Most sales coaching isn’t built for consultants.
It’s built for high-volume selling, where the answer to a slow month is more outreach. This advice isn’t wrong, it’s just aimed at a different problem. When you sell $10,000 to $50,000 engagements across several conversations, your constraint is rarely the number of leads. It’s what happens between a qualified conversation and a signed agreement.
Hiring the wrong kind of coach is expensive in a way that’s easy to miss. You spend months getting better at something that was never the bottleneck.
Here’s how to work out which kind you need.
The five kinds of sales coach
Most people discover these categories after hiring the wrong one. Knowing them beforehand saves a season.
- Lead generation and prospecting coaches teach you to fill the pipeline: cold outreach, LinkedIn systems, content that generates inbound. The right choice when your calendar is genuinely empty.
- Mindset and confidence coaches work on the inner game, on what makes selling feel uncomfortable. The right choice when you know what to do and can’t bring yourself to do it.
- High-ticket closing coaches typically teach phone-sales methodology, often with scripts and urgency techniques built for one-call closes. This transfers poorly to a consulting engagement with a procurement process and three decision makers.
- Sales conversation coaches work on the mechanics of the conversation itself: discovery, positioning, proposals, buying signals, follow-up, and the language you use at each point. The right choice when good prospects are reaching you and too few become clients.
- Sales team trainers build capability across a team of reps. The right choice when other people sell on your behalf.
This is the most useful question you can ask yourself: is the gap in front of the conversation, inside the conversation, or inside your own head? Each one points at a different kind of coach.
What to look for when you sell consulting engagements
Assuming the gap is inside the conversation, these are the things that actually separate one coach from another.
- Have they sold to organizations like yours? They don’t need to sell what you sell. They need to know how to close business with the kind of organizations you sell to, at your deal size. Ask what they have personally sold, to whom, and over what kind of sales cycle.
- Do they work on your real conversations? This is the sharpest dividing line in the market. Most coaching works from what you remember about a call, and the moments that decide a sale are usually the ones you did not notice, which means they never make it into your retelling. Ask whether they will review recordings of your actual sales calls.
- Is there a system, or only encouragement? You want a named, repeatable framework you can still use after the engagement ends. When you can’t describe their method back to someone in a couple of sentences, there probably is not one.
- Do they teach volume or conversion? Ask what they would do when your close rate is low. A coach who reaches for more leads is solving a pipeline problem. When your pipeline is fine, this is the wrong answer.
- Will you still sound like yourself? Scripts are easy to sell and hard to use, because a prospect can hear one. What you want is language you would plausibly say, and an understanding of why it works, so you can adapt it live.
- Do they coach you, or sell for you? For most consultants, you’re the person in the room. You need the capability in you, not outsourced.
- Is their proof from people like you? Testimonials from course creators tell you little about selling professional services. Look for named clients with real businesses and specific outcomes.
- Do they say who they aren’t for? A coach who claims to work for everybody hasn’t thought hard about who they work for. Being told plainly that you aren’t a fit is a good sign.
Questions worth asking on a fit call
- What have you personally sold, and at what deal size?
- Will you review recordings of my actual sales calls?
- What is your framework, and can you describe it in two sentences?
- My close rate is lower than I want. What would you look at first?
- Who is this not right for?
- What does the engagement actually include, week to week?
- What happens when it isn’t working?
Red flags
Walk away when you notice any of these. Each one tells you something about how the coach works, before you have paid anything.
- Guaranteed revenue numbers. Nobody can guarantee what your prospects will do.
- Pressure tactics used on you. How someone sells to you is a preview of what they will teach you. When the fit call includes artificial urgency and a discount expiring tonight, you have just seen the methodology.
- A method that only works at volume, when your business doesn’t run at volume.
- No clarity on what happens between sessions. Most of the value in a coaching engagement is in the moments you need input before a real conversation.
- Everyone is a fit.
What good looks like
- A coach who has sold similar size deals to you, or has sold to organizations similar to the ones you sell to
- A named framework you can repeat
- Work on your real conversations rather than your recollection of them
- Language that still sounds like you
- A straight answer about who they aren’t right for
Where I fit, and where I don’t
I coach consultants, agency owners, and service-based founders selling $10,000 to $50,000 engagements. My work is inside the conversation: discovery, positioning, proposals, buying signals, follow-up, and the language you use at each step. We work from recordings of your real sales calls.
Before founding Sales Maven, I spent 17 years selling technology to organizations including Hewlett-Packard, NASA, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, closed individual deals worth more than $3 million, managed a territory generating over $30 million in annual sales, and earned multiple top-producer awards. I’m the author of three books on selling, including The Selling Staircase.
I’m not the right coach when:
- You need more leads. My work assumes qualified people are already reaching you.
- You want a cold outreach or high-volume prospecting system.
- You want a word-for-word script that does the selling for you.
- You want someone to run your sales conversations on your behalf.
- You’re still testing whether people will pay for your expertise. The Sales Maven Society is a better place to start.
Take the questions with you
The seven fit-call questions above, plus the red flags and what good looks like, as a one-page checklist you can bring to an actual conversation. Enter your first name and email and it’s on its way.