What B2B Sales Managers Can Learn from Lou Holtz About Coaching Top Performance

 

 

 

I was saddened to hear of Lou Hotz’s passing recently. He led top-performing teams; he openly shared his faith in Jesus and inspired so many leaders over the years. He is one of the inspirational leaders I have admired and followed for years since he also graduated from Kent State, and it’s hard not to want to apply his advice to create top-performing teams. I believe his advice and legacy will live on, and he offers some strong advice to leaders on how to get the most out of their players. I thought about his teaching and thought about how B2B sales managers can apply his coaching. Great B2B sales managers and great coaches have more in common than most people realize. Both are responsible for building teams, developing talent, creating accountability, developing future leaders, and delivering consistent results under pressure.

 

Few coaches embodied these principles better than Lou Holtz, the legendary college football coach best known for transforming struggling programs and leading the Notre Dame Fighting Irish to a national championship in 1988.

 

Holtz didn’t just win games—he built cultures of discipline, belief, and execution. Through his coaching, he built leaders. The same leadership principles apply directly to managing a high-performing B2B sales team.

I heard him speak at a conference, and one takeaway for me was that Lou would visit players’ homes before asking them to join his organization. He shared that he could learn a lot about someone’s character from how they treated their mother.

This is very similar to what I recommend CEOs do when hiring new CROs. I suggest they take them to dinner and see how they treat the hostess and the waiting staff. I encourage the CEO to call the restaurant ahead of time or, ideally, visit it and stage a problem or two just to see how the person reacts. You can have the hostess be unable to find the reservation, or have the waiter instruct them to tell the CRO candidate they are out of their first two dinner choices, to see how they react.

Lou visiting players’ homes is just one of my memories.

Below are seven key takeaways B2B sales managers can apply from Lou Holtz to drive winning sales teams.

Research reports share the constant and growing challenges with leading sales organizations.

• Only 25% of sellers complete assigned sales tasks, and 98% of companies fail to track closed/lost reasons consistently — limiting their ability to scale success.
• We also have data on the impact coaching has on sales performance.
• According to the Sales Management Association, companies that provide sufficient coaching achieve 7 percent greater annual revenue growth than those that do not.
• A study published by Revegy found that more time correlated with higher opportunity win rates. When coaching increased from less than 30 minutes per resource per week to over 2 hours per resource per week, sales win rates rose from 43 percent to 56 percent.
• A study by Knowledge Tree reported that sales representatives who received at least 3 hours of manager guidance per month exceeded their sales goals by 7 percent and increased revenue by 25 percent.
• According to the Center for Sales Strategy, companies that spent more time coaching achieved a 2 percent higher win rate and a 5.2 percent higher revenue realization.
• CSO Insights reported that companies with a formal coaching approach achieved a 10 percent higher win rate than those with informal coaching processes.

How can B2B Sales Managers Improve Coaching Skills?

 

Here are seven coaching lessons B2B sales managers can learn from Lou Holtz.

 

1. Establish Clear Standards for the Team

Does your sales team understand their goals, how we plan to achieve them, and the sales motions you expect them to do each day?

More important- Are they doing them?

Lou Holtz famously said:

“Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.”

Holtz believed talent alone didn’t win championships. Standards did.

Great sales managers do the same thing.

Top-performing B2B sales managers define clear expectations for:

• Pipeline creation

• Customer meetings

• Listening to learn and not just to reply

• Opportunity management

• CRM discipline

• Prospecting activity

• Speaking in terms of solutions and outcomes, not features and benefits

• Follow Up

• Forecast accuracy

 

Average sales teams operate under loose expectations and execute what I call random acts of sales. Many sales teams play just enough to not get fired but not enough to win. They have rollercoaster revenues and miss more sales forecasts than they hit.

High-performing sales teams operate with clear standards that everyone understands.

 

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: When standards are clear, accountability becomes easier.

 

2. Focus on Fundamentals

I often find that sales teams have the will to win but lack the fundamentals of sales. In B2B sales, research shows that less than 50% of salespeople have received formal sales skills training. When we apply the no-smoke-and-mirrors sales enablement process, one of the first steps is to assess the sales team’s skills. Often, we find B2B sales teams scoring 45 to 53 out of 100 in sales skills. Skills like discovery and qualifying, handling objections, and closing skills are often particularly low.

Holtz teams practiced fundamentals relentlessly:

• Blocking
• Tackling
• Execution
• Discipline

Even elite athletes practiced basics daily.

The same applies to sales.

Many sales managers focus too much on results.

Data and reporting, and not enough on skills and strategy.

The fundamentals of great B2B selling include:

• Asking great discovery questions

• Understanding customer problems

• Active listening

• Stakeholder mapping

• Value communication

• Objection handling

• Curiosity

• Critical thinking

• Problem solving

• Intent to serve and deliver impact for the customer

• Design and deliver a compelling business case

• Follow up

• Closing

B2B Sales Managers will receive resistance, and you should plan for it and have the skills to overcome it.

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Great sales managers coach these fundamentals constantly.

 

3. Build Confidence Before Demanding Results

Holtz understood something many leaders miss: confidence drives performance. Training, practice, and coaching build confidence. When I was the sales training manager for a large US-based manufacturing firm, I would often ask the new engineers who would be filling sales roles…

What would you like to get from my training and coaching?

Confidence was often the number one response.

When Hotz took over struggling programs, his first job was often rebuilding belief.

What beliefs does your team have today?

Are they limiting or do they support growth?

