You can't coach a lagging indicator
A one-to-one, second week of the quarter. The rep is at 38% of her number with ten weeks to go. The manager opens with the dashboard, walks through the gap, and closes with the coaching: she needs to get to 100%. She nods. He books the same meeting for next week.
Nothing in that meeting can change the number. The number is a result. Everything that produced it happened weeks or months ago, in discovery calls he did not listen to and deals he did not inspect. He has coached the scoreboard.
Quota attainment, win rate, revenue, average deal size. They all share the same problem. By the time you can see them, the behaviour that produced them is over. You are looking at a photograph of something that already happened. You cannot coach a photograph.
What you can coach
The behaviours that produce the result are visible long before the result is, if you look in the right place. In a deal, that place is MEDDICC.
Has the rep quantified the Metrics with the customer, or is there a vague line about “efficiency” in the CRM? Has she met the Economic Buyer, or is she taking a Coach’s word for it? Can she describe the Decision Process with dates and the Paper Process with names? Is the Champion tested, or merely friendly? Each of those is a leading indicator. Each of those can be changed this week. That is what makes them coachable.
The test is simple. Ask two questions about anything you are about to coach. Can the rep change it before the next meeting? Will you be able to see whether she did? If the answer to either is no, you are not coaching. You are reporting.
Attainment fails both questions. A tested Champion passes both.
The trap on the other side
There is a version of this that goes wrong. Some leaders hear “leading indicator” and reach for activity. Calls made, emails sent, meetings booked. Those are early and they are measurable, so they look like the answer. They are a trap. Activity is a leading indicator of effort. It is only loosely connected to revenue, and the moment you coach to it, you get reps who dial for the dashboard. The B in B-Player stands for busy for exactly this reason.
The leading indicators worth coaching are the ones that cause the outcome, which is a smaller set than the ones that merely happen before it. A rep with 400 dials and no Champion is behind. A rep with 40 dials and three tested Champions is ahead. Coach the cause.
Rewrite the meeting
Take the one-to-one from the opening and run it again.
This time the manager leaves the dashboard closed. He opens with her three biggest deals and asks the same questions of each. What did the Economic Buyer say, in their own words, about the pain? When did she last ask the Champion to do something that cost him political capital, and did he do it? What is the next step, and is it in the customer’s calendar or only in hers?
Every answer is something she can act on by Friday. Every answer is something he can check the following week. The number will move because the inputs moved. That is the only direction the causality runs.
More than 35,000 people have been through the MEDDICC Masterclass, and the change leaders describe most often afterwards is the shape of their pipeline review. They stopped asking where a deal would land and started asking what was true about it. That is the whole shift. Inspect the deal, and you will never need to shout at the rep.
Find your last three coaching conversations and write down the thing you coached in each one.
Could the rep have changed it that week, and would you have seen it if they had?
