"And the two-bedroom on the twelfth floor? What's the price on that one?"
Obinna asks it the way a buyer would, leaning back, slightly bored. He's playing the buyer because Dorota asked him to. She sells off-plan apartments from a sales gallery in Meydan, and she wanted to rehearse one moment before a meeting on Thursday.
She gives the figure clearly. It's the right figure, and she says it well.
Then, while Obinna is still looking at the floor plan and hasn't said a word, she adds, "But I can speak to the developer about the service fees for you."
He hadn't objected. He hadn't even blinked. The discount arrived on its own, into a silence that was doing her no harm at all.
Dorota has sat through three sales trainings. She can recite the rule for this moment: state the price, then stop talking. In every role-play with a colleague, she follows it. In real meetings with buyers she warms to, she doesn't, and her manager has started to notice which deals arrive already softened.
Obinna and Dorota are composites. What Obinna does next decides which kind of sales coach he is.
What is sales coaching?
Sales coaching is coaching for people who sell. One layer is skills: the pipeline, preparation, questions, objections and follow-up. The other is the person making the call, and how they live with a no, a price said aloud, and the feeling that a lost deal says who they are. Many salespeople need both layers at different times.
As a niche, it asks a coach to be useful on the first layer and steady on the second, and the second needs training the first doesn't.
If salespeople are the clients you'd like to work with, a free call on Google Meet held by an RS Method Master Practitioner can help you see whether either of our programmes is the training for that work. The call runs "Approximately 20 to 40 minutes", according to our apply page. Request the call. Or read on.
What does skills-based sales coaching work on?
The mechanics of selling, and in our experience they're where most sales coaching starts, often for good reason.
The pipeline. Which deals are real, which are stuck, and which are being kept alive because closing them as lost would sting. A weekly pipeline review is often the first time anyone has asked a salesperson why a deal is still on the list.
Preparation. What the buyer needs, what they've already been told, and what this meeting has to achieve. A lot of lost deals were lost in the car park, before anyone walked in.
The conversation itself. Questions that find out what the buyer wants instead of guessing at it, how to hear an objection without rushing to answer it, and how to ask for a next step in so many words.
Follow-up. The rhythm after the meeting, and a record that matches it: what was agreed, and by whom.
This is good, practical work, and plenty of salespeople need nothing more. Where what's missing is know-how, a method or a habit, skills coaching is just what's needed. Sales trainers and managers do much of it well.
For coaches whose clients own the business rather than work in its sales team, business coaching vs life coaching looks at that line. And where a salesperson's results are public and measured every quarter, coaching people whose results are public covers the performance side in full.
Where does the number actually stall?
Often at three points, and none of them is in the pipeline.
The ask. Some people can run a flawless meeting and then never quite ask for the business. A no feels too close, so the meeting ends on "let me know what you think".
The price. For some salespeople a figure said out loud is ordinary. For others it's the hardest sentence of the day, and it comes out padded with "only", "just" and an offer nobody asked for.
The verdict. A lost deal stops being an event and becomes a statement about the person. After a run of them, the salesperson starts avoiding the calls most likely to produce another one.
Dorota's stall is the second. Later in that session, Obinna asked her when saying a figure to someone she liked had first felt risky. She answered quickly, as if she'd been waiting to be asked.
At her cousin's wedding in Gdańsk, when she was nineteen, her uncle leaned across the table and asked her father, in front of everyone, when the loan would be coming back. The two brothers didn't speak for four years. Nobody at home said a figure aloud after that if they could help it.
What that night left in her works like a tripwire strung across the wrong path. It was strung for one kind of crossing: money spoken between people who are fond of each other. Friendly feet have caught on it ever since. A buyer she gets on with, a two-bedroom she's priced a hundred times, and the wire pulls, and what it pulls is a discount.
That's why the rule holds in every role-play and slips in real meetings with buyers she likes. The role-play has no wire across it.
Take down the wire that wedding night strung, and a figure said to a buyer she liked could be what it is, a number with a next step after it. What the buyer does with that figure stays the buyer's call.
What does each layer of sales coaching demand of a coach?
