Strengthen Your Coaching Skills with Challenger’s PAUSE Framework

There’s only one seller productivity investment endorsed as more important than all others by Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, authors of “The Challenger Sale.”

It isn’t a new tool.

It isn’t even training in the Challenger skills they identified as critical to winning complex sales.

It’s investment in sales coaching that drives organization-wide performance.

Coaching stands out because it helps reps win more: Training Industry found 53% higher win rates for sellers with high-performing coaches. It also drives down costs. Hubspot found in 2023 that turnover for sellers hovered around 35%. One Gallup study found the average cost of replacing a sales rep ranges from one-half to two times their base salary, which, in 2024, was $130K. If you’re not up for the mental math, here’s the shocking average cost of replacing just one rep at 1.5x their base salary: $195,000.

But there is hope: by prioritizing the right sales coaching at the right moment, organizations can avoid pitfalls like the Double Jump Problem and build a strong foundation for future sales.

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Prioritizing sales coaching means more than promoting star sellers

Simply put, top sales coaches don’t just wake up that way. They need training to achieve their potential as revenue multipliers. Research from Harvard Business School shows that increasing complexity for sellers (see the buying-selling chaos spiral) means “in recent decades, the expectations of the managerial role have quickly changed, in almost all sectors, from supervision to collaboration.”

The most effective coaches act as partners to sellers, developing and guiding them to stronger execution, rather than directing them.

Unfortunately, too many sales leaders fall into the trap of appointing their star sellers to management positions without the dedicated coaching training they need to leap from star seller to effective manager. Even when hiring externally, the Sales Management Association found 65% of sales organizations do not evaluate a candidate’s coaching skills, but focus on their ability to sell.

The resulting “double jump” problem reinforces bad coaching behavior — selling deals for reps instead of building their skills — and leads to seller attrition and lower revenues, an unsustainable path for growing organizations.

Excellent selling skills and excellent coaching skills are not the same. The success a seller experienced in their previous role—even at a different organization—brings limited relevance to their new role. In some cases, the tendencies that helped them exceed in those roles might prevent them from good sales coaching.

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The reality of complex B2B selling and constant shifts in the market means they can’t rely on what worked when they carried a bag. It’s why organizations with formal, dynamic coaching programs succeed more than those with sporadic or static approaches.

Focus on building the right coaching skills

For most organizations, building a stronger coaching foundation will mean building a coaching culture, not just changing how managers conduct their 1:1’s. Coaches employ a very specific set of skills to truly impact their direct reports.

But, daunting and nuanced as this list appears, it doesn’t mean incremental change isn’t possible.

Challenger’s sales coaching framework

Where do you turn if you’re a Challenger-trained coach or leader looking to improve coaching interactions fast? Challenger’s PAUSE framework helps Challenger coaches bridge those skill gaps. Here’s how the PAUSE framework looks in every coaching interaction:

P — Prepare for Coaching Conversation

Sounds simple, but we find this is easier said than done. After all, Gartner found that coaches spend less than 10% of their time actively coaching. Preparation means considering past interactions and asking: what is this seller’s learning style? What plans have we put together in the past? Successful coaching means walking away from the coaching session with a plan.

A — Affirm the Coaching Relationship

Positive coaching isn’t just about performance management, although it’s easy to overemphasize this in a performance-driven field such as sales. The best coaches focus instead on building trust with their direct reports. They prioritize development over performance, asking “how can you get better in ways that serve your goals?” instead of “how can you hit your goal next month?”

U — Understand Observed Behavior

It’s in this area that a coach’s Challenger expertise really shines. Armed with a template, they should assess their sellers’ strengths and weaknesses in each stage of the sales process. From there, they can support each seller to consider their unique Challenger selling style and assess the seller’s own ability to perform. As coaches grow in skill, they’ll learn to identify areas where coaching is needed and where each seller excels.

S — Specify Behavior Change

No one likes to operate with unclear expectations. That’s why delivering feedback ranks as such an essential part of a coach’s responsibilities. But how a coach delivers feedback matters too: ideally, succinctly, positively (especially when giving corrective) and matched to the sellers’ individual learning style. Coaches should focus on the most critical developmental areas instead of overloading their sellers.

E — Embed New Behaviors

The final step in a successful coaching interaction requires strong coaches to build a plan that links each individual interaction to a larger, lifetime set of seller goals. The whole team — both front and second-line managers — can jump in here to provide support and connect the dots between past and future coaching interactions.

Help coaches lean into AI for efficiency and accountability

Time is the one commodity a sales manager can never get enough of, yet it’s essential for building the kind of sales interactions that drive behavioral change. Using AI-powered tools can help sales coaches gain visibility with intelligent insights, prioritize coaching skills, and even identify places to deploy the PAUSE framework’s suggested approach.

Hubspot estimates AI tools can save sales professionals as much as two hours a day. It can analyze vast amounts of data much faster than even the most skilled sales coach, allowing them to find seller behavior and activity patterns from their CRM or conversational intelligence tools (Prepare for Coaching Conversations; Understand Observed Behavior). It can also be deployed to identify the skill gaps they must address to meet their goals (Specify Behavior Change).

Using AI or machine learning in a CRM can also help sales coaches quickly see how well their direct reports apply what they’ve learned, both from the classroom and coaching (Embed New Behaviors). In some cases, these tools can even point sellers toward next steps to progress a deal through a sales cycle. These tools make it simpler than ever to create the type of accountability loop specified in the PAUSE framework, without spending hours analyzing activities across tools and wondering whether their sellers followed up.

Unlock stronger seller performance with the right sales coaching support

More than half of sales organizations consistently tell us they offer only “sporadic and informal” coaching to their teams — even while they prioritize new skills for individual sellers. If “improve our sellers’ numbers” is one of your 2025 goals (formally, informally, or shouted into the abyss) it may be time to take a step back and analyze your coaches’ toolbox, too. Whether you’re expecting star sellers to effortlessly bridge the gap between their own success and their teams or simply looking to add rigor and reinforcement to your training program, coaches hold the key.