sales management | new sales manager | sales coaching | pipeline management | sales KPIs | one-on-ones | bonus plans
What You Will Learn:
- Hire a seller using a scorecard instead of a gut feeling in the interview
- Qualify a pipeline with BANT and stop forecasting from optimism
- Coach on performance data rather than on impressions of effort
- Run a one-to-one that produces something, including the difficult types
- Use GROW and powerful questions instead of telling people the answer
- Design a bonus plan that does not reward the wrong behaviour
- Set the service agreement between sales and marketing in writing
- Tell a result indicator from a performance indicator, and act accordingly
- Recognise the six measurement myths that break most sales dashboards
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Overview: Moving from “Star Seller” to Strategic Leader
Look, we’ve all seen it happen a thousand times in the tech world: your top-performing Account Executive gets promoted to Sales Manager because they crushed their quota for six quarters straight. Then, six months later, the team’s morale is in the gutter and the forecast is a mess. Why? Because being a great hunter is a completely different beast than being a great coach. I picked up Sales Management: Coach Your Team, Build the Pipeline specifically to see if it bridged that “leadership gap,” and honestly, it’s one of the few courses that treats sales management as a rigorous discipline rather than a collection of motivational speeches.
What Mike nails here is the transition from “intuitive selling” to “systematic scaling.” Instead of relying on that “gut feeling” during recruitment or “optimism-based forecasting” at the end of the month, this course forces you to build a framework. It’s about job-ready skills that move the needle. The curriculum doesn’t just tell you to “be a better leader”; it gives you the mechanical blueprints for things like Sales-Marketing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and recruitment scorecards that remove bias. It’s an opinionated take on management that favors data over vibes, which is exactly what a modern career growth trajectory requires in a tight economy.
The course feels like a hands-on lab for your leadership style. You aren’t just watching videos; you’re prompted to rebuild your 1-on-1 structure and re-evaluate your pipeline using strict BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) criteria. For anyone looking to stop “firefighting” every day and start actually managing a high-output machine, the insights here regarding real-world projects and pipeline hygiene are invaluable.
Prerequisites
- A foundational understanding of the B2B sales cycle (knowing the difference between a lead and a discovery call is essential).
- Previous experience as an Individual Contributor (IC) or a junior manager—this is a beginner to advanced level course that hits hardest if you’ve already felt the pain of a missed quota.
- Familiarity with any industry-standard tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive (the principles apply to all CRMs).
- A willingness to let go of the “hero complex”—you have to be ready to stop selling for your team and start coaching them to sell.
Skills & Tools You’ll Master
- The GROW Model: A structured coaching framework (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) to facilitate better performance conversations.
- BANT Qualification: Hardening your pipeline to ensure certification prep levels of accuracy in your forecasting.
- Recruitment Scorecards: Data-driven hiring tools to identify talent based on competency rather than “culture fit” charms.
- KPI Distinction: Learning the vital difference between Result Indicators (lagging) and Performance Indicators (leading).
- Conflict Resolution: Tactics for handling “difficult” personality types in one-on-ones without losing the room.
- Dashboard Literacy: Debunking the six measurement myths that lead to cluttered, useless sales reports.
Career Benefits & Job Roles
Completing this course is a major milestone for anyone eyeing career growth in the revenue space. It provides the job-ready skills necessary to move from a Senior AE into a Sales Manager or Director of Sales role. In the tech sector specifically, companies are desperate for leaders who understand Sales Operations and Pipeline Management—this course basically acts as a certification prep for those high-level leadership conversations. Whether you are aiming for a VP of Sales track or looking to specialize in Sales Enablement, the ability to build a repeatable, coachable process is what gets you the seat at the executive table.
Pros: Why This Course Stands Out
- Eliminates the “Gut Feeling” Trap: The section on using scorecards for hiring is a game-changer. It turns the interview process into a real-world project, ensuring you hire for skills that actually translate to revenue.
- Data-Driven Coaching: Most managers coach on “effort” (e.g., “make more calls”). Mike teaches you to coach on performance data. This shift allows you to identify exactly where a rep is failing in the funnel, making your 1-on-1s incredibly efficient.
- The Sales-Marketing SLA: This is often overlooked. Learning how to put the agreement between Sales and Marketing in writing is essential for stopping the “leads are bad” vs. “sales isn’t calling” blame game.
- No-Fluff Frameworks: Using the GROW model and powerful questioning instead of just giving answers transforms a manager from a bottleneck into a multiplier.
Cons: An Honest Critique
If I have one gripe, it’s that the course stays very high-level on the actual technical configuration of industry-standard tools. While it tells you *what* to track on a dashboard and why most dashboards are broken, it doesn’t provide a hands-on lab for setting these up in specific software like Salesforce or Tableau. You’ll get the logic and the strategy, but you’ll still have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out the “how-to” within your specific CRM’s interface.