Skills coaching asks for knowledge. You need to know how a pipeline behaves, what a good discovery question sounds like, and how a deal dies quietly in week six.
Coaching the person behind the number asks for something different, and it's mostly about you.
No stake in the figure. If the coach needs the client to hit target, every session drifts back to the deal. When a sales director pays for the coaching, the number has a sponsor too, and a coach should know where they stand before the first session. Our guide to corporate coaching contracts in the UAE covers who decides what in that arrangement.
Steadiness with money and shame. When a client starts talking about the wedding, the loan or the four years of silence, the coach mustn't flinch toward the script.
Your own relationship with asking. This is the one Obinna met that afternoon. When Dorota padded the price, his pen was already writing "state price, then stop". He used to run a sales floor himself, and he knows that rule by heart. He also knows, if he looks at it squarely, that at his own family's table he's the one who changes the subject when money comes up. A coach who reaches for the fix at that moment may be soothing himself as much as helping her.
That's why the second layer needs training the first doesn't. Skills can be learned from a good trainer. Staying with someone while a wedding from years ago comes into the room asks the coach to have met their own version first. At RSCI that order is kept for every cohort, without exception: the practitioner is transformed before the practitioner is trained.
Where your own pen goes at a moment like that is worth raising on the free call. There, an RS Method Master Practitioner talks through whether either programme fits the coach you want to be. Choose your slot.
How can a coach tell which layer a salesperson's stall sits in?
Run the unpadded price with a client in your next session. It takes about twenty minutes, and you'll need a pen.
- Ask for their price sentence, exactly as they'd say it to a buyer. Write it down word for word, including the bits they'd normally rush.
- Underline every word that isn't the figure, the product or the next step. "Just", "only", "to be fair", "but I can try", an offer on fees. That's the padding.
- Ask them to say it to you again with the padding gone. You play the buyer, and you say nothing back.
- Hold ten seconds of silence afterwards. Watch their hands, their breathing and where their eyes go.
- Ask what they wanted to add during those ten seconds. Write that down too. It's often a discount, an apology or a joke.
- Ask them to picture saying the bare sentence to three different listeners. A stranger, a buyer they like, and someone whose opinion of them has always mattered. Ask which one brings the padding back.
- Decide together what the next session is for. If the padding comes back with every listener, there's a skill to build, so build it. If it only comes back with one kind of listener, the script was never the problem.
Step 6 does most of the work. A skills gap tends to show up everywhere. A gap like Dorota's tends to show up with particular people.
Which training prepares a coach for the person behind the pipeline?
Three things matter for this niche. Here's where each one sits in our programmes.
- Asking, tested on yourself. Personal inner work is part of what RS Method Coach includes, and the trainee's own transformation is part of RS Method Complete. The rule you reach for when a client freezes on a price is worked through in you, with a supervisor, before a client ever sees it.
- Practice on real moments, watched by someone else. RS Method Coach includes hands-on work and supervised practice, and RS Method Complete includes advanced supervised practice. A padded price sounds obvious on paper and very different across a table, which is where training should catch it.
- ICF education built into the fee. Level 1 sits inside RS Method Coach and leads toward the ACC. Level 2 sits inside RS Method Complete; it leads toward the PCC and can also support an ACC application first.
The fee for RS Method Coach is AED 18,000, ICF education included, and for RS Method Complete it's AED 35,000, ICF education included. Complete's live training runs for five days in Dubai. The ICF-accredited education inside our programmes is designed, delivered and certified by the Institute of Coaching and Mentoring (IICM), an ICF-accredited organisation. The ACC and PCC credentials are awarded only by the ICF.
What Dorota needed from Obinna that afternoon wasn't a rule. To witness. To hold. To walk them home.
Marko Mladenovic, after his own RS Method work: "I am still in such a peaceful, blissful, joyful state. I feel like I have finally found the answers on my question, Who am I?"
The modules, the live days and what each programme includes are on our life coach training page.
Robert Simic, training the next generation.
P.S. A padded figure, said to a buyer or across a family table, is often where an RSCI trainee's own work begins. You'll find where that work sits, programme by programme, on life coach training.