What your coach remembers

The coach carries what you have told it. This is what separates it from opening a general assistant every morning, and it is why the value compounds instead of resetting.

#What carries over

The accounts you have discussed, what the buyers said, what you committed to do, where the coach thought the risk was, and whether you came back and closed the gap.

Say an account name a week later and you do not re-explain it. The coach picks up where you left it, and it will usually open by asking about the thing it told you to go and find out.

#Whose memory it is

Memory is scoped to you. Your coach's memory of your work is yours and a colleague cannot reach it by asking the same coach: your coach and Sally's coach are the same coach, and it has no route from her conversation to yours.

Yours, across your coachesMemory follows you, so what you established with one coach is available when you work with another. You do not re-explain an account because you switched.

Not reachable by a colleagueAnother rep asking the same coach about your account gets nothing of yours. Their coach knows their work, not yours.

Visible upward as observationsWhat you work through informs what your manager sees: what you are stuck on, where the risk is, the themes across the team, reported as a read rather than replayed. The exception is a note your coach writes onto a deal, which is stored there and visible to anyone who can see that deal. See What you can see.

Separate from account knowledgeWhat the coach knows about your products, buyers and standards comes from the account knowledge base. That is shared and administered, and it is not your history.

#Why the second session is the good one

1Session oneMostly the coach getting the deal into its head. Useful, but it is doing more listening than coaching.

2BetweenYou go and find out the thing it named. Or you do not.

3Session twoIt can now compare what you said with what happened. This is where it starts being worth the time.

It also gets uncomfortable here, in the way a good manager is uncomfortable. If you said you would get the economic buyer on a call and you did not, it will ask why.

#Correcting it

Coaches are not always right about your deal, and they are reasoning from what you told them. Say so plainly in the conversation: "that is wrong, the champion moved teams in July". The correction carries forward like anything else.

Correct as soon as you notice. An uncorrected wrong fact gets reasoned from in every later session, and by the fourth one it is load-bearing.

#When you want it to forget

If you have been working a deal that has died, say so rather than leaving it. "We lost Contoso, they went with the incumbent, do not keep asking about it" is enough, and the reason you give is useful to it later.

A manager or an administrator can also reset your coaching history outright, which clears the conversations and the memory built from them. There is no undo and no partial version of it. See Users, teams and roles.