive summary

• Shannahan, Bush and Shannahan, publishing in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, found that salesperson coachability fully mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and sales performance, and partially mediates the relationship between a rep’s competitiveness and their performance.
• Full mediation is a strong claim. It means leadership behavior does not reach the number by any other route. Where coachability is absent, the measured effect of good management approaches zero.
• Most organizations allocate coaching by need or by fairness. Both allocate against performance gap. The research says return depends on coachability, which is a different variable and one almost nobody measures.
• The consequence is uncomfortable: the rep with the largest gap and the lowest coachability is the worst use of manager time in the organization, and usually receives the most of it.
• Coachability is not fixed. Research published in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management in 2026 finds that manager vulnerability strengthens it, which means a manager can partly create the condition that makes their own coaching work.
• The practical shift is from coaching more to coaching selectively, and from measuring coaching hours to measuring where those hours were spent.

The position everyone agrees is critical and nobody designs

Ask any revenue leader where the leverage sits in a sales organization and most will name the frontline manager. A first-line manager with eight reps touches more revenue than any individual seller and shapes the behavior of everyone in that span.

Then look at how the role is actually constructed. The frontline manager typically inherits forecasting, pipeline review, escalations, recruiting, onboarding, comp disputes, cross-functional meetings, their own strategic accounts in many organizations, and coaching. Coaching is the only item on that list with no deadline attached, which is why it is the item that gets displaced when the quarter tightens.

The standard remedy is to protect coaching time. Block the calendar, mandate a cadence, measure hours coached. It is sensible, it is widely recommended, and it treats manager time as the binding constraint.

The research suggests the binding constraint is somewhere else.

What the evidence actually says

Kathryn Shannahan, Alan Bush and Rachelle Shannahan, publishing in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science in 2013, adapted a measure of coachability from athletics and applied it to business-to-business salespeople across a two-part empirical study.

Their finding, stated plainly: sales performance is highest when salespeople are highly coachable, highly competitive, and working under transformational leadership. And critically, salesperson coachability fully mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and sales performance. It partially mediates the relationship between trait competitiveness and performance.

Full mediation is worth pausing on, because it is a much stronger statement than “coachability helps.”

It means the effect of leadership on performance travels entirely through coachability. There is no measured direct path. A manager can exhibit every behavior the leadership literature recommends, and if the rep is not coachable, the study found no separate route by which that behavior reaches the number.

Read against how most organizations allocate coaching, that is a problem.

The allocation nobody examines

There are two common ways sales organizations decide who gets coached.

By need. The manager spends the most time with the reps furthest from quota. This feels responsible and it is the default in most teams under pressure.

By fairness. Everyone gets an equal block. This feels defensible, it survives HR scrutiny, and it is common in larger organizations.

Both allocate manager hours as a function of the performance gap. Neither considers coachability at all.

If coachability is the mediating variable, then allocating by gap is allocating against the wrong axis. The organization is systematically directing its scarcest management resource toward the cases where the research predicts the smallest return, and calling it good management.

The uncomfortable version: the rep with the biggest gap and the lowest coachability is the single worst investment of manager time in the organization, and in most teams they are receiving more of it than anyone else.

That is not an argument for abandoning struggling people. It is an argument that the intervention they need is probably not coaching, and that continuing to coach is how organizations avoid making a harder decision for another two quarters.

A better allocation

Two axes. Performance gap on one, coachability on the other.

The top-left quadrant is where coaching hours belong and it is rarely where they go. The bottom-right is where they usually go.

The top-right deserves a note, because it is the most commonly wasted opportunity in a sales organization. A coachable rep who is already performing adequately is not urgent, so they get almost no manager attention. They are also the population most likely to convert coaching into capability, and the population your next frontline managers come from. Ignoring them is a compounding error.

How to assess coachability without a psychometric instrument

The research used a validated measure. You are not going to run one, and you do not need to for a first pass.

Coachability shows up in behavior, and any manager who has run a team for two quarters already holds the data. Four observable signals:

Does feedback change anything within two weeks? Not agreement in the moment. Observable difference in the next call, the next proposal, the next pipeline review. Agreement without change is the most common false positive in coaching, and it reads as coachability while producing none of it.

Do they bring problems before the problems are visible? A rep who surfaces a stalled deal early is demonstrating openness to intervention. A rep whose deals fail without warning is managing the manager, not working with them.

How do they handle being wrong in front of a peer? Defensiveness in a group setting is the strongest negative signal, and it is easy to observe in any pipeline review.

Do they ask for specific help, or general reassurance? “How should I handle the procurement step on this account” is a coachable request. “I just need to get more volume in the top of funnel” usually is not.

None of that requires an instrument. It requires writing it down, which is the part that does not happen, because manager judgment about people lives in the manager’s head and leaves the company when they do.

The finding that makes this actionable

If coachability were a fixed trait, this article would be an argument for better hiring and nothing else.

Carlin Nguyen, Andrew Artis and Jeffrey Anderson, publishing in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, examine manager vulnerability as a driver of coachability and find that it strengthens the components that matter: the relationship with the coach, the ability to cope with feedback, and openness to learning, which in turn improve sales performance.

