Every sales leader wants to coach consistently. The challenge isn’t knowing coaching matters, it’s finding the time to do it well.
Mark Guthrie, sales leader at Verisk, believes AI can dramatically reduce that burden by helping managers focus on the conversations and skills that matter most to support and help clients, rather than reviewing every customer call manually.
After using Gong for roughly a year, Mark described one capability as “a game-changing thing for me”: being able to witness customer conversations at scale without needing to sit in on every meeting.
Rather than replacing coaching, AI gives managers better visibility and helps them coach with greater consistency.
Mark’s approach centers on three principles.
1️⃣ Let AI Surface the Moments That Matter
Managers don’t need to review every minute of every conversation.
Instead, Mark’s team uses AI to identify the interactions worth coaching. One example is objection handling, where AI evaluates whether the seller empathizes with the objection, understands it, with additional questions, addresses it clearly and confirms the customer’s need has been resolved.
By narrowing attention to the highest-value coaching moments, managers can spend more time investing in and developing people and less time searching for opportunities to coach.
2️⃣ Measure Behaviors, Not Just Outcomes
For Mark, coaching becomes much more effective when it focuses on observable behaviors instead of waiting for quota results.
His team doesn’t just evaluate objection handling. They also track whether sellers begin conversations with a clear purpose statement and whether those habits improve over time.
Those small behaviors become leading indicators that managers can reinforce long before they show up in pipeline or revenue metrics.
3️⃣ Start Small and Build Coaching Habits
One of Mark’s strongest recommendations is to avoid overwhelming sales teams with dozens of AI scorecards.
Instead, he advises leaders to focus on just a few skills at a time.
“Pick three things,” he explained. Guide your account executives using the AI briefs and scoring so they can assess themselves, then “spoon-feed them as you climb the ladder.”
That incremental approach makes AI easier to adopt while creating steady improvement instead of one-time training events.
Mark Guthrie’s approach is grounded in focus and progression. Instead of trying to measure every part of a sales conversation at once, leaders can identify a few behaviors that matter, use AI to make those behaviors visible, and build from there.
That turns coaching into a practical operating rhythm: observe the right moments, reinforce specific skills, and “climb every customer discussion ladder” one step at a time.