Sales managers face the same challenge.

When salespeople:

• lose deals
• struggle with prospecting
• face rejection
• deal with long sales cycles
• Have to sell through missed shipping and delivery promises

Sales confidence can collapse.

Great B2B sales managers rebuild belief through:

• coaching

• small wins

• role-playing conversations

• reinforcing progress

• Skills training

 

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Sales Skills Confidence isn’t motivational fluff—it’s a performance driver.

 

 

4. Discipline Beats Motivation

Do your salespeople know what the goal is and the behaviors you expect, the daily habits, if you will, to achieve them? Are they doing them? That is the discipline. Most B2B sales teams know their team’s goal and their own. Some had an SKO, and they were presented with new growth objectives and ways to achieve them. New sales year, new sales goals, new sales motions, and expectations. Salespeople must have the training, coaching, and discipline to execute what must occur to hit their growth goals.

Holtz was known for running extremely disciplined programs.

His philosophy :

Motivation fades.

Discipline sustains performance.

Sales teams often rely too heavily on motivation:

• sales contests
• incentives
• SPIFFs
• kickoff speeches

But motivation is temporary.

If the SKO is poorly designed and delivered, they often revert to the way they always do things on the plane ride home after the event.

If the B2B sales manager lacks coaching and reinforcement skills, the sales team will go back to how they feel comfortable selling. ( the same process they used and missed sales goals last year) 

Discipline creates consistency.

Examples of B2B sales managers’ discipline include:

• Weekly pipeline reviews

• Structured account planning

• Prospecting time blocks

• Post-mortems on lost deals

• Deal qualification standards

• Coaching cadence and framework

• Follow up time blocks

• Key account call debriefs with their managers

 

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Motivation may start the engine. Discipline keeps the engine running.

 

 

5. Recruit for Character, Not Just Talent

Lou Holtz cared deeply about character and culture.

He believed the wrong player could damage the entire team.

B2B sales managers often make the mistake of hiring based solely on:

• industry experience

• existing relationships

• resume accomplishments

• likeability

 

But the best B2B sales hires usually possess traits like:

• coachability

• curiosity

• resilience

• accountability

• work ethic

• sales skills

• sales mindset and sales DNA

• Conversational intelligence

• Situational awareness

 

Skills can be developed.

Mindset is much harder to change.

Great sales cultures are built one hire at a time.

What are you using to ensure the new candidates you are considering for your sales team have the right skills, motivations, and beliefs?

Does it have a high sales predictive validity rating?

Are you recruiting for your future vision of the sales team or for salespeople who are likable and are just like the players you have today and in the past?

6. Preparation Creates Confidence

You would never send a football team on the field to win a big game without fitness training, practice, and coaching. Yet many B2B salespeople are sent out each week to play the game of sales unprepared, untrained, and ill-equipped to meet their sales objectives.

Holtz was obsessive about preparation.

His teams prepared for:

• specific opponents
• specific plays
• specific scenarios

The result? Players felt confident because they had already practiced the moment.

In our no-smoke-and-mirrors sales enablement process training, we spend a great deal of time helping salespeople and sales managers prepare. We work on designing and practicing discovery and qualifying questions. We list the top five objections salespeople have in their company, and we work on our conversations and strategies to handle them rather than try to overcome them.

B2B sales managers should bring the same approach to deal preparation.

Before major customer meetings, B2B sales managers should coach salespeople to prepare:

• Pre-call customer and contact research

• Customer business issues

• Stakeholder concerns

• Decision criteria

• Competitive threats

• Key questions to ask relevant to that company and the buyer persona

• Market trends

• Customer 10k report

• Research recent social posts about your customer

• Research the people you will be meeting with

No-Smoke-And-Mirrors Insight: Preparation turns stressful sales conversations into confident ones.

 

7. Leadership Is About the Team, Not the Leader

One of Holtz’s most powerful beliefs was that leadership isn’t about personal recognition.

It’s about helping others succeed. Acts of service.

The best B2B sales managers focus on:

• developing their people

• removing obstacles

• coaching performance

• creating opportunities

• increasing enterprise value

• developing new leaders

Average managers focus on micromanaging numbers.

Great managers focus on developing people.

No-smoke-and-mirrors Insight: when people grow, the numbers follow.

 

The Real Lesson: B2B Sales Managers Are Coaches ( or should be) 

One of the most scalable investments companies can make is training sales managers in coaching skills. More top-performing salespeople leave because of poor sales managers than because of poor companies or products. When a sales manager knows how to coach and has a coaching cadence, sales performance improves.

The biggest takeaway from Lou Holtz’s leadership philosophy is simple:

B2B sales managers are not micromanaging administrators.

They are coaches.

Their job is to:

• Develop skills

• Build confidence

• Enforce standards

• Create discipline

• Help move deals through the pipeline

• Build a winning culture

• Create new leaders

• Hold team members accountable

• Deliver training when performance is not to expectations

 

Just like a championship football program, great B2B sales teams don’t happen by accident.

They are coached into existence.

Thank you, Lou Hotz, for your coaching, guidance, and inspiration.

Thank you for sharing your faith and helping so many become team leaders.

Thank you for introducing so many people to Jesus.

What are some of your favorite Lou Hotz Quotes?

How are you and your sales team applying them today?

Have your sales managers received sales coaching skills training?

Are your sales managers coaching your salespeople?

What is your plan to develop and lead a top-performing sales team in your industry?

 

Let’s schedule a call if you want a top-producing sales team and sales leaders who know how to coach.