That is a useful and slightly counterintuitive result. A manager who is willing to say “I have not run this play either, let us work it out” produces more coachable reps than one who performs certainty. The instinct in sales leadership runs the other way, because the culture rewards conviction and reads uncertainty as weakness.

If it holds, coachability is partly an output of the manager’s own behavior rather than purely an input they inherit. That makes it a lever rather than a filter, and it changes what a manager should practice.

What to change

Stop measuring coaching hours as a proxy for coaching quality. Hours coached tells you nothing about return if the allocation is wrong. A manager at twelve hours a month distributed across the bottom-right quadrant is producing less than one at six hours concentrated in the top-left.

Record a coachability read on every rep, and revisit it quarterly. Three levels is enough. Use the four behavioral signals. Have the manager write one sentence of evidence for each read, because the sentence is what makes it a judgment rather than a feeling.

Re-allocate deliberately, and say out loud that you are doing it. Unequal coaching invites a fairness objection, and the objection is easier to answer before it is raised than after. The answer is that coaching is an investment of a scarce resource and investments go where they return, which is the same logic every other resourcing decision in the company already follows.

Separate the coaching decision from the performance decision. A rep in the bottom-right quadrant needs a clear conversation about fit and a defined timeline, not another coaching cycle. Organizations conflate the two because coaching feels supportive and the fit conversation does not. The conflation is not kindness. It costs the rep two quarters of their career and the manager two quarters of capacity.

Ask managers to practice not knowing. If the 2026 finding holds, this is the cheapest lever available. It costs nothing and it runs against instinct, which is usually where the unexploited returns are.

Five ways this goes wrong

1. Using coachability as a label instead of a read. It is a current assessment that changes, particularly under a different manager. A permanent tag on a person is both wrong and corrosive.
2. Confusing agreeableness with coachability. The most pleasant rep in the team is often the least likely to change anything. Behavioral change within two weeks is the test, not receptiveness in the room.
3. Announcing the framework to the team. The reps will correctly hear a ranking. The allocation is a management decision and it should be visible in where time goes, not in a slide reps see.
4. Skipping the fit conversation anyway. If the bottom-right quadrant does not produce a different kind of conversation within a quarter, the exercise has changed nothing except the vocabulary.
5. Treating this as a substitute for manager capacity work. Manager bandwidth is genuinely constrained, and the administrative load on frontline managers is real. Better allocation of a scarce resource and expanding the resource are both worth doing. This article addresses the first.

Where this leaves a revenue leader

The frontline manager is the most leveraged and least deliberately designed role in most sales organizations. The usual response to that is to protect their time.

Protecting time is necessary and it is not sufficient, because it treats every coaching hour as equally productive. The evidence says they are not equal, and that the variable determining return is one most companies never look at.

The first move is not a program. It is a list: every rep, a coachability read with one sentence of evidence, and an honest look at where last quarter’s coaching hours actually went. Most leaders find the two do not match, and the gap between them is available immediately, at no cost.

Frequently asked questions

What is sales coachability?

A rep’s receptiveness to coaching and their capacity to convert it into changed behavior. Research adapted the concept from athletics and applied it to business-to-business selling. It is distinct from agreeableness or effort, and it is observable through whether feedback produces a measurable change in the following weeks.

Does sales coaching actually improve performance?

The evidence says it depends on who is being coached. Shannahan, Bush and Shannahan, in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, found salesperson coachability fully mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and sales performance. Full mediation means no measured direct path from leadership to performance that bypasses coachability, so the same coaching produces very different returns across a team.

Who should a sales manager coach first?

The reps with a real performance gap who are also highly coachable. That quadrant has both the room to improve and the mechanism for improving. Reps with a large gap and low coachability are usually a fit or role decision rather than a coaching one, and they typically absorb the most manager time in teams that allocate by need.

Can coachability be improved?

Research published in the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management in 2026 finds that manager vulnerability strengthens coachability components including the relationship with the coach, feedback coping and openness to learning. That suggests coachability is partly produced by the manager’s behavior rather than being a fixed trait, which makes it a lever rather than only a screening criterion.

How do we assess coachability without a formal instrument?

Four behavioral signals any manager can observe: whether feedback changes behavior within two weeks, whether the rep surfaces problems before they become visible, how they handle being wrong in front of peers, and whether they ask for specific help rather than general reassurance. Write the read down with one sentence of evidence and revisit it quarterly.

Sources

1. Kathryn L. J. Shannahan, Alan J. Bush and Rachelle J. Shannahan, “Are your salespeople coachable? How salesperson coachability, trait competitiveness, and transformational leadership enhance sales performance,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2013), pages 40 to 54. DOI 10.1007/s11747-012-0302-9
2. Carlin A. Nguyen, Andrew B. Artis and Jeffrey E. Anderson, “When sales managers stop pretending to be perfect: vulnerability as a catalyst for sales coachability,” Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2026), pages 26 to 41. DOI 10.1080/08853134.2025.2571551

About the author

Andre Magrini is a chief revenue officer and fractional CRO based in the Greater Chicago Area. He led North America for Ag Growth International and, as general manager in Brazil, scaled an operation more than 4x in three years. He served as Vice President of the Marketing and Communications Committee at the American Feed Industry Association, and is the author of seven books, including five on sales, marketing analytics and corporate governance.