Find a sales coach

Sales coaching ranges from one-on-one work with a nervous founder to training a whole B2B team. The coach who is brilliant at one may be wrong for the other. Here's how to find the right kind.

Match them to what you sell. Selling a four-thousand-dollar coaching package, a monthly software plan, and an enterprise contract are different games. Ask what kinds of sales a coach has done and coached, and look for overlap with yours.

Ask about their own sales record. Plenty of great coaches have sold a lot. Some have mostly trained. Either can work, but you should know whether their advice comes from the field or from a framework.

Ask them to listen to a call. The best sales coaches want to hear how you actually sell, through a recording, a role-play, or by sitting in. Be wary of a coach who only ever works from theory.

Check the style fits you. If a coach's own style feels pushy on the intro call, that's what they'll teach you. Find someone whose way of selling you'd be comfortable using with your own customers.

Ask for a short intro call before you commit. Tell them where your deals stall and listen for how they diagnose it. A good sales coach will spot a specific gap, not just promise to "double your close rate".

Bring these to your intro call. You're listening for relevant experience and a way of working that involves your real conversations.

• What have you sold yourself, and to whom?
• Have you coached people selling something like what I sell?
• Will you review my actual calls, emails, or proposals?
• How do you handle someone who hates selling?
• What do you expect me to do between sessions?
• How do we track whether it's working?

Big guarantees are a warning sign. Sales results depend on your offer and your market, and an honest coach will say so.

Your first message can be two or three sentences. Say what you sell, where it goes wrong, and ask how they work. Borrow one of these:

Hi [name], I sell [product or service] and I get plenty of first calls, but most of them go quiet afterwards. I'd like help closing. Do you work with situations like this, and what does your process look like?

Hi [name], I'm good at my work but I really dislike selling it, and it's holding my business back. Could you tell me how you'd approach the first month of working together?

Swap in your own details and send it to two or three coaches. How they sell you on themselves tells you a lot about how they coach.

A sales coach helps you sell better through practice, feedback, and accountability. That's different from a sales trainer who runs a one-day workshop, or a consultant who redesigns your whole sales process. If your problem is the offer itself, or you have no leads at all, a business or marketing coach may be the better first step.

One honest note: a coach can sharpen how you sell, but you still have to make the calls and send the follow-ups. The coaching is there to make sure you do, and to make each one better than the last.

You're browsing CoachCompare's sales coach directory. Coaches create their own profiles and choose their own specialties, and everyone on this page lists sales coaching as one of theirs. Profiles are written by the coaches themselves. The list shows the newest profiles first unless you change the sort, and coaches don't pay for placement in these results.