Sales organizations have never been better instrumented. Pipeline dashboards, activity logs, conversion rates, forecast accuracy scores. Yet most frontline managers still reach for the same remedy no matter what the data says: do more. More calls, faster follow-up, bigger top of funnel. Joshua Teixidor, who coaches sales leaders, argues that this reflex is the single most expensive habit in sales management, because it treats three unrelated problems as one. A rep with a thin pipeline might be avoiding prospecting, might not know how to open a conversation, or might be executing beautifully against accounts that will never buy. The outcome looks identical on the report. The fix is not remotely the same, and prescribing effort to a knowledge problem, as Teixidor puts it, amounts to telling someone to make the same mistake faster.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe
Teixidor built his framework out of his own error. “Early in my leadership career, when someone was underperforming, my first instinct was usually effort. Make more calls. Follow up faster. Build more pipeline. Do more,” he says. “That works if effort is the problem. It can make things worse when it is not.” The framework he now teaches, EKS, splits performance gaps into three questions:
- Effort asks whether the representative is doing the work consistently.
- Knowledge asks whether they know how to do it.
- Strategy asks whether they are doing the right work, in the right way, against the right opportunities. Same result, three completely different coaching conversations.
The discipline this demands is uncomfortable for managers who built their careers on fast answers. It means looking at evidence before forming a verdict: what activities are happening, what the person genuinely understands, and where the process starts to break. Teixidor is blunt about the cost of skipping that step in the other direction too. “If I keep teaching someone who knows exactly what to do but simply will not do it, I am avoiding an accountability issue.” Most managers have a handful of coaching moves they are comfortable with and apply them regardless of the problem in front of them. The diagnosis is what stops the toolkit from choosing the diagnosis.
Make The Remediation Small Enough To Inspect
Once the root cause is clear, the response has to change with it. An effort problem does not need another training session; it needs clarity about what is expected, what behavior is missing, what commitment the rep is making, and when it gets inspected again. A knowledge problem needs the opposite of pressure. “That person needs teaching, modeling, practice, and repetition. Show me how you prepare for the call. Let us listen to one together. Let us role-play the conversation. Then go use it and come back with evidence.” Strategy sits in a different register entirely, interrogating judgment: why this account, why this stakeholder, why this next step, and what are you seeing that makes you believe this deal deserves more of your time.
The part most managers skip is sizing. Teixidor has little patience for coaching that ends in aspiration. “I do not like ending a coaching conversation with, ‘Go improve your pipeline.’ That sounds good and means almost nothing.” His preferred close is narrow enough to verify: identify the five opportunities most likely to move this week, name the buyer-confirmed next step on each, and review on Friday. That specificity is what separates development from conversation. It also exposes a quieter failure mode. Managers often believe a coaching session took place while the rep experienced a status review. The manager opens the customer relationship management system, walks the pipeline, checks close dates, and leaves satisfied. “From the rep’s perspective, they spent an hour reporting.” Teixidor’s second framework, OIRC, begins with Observation and Impact before reaching Recommendation and Commitment, specifically so the rep participates in the diagnosis rather than receiving a verdict. If the manager spends ten minutes listing everything wrong with a deal, they have demonstrated their own experience without developing anyone else’s.
The Problem Chief Executives Will Wish They Had Named Sooner
Accountability has its place, but Teixidor warns against letting it become the whole operating system. “Accountability cannot compensate for poor leadership. If every performance conversation ends with ‘You need to do more,’ eventually the team stops hearing coaching and starts hearing pressure.” He teaches managers to work through three distinct hats:
- The Manager creates clarity about expectations, process, and measurement.
- The Coach develops capability.
- The Leader supplies belief and direction, and the trust that makes people say what is really happening.
Before anyone enforces a standard, he wants five questions answered honestly:
- Was the standard clear?
- Did we teach it?
- Did we coach it?
- Did we inspect it?
- Did the person have a reasonable chance to execute it?
Punishing someone for not knowing something nobody taught them is not accountability. It is a leadership failure wearing accountability’s clothes.
Which leads to the issue Teixidor believes executives underestimate most. Companies examine salespeople exhaustively and the layer directly above them barely at all. “That becomes expensive slowly and then suddenly.” A weak manager can hide inside a decent market, a couple of strong reps, or a growing pipeline for a long time, but the signals are usually visible: inconsistent forecasts, the same reps recurring with the same problems, top performers carrying too much of the number, slow ramp times, underperformers who stay underperformers, and a vice president of sales repeatedly pulled into deals a frontline manager should own. Eventually it gets labeled a sales problem when it began as a management problem. Teixidor’s stress test is one question. If your best sales leader disappeared tomorrow, would your management system still produce good decisions? Would managers diagnose performance, coach a deal without taking it over, run a meaningful one-on-one, hold a standard, or defend a forecast? “If the answer depends on one senior leader being in every important conversation, you do not have a scalable sales organization yet. You have a very capable rescuer.”
Follow Joshua Teixidor on LinkedIn for more insights on sales leadership, coaching frameworks, and building management capability.