Coach the deal in front of you.

This is the deal-coaching job reps bring most often: a rep has decided to do something (send the proposal now, push for a meeting with the VP, hold firm on price) and wants a check before it goes out. Your coach asks what you are trying to achieve with the move and what the buyer has confirmed, then plays out the likely response. Either you go ahead with more conviction, or you catch that the move assumes a problem the buyer never agreed they had, and you fix the discovery gap first and keep the touchpoint for later.

A deal that has not moved in three weeks is rarely stuck for the reason in the CRM note. The coach works backwards from the last real moment of progress and asks what changed: did a stakeholder go quiet, did the problem stop feeling urgent, did you never quantify the cost of inaction. A dead deal gets separated from a dormant one, and for the dormant one you get a concrete re-opening move tied to the buyer's situation. Get this right and you know whether to invest or walk. And if you invest, you carry a real reason for the buyer to re-engage.

Stage in the CRM tells you where the deal is supposed to be. It does not tell you whether the buyer can name their problem in numbers, whether the economic buyer has been in a room, or whether anyone has agreed a future state. Your coach runs the deal against the parts of your methodology that predict close: problem clarity, quantified impact, access to power, a compelling reason to act, and returns a short, honest read of what is solid and what is assumed. Done well, your forecast category reflects reality and you walk away with the one or two gaps to close before the next call.

Reps often have five things they could do next and no clear sense of which one moves the deal. A coach does not hand you a checklist. The question comes back at you: what does the buyer need to believe or decide for the deal to progress? Out of that comes the single next step that creates it, plus what a good version of it looks like. A 'next step' that is just another meeting with no decision attached is not a next step, and your coach will push back on it. You leave with one move, the reason it matters, and a way to tell whether it landed.

Complex deals die in the gap between the person you talk to and the person who signs. Your coach helps you map who is involved: who has the problem, who controls the budget, who can block, who you have never met, then coaches the multi-thread: how to get access through your champion without going around them, and what each stakeholder needs to hear in their own terms. Run it well and you have named every stakeholder who can kill the deal, you have a credible path to the economic buyer, and your champion is helping you build it.

Post-meeting and post-call follow-up is one of the highest-volume jobs reps bring to a coach. The default 'just circling back' email gets ignored because it gives the buyer nothing new to react to. Your coach reads what was discussed, finds the open loop or the unresolved problem, and drafts a follow-up that puts that in front of the buyer and asks for a specific, small decision. The result is an email that references the buyer's own words, advances one thing, and is short enough to answer from a phone.

Qualification fails when it becomes a box-ticking exercise the rep does to themselves. The coach runs your deal against your qualification framework (MEDDPICC, MEDDIC, or Gap-based qualification) and is deliberately unforgiving about the difference between 'I think' and 'the buyer told me'. The criteria you are scoring on hope get surfaced. What you end up with is a qualification read you would defend in a pipeline review, and a clear call on whether this deal earns more of your time.

Silence after a proposal usually means the value case did not survive contact with the people who were not in the room. Your coach helps you work out the likely reason (the price landed without the cost-of-inaction beside it, an unseen stakeholder pushed back, a competing priority won) and gives you a recovery move matched to that reason. Skip a third 'any update?' email. Re-open the conversation about the problem and its cost: the one ground where the proposal can be defended.