How to Coach B Players: Stop Bailing Every Bucket at Once

Every sales team has one. He makes his number most months, rarely by much, and your sales manager has tried everything with him: more calls, a new opening line, ride-alongs, another product session. He’s still a B player, and the manager is running out of ideas.

The problem probably isn’t effort on either side. When a manager coaches everything at once, nothing gets enough attention to change. Knowing how to coach B players starts with a simpler discipline: put the problem in the right bucket, and work that bucket until it moves.

If you’re an owner or sales leader who would rather not keep sending your B players to another seminar, this post is for you.

Know Which Player You’re Coaching

Most sales teams sort into three groups. A players are your best salespeople and consistently exceed quota and are a core values fit. B players aren’t as strong as your A players, but they meet quota—usually. C players are chronic underachievers who miss their numbers. The C players usually have a mindset issue and don’t want to recognize that weakness.

Those labels are relative to your own team, and that matters more than most owners realize. Objective Management Group has assessed more than two million salespeople, and the distribution holds steady across industries: 6% are elite, 14% are good, 20% are above average, and 60% are mediocre to poor. Your A player is the best in your building. Measured against that distribution, he might be a B player somewhere else, and your B player may have more headroom than his numbers suggest.

That headroom is why B players deserve the coaching hours. Your A players need sharpening, your C players need a different conversation, and your B players sit in the middle with the most room to grow. Think of it this way: the B players can be coached up and have a great ROI.

Sort the Problem Into Four Buckets

If you have an OMG evaluation in hand, you can see exactly where a salesperson is strong and where he isn’t. Without one, you need a faster way to narrow the field. Dave Kurlan, who founded OMG, wrote about thinking in buckets back in 2021. My version uses four.

Pipeline asks whether the salesperson has enough real opportunities to work.

Urgency asks whether he uncovers compelling reasons to buy, so the buyer has a reason to act now rather than later.

Qualifying asks whether he confirms that a prospect fits your company’s offerings, including size, budget, and decision-making process.

Mindset asks how he thinks about selling, which shapes everything else he does in front of a buyer.

Almost any issue a manager can name will land in one of those four. Pipeline and Mindset are real buckets, and they matter, but they aren’t where this post spends its time.

Match the Bucket to the Player

Here’s how I assign the coaching.

A players should be coached up on urgency. They already fill the pipeline and qualify well, so the remaining gap is usually how quickly their buyers decide to act.

B players should be coached up on urgency and qualifying. That’s two buckets, not four, and in most cases one of the two is doing most of the damage.

Here is a controversial thought: C players should be coached off of the team. It may seem harsh. If the C player isn’t asking for help or acknowledging a desire for help, my belief is that the juice is usually not worth the squeeze. It also fits with the GWC tool that EOS runs. Every hour spent trying to rescue a C player is an hour your B players don’t get.

How to Coach B Players: Start With the Bucket That’s Leaking

I worked with a distribution company that had a strong B player. He could create urgency, and he found compelling reasons to buy in most of his conversations. On paper, he should have been an A player.

His leak was qualifying. When a prospect showed him deference, or said they wanted to learn more, he kept them in his pipeline. Many of those prospects were too small for what his company offered, and they didn’t have the budgets required by the offering. They were pleasant to talk to and unlikely to buy, and they consumed time that should have gone to buyers who could.

Once we focused on the right bucket, the coaching got simple. We worked on qualifying within the sales process so that size and budget were confirmed early, and prospects who didn’t fit were disqualified rather than nurtured. Within six months, his revenue grew by 15%.

Nothing about his personality changed, and he didn’t learn a new pitch. He stopped spending his best hours on people who were never going to buy.

Answer the Worry About the Other Buckets

You may worry that focusing on one bucket means ignoring the others. It doesn’t. The other buckets are still there, and you’ll get to them, but a salesperson can only change one habit at a time with any real depth. A manager who coaches pipeline, urgency, qualifying, and mindset in the same month is usually coaching none of them well.

You may also wonder whether your B player’s bucket is obvious. Sometimes it isn’t. The post-call debrief usually surfaces it, because when you ask a salesperson what he could have done better on a call, he tends to name the bucket himself.

Coach every bucket at once, and you’ll have coached none of them.

Build a Team Where B Players Move Up

Picture your sales team a year from now. Your A players are closing faster because someone worked on urgency with them. Your B players are spending their time on qualified buyers, and a couple of them are starting to look like A players. Your sales manager knows which bucket each person is in, and the coaching conversations are short because they’re specific. You’re reading a forecast you can trust, not a list of maybes.

If you want to see how the coaching conversation itself works, read Effective Sales Coaching Lives Between the Five and the Ten.

It walks through the one question a manager can ask after every sales call. For more on the origin of the bucket idea, Dave Kurlan’s article, "How to Use Buckets to Improve Sales Performance and Coaching," is worth the read.

If you’d like help figuring out which bucket your B players are in, book a 15-minute conversation, and let’s talk about what your team looks like when every player is coached in the right place.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you coach B players in sales?

Coach B players on two buckets, urgency and qualifying, and start with whichever one is doing the most damage. Most B players already have a workable pipeline, so their growth usually comes from creating urgency with buyers and disqualifying prospects who don’t fit.

What is the difference between A players and B players?

A players consistently exceed quota or expectations, while B players meet quota without exceeding it. Both labels are relative to your own team; OMG’s data on more than two million salespeople shows that only 20% are elite or good.

What should a sales manager do with C players?

Coach them out of the team. C players are chronic underachievers, and the hours spent trying to rescue them are hours your B players don’t get.

What are the four sales coaching buckets?

Pipeline, urgency, qualifying, and mindset. Nearly any performance issue fits in one of them, and naming the right bucket keeps the coaching focused on one change at a time.

Walter Crosby | The Sales Integrator™ | helixsalesdevelopment.com