Summary
For program and sales managers in banks and credit unions, this article explores what a manager needs in front of them before a coaching conversation with an advisor.
- Sales managers consistently rate their own coaching higher than the people they coach do, and thin or late data is a big reason why.
- A production total tells a manager what happened. Coaching requires seeing which product lines, client segments, and activities are behind it.
- Reporting that arrives weeks after month-end coaches a month that's already spent, which limits what even a skilled manager can change.
Ask a sales manager how well they coach, and you'll usually get a confident answer. Ask their advisors, and you'll get a different one. In research cited in the Journal of Selling, sales managers rated their own coaching ability in the 79th percentile. The salespeople they coached ranked them in the 38th.
That gap has less to do with ego than with inputs. Managers coach using whatever's in front of them, and for many program and sales managers in wealth management, what's in front of them is a flat production report that closed three weeks ago. Outdated and rolled-up numbers support very few real conversations. So the meeting turns into a month recap, and while the advisor leaves knowing how they did, they don't know what to change.
Coaching Is the Highest-Leverage Thing a Manager Does
The same research found that managers, stretched across planning, recruiting, supervision, and their own production goals, end up having to ration coaching. One manager put it plainly: he picks who to coach based on who will give him the most return on his time. That sounds reasonable in theory. In practice, it doesn't hold up. Managers focus on the newest advisors and those visibly struggling, while solid middle performers and veterans get checked on occasionally and coached rarely.
Deciding who needs you most is a judgment call every manager makes. But doing this well requires evidence. The researchers found that advisors rate a coaching session as effective when they leave with a clearer understanding of what held them back and what to change. This is hard to achieve when the conversation is limited to rolled-up production numbers for the quarter.
Consider the difference between "your production is down" and "your annuity business has slipped three months running while your managed money held steady." The first is a scolding. The second is a starting point, and it leads to a specific question about what changed in that advisor's client conversations.
What the Production Report Leaves Out
Getting to that second version is harder than it should be. In a typical bank or credit union program, gross production lives on the broker-dealer platform, compensation detail sits in a separate system, and direct business held at fund companies and insurance carriers arrives on its own schedule in its own format. A manager preparing for a one-on-one pulls two or three exports, reconciles them by hand, and builds a composite that's already days old by the time it's finished.
What usually gets lost in that assembly is exactly what coaching depends on. The composite shows a total. It rarely shows which product lines moved, which client segments an advisor has stopped opening, or whether a dip is a seasonal pattern or the start of something. Managers end up walking in with a figure and no thread to pull.
That's the practical value of smarter reporting. When production, compensation, and direct business are brought together in one reconciled view, the manager can see the activity behind the numbers before the meeting instead of piecing it together afterward. That's what reporting and analytics should do for a sales manager: surface the specific things worth talking about.
Timing Decides Whether Coaching Lands
Even good information arrives too late to be useful. If the March numbers reach a manager in the last week of April, the coaching conversation is about a month that's finished, aimed at an advisor who's already halfway through the next one. The manager can acknowledge what happened. Changing it is a different matter.
McKinsey's PriceMetrix research on North American wealth management identifies where firms actually get returns on advisor investment, and field leadership sits near the top of the list alongside practice-management analytics and coaching. The report makes a related point about the manager's job: motivated advisors will find growth on their own, and the real work of a sales leader is reaching the ones who've gone flat. Reaching a stagnant advisor takes more than a monthly recap. It takes noticing the drift while it's still developing.
Shortening that cycle is mostly a reporting problem. When the data behind business intelligence and dashboards refreshes on a schedule that matches how a manager actually works, coaching moves closer to the events it's meant to influence.
Give Managers Something to Manage With
Most firms invest heavily in advisor tools and comparatively little in what their sales managers can see. That's a strange allocation, given that a single manager's coaching touches an entire team's production.
None of this replaces the manager's unique skill set. Reading an advisor, building enough trust for feedback to land, and knowing when to push are parts of the job that data and technology cannot do. What good data changes is the preparation. It lets a manager walk into a one-on-one already knowing where to zero in, so the conversation is immediately actionable.
If you're rethinking what your sales managers see before those coaching opportunities, we'd welcome a conversation about it.
