Problem and solution
Sales coaching doesn't scale. What can one manager actually do?
You believe in coaching, but there are eight of them and one of you, and the diary has no room for it. The honest answer is that you will not hear every call, so the work is choosing what to coach and what to let scale some other way.
Practical guidance for call training. Practice with DIRI AI is for coaching, not for rating or ranking people.
What it feels like
Your week is a stack of forecast calls, hiring, escalations and reports, and coaching is the item that slides to Friday afternoon. When you do find an hour, you listen to one call from one rep, give feedback on five different things, and watch them nod politely. Two weeks later you cannot tell whether anything changed, and the other seven reps got nothing.
The guilt is specific. You know the rep who needs help most is the quiet one who never asks, and you also know the loudest rep absorbs the time you do have. You end up coaching reactively, after a lost deal, when the conversation feels like an inquest rather than a development discussion.
Why it happens
Listening is the bottleneck
Real coaching from live calls needs a manager to hear the call, find the moment, and give a response, one rep at a time. That is linear work: double the team and you need double the hours. No amount of effort turns it into a scalable process by itself.
Feedback is too broad to act on
When a review covers opening, discovery, objection handling and the close in one sitting, the rep leaves with a general impression and no single change. Broad feedback is cheap to give and expensive to ignore, because nothing specific is asked of them.
Practice and coaching happen in the same hour
If the only time reps rehearse is when you are in the room, practice scales exactly as far as your calendar does. The repetition belongs somewhere else, so the coaching hour can be spent on judgement and not on drilling.
Nobody agrees what good looks like this week
Without a single named skill for the whole team, each coaching chat starts from zero. A shared focus makes every conversation shorter, because both people already know what you are looking for.
A method you can use this week
- Name one team skill per week Pick a single behaviour such as "asking for a specific next step before the call ends". Announce it on Monday in one sentence. Everything you coach, hear or read that week is filtered through it, which makes feedback faster for you and clearer for them.
- Shift the repetition away from your calendar Ask each rep to do a short practice round on that skill before the live call block, alone or in pairs. Your role moves from running drills to reviewing what came out of them.
- Run a fifteen-minute 1:1 from one moment Bring a single quoted moment, either from a practice report or a call the rep chose to share. Ask, "What were you trying to do there?", then "What would you say instead?", then have them say it aloud. Finish with one change for the next five calls.
- Rotate depth, not attention You cannot go deep with everyone each week. Give each rep a full 1:1 on a rotation and a two-line message in the weeks between, naming one thing you noticed. Everybody gets something, nobody is skipped.
- Move some coaching sideways Pair reps for a ten-minute swap where each plays the customer for the other on the weekly skill. Peers will not replace you, but they close the gaps between your sessions and make the focus a team habit.
Drill: The fifteen-minute coaching block
Use this for your next 1:1. Before it, ask the rep to bring one moment from a recent call or practice round where the weekly skill came up. You need a timer and nothing else.
- Minutes 0 to 3: the rep sets the scene. "The buyer said the budget was frozen, and I answered..." Do not interrupt or fix anything yet.
- Minutes 3 to 6: ask two questions only. "What were you trying to achieve?" and "What did you notice the buyer do?" Write down their words.
- Minutes 6 to 10: the rep rephrases the moment aloud, twice. You play the buyer and push back honestly. Stop after the second version.
- Minutes 10 to 13: agree one change, written as a sentence they will use, for example "Before we hang up, can we put twenty minutes in on Thursday?".
- Minutes 13 to 15: fix when you will check. "Send me one example from this week" is enough.
How you know it worked: It worked if the rep leaves with one sentence in their own words and you did not give a list of five improvements. A short session that ends in a single change beats a long one that ends in a general impression.
How DIRI AI helps
What DIRI AI can take off your calendar is the repetition. A rep chooses a situation or writes their own, sets the difficulty and client type, and speaks through the browser to an AI customer, clearly labelled as AI, that reacts to what they actually say. Afterwards the report gives a score, quoted key moments from the rep's own transcript, the effect of each one, a concrete next change and better phrasings. That gives your 1:1 a starting point you did not have to listen for.
A practical way to use it: set the weekly skill, ask reps to choose a matching situation, and open the 1:1 with the one quoted moment they find most useful. Because they can repeat a situation and compare attempts, the conversation can be about what changed, not about what went wrong. Team plans exist, and a team pilot runs for 90 days with up to ten advisors if you want to try it with a small group. The Free plan lets an individual try 3 calls a month, up to five minutes each, no card.
This does not make coaching fully scalable, and it should not. The AI customer is not a real customer and not a human coach, the score is a guide for practice and not a validated measure, and practice is for training, not for evaluating or ranking employees. Use the reports as one input to a coaching conversation, never as the only basis for a decision about a person. Voice recordings are off by default.
Try it on a practice call
Free plan: 3 calls a month, up to 5 minutes each, no card. You talk to a customer played by an AI, then read a report that quotes your own words.
Questions people ask
How much coaching is realistic for one manager?
Enough that every rep gets one specific conversation on a regular rhythm, rather than a few reps getting a lot. A rotation of fifteen-minute sessions plus short written notes is sustainable where long weekly reviews are not.
Do I need to listen to full calls to coach well?
No. One quoted moment is more useful than a whole call, because it keeps the conversation on one behaviour. Ask reps to select the moment themselves, and you also learn what they notice.
What should not be delegated?
Judgement about priorities, difficult feedback, and decisions about people stay with you. Repetition, rehearsal and first-pass reflection can be moved elsewhere.
Can practice reports show me who to coach?
They can suggest a topic for a conversation, which is useful. They are a starting point for coaching and not a basis for judging someone, so combine them with what you know about the person and their live work.