You will be able to decide when your presence on a deal helps the rep and when it takes over.
It is Thursday afternoon and Raj leans over your desk. The procurement head at a logistics firm in Tuas has gone quiet on a deal he has been chasing for two months. "Can you join the call tomorrow? They'll listen to you." You know you could probably save it. You also know that last week it was a different deal, and the week before that, another one.
This lesson is about that moment. Joining a rep's deal is one of the most useful things a sales manager can do, and one of the easiest ways to stop a team from learning. The difference lies in why you join, how you prepare, and what happens afterwards.
To keep it concrete, we will follow Wei Ming through this module. He was the top seller at a company that sells HR and payroll software to Singapore SMEs, and three months ago he became manager of the four reps he used to sit with: Aisha, Raj, Daniel and Mei Ling. There is also one open role he needs to fill.
There are three good reasons to put yourself on a rep's call. The first is seniority. If the buyer is bringing their CEO or finance director, they may expect someone of similar rank on your side, and your presence tells them the deal matters to you too. The second is size. A deal that is several times larger than the team usually handles might need you to commit to terms, a discount or a delivery date that only you can approve. The third is real risk: a client threatening to cancel, a complaint, a contract term your company has never agreed to before.
The bad reason is that the deal is slipping. A slipping deal is information. It usually means a step in the process was skipped: nobody confirmed the problem, the decision maker was never met, or there is no agreed next step. If you rescue it, the deal may close, but the rep never finds out which step went missing. Next month the same thing happens.
So before you say yes, ask yourself one question: what would I bring to this call that the rep cannot? If the honest answer is "my title" or "my authority to approve something", go. If the answer is "I'm better at it", stay out and coach instead. Lesson 6.3, Joint meetings: observe, do not rescue, covers the other kind of visit, where you join only to watch.
Most joint calls go wrong in the first five minutes, when the buyer turns to the manager and the rep goes silent. From then on the buyer treats the manager as the real contact, and the rep has lost the account without anyone deciding it.
You prevent this with a short conversation the day before. Wei Ming uses the same five questions every time:
What does the buyer need to have decided by the end of this call? Who leads, and who opens the call? At what point, or on what topic, do I speak? What will we do if the buyer asks me something the rep should answer? When do we debrief, and where?
The answers are usually simple. The rep opens and leads. The manager speaks on one topic, such as the commercial terms or the implementation commitment. If the buyer directs a question to the manager that belongs to the rep, the manager hands it back: "Raj knows your setup better than I do. Raj?" That one sentence keeps the rep in charge of the relationship.
When Raj asked about the Tuas deal, Wei Ming asked what had changed since the last meeting. It turned out the procurement head had been replaced, and the new one had not seen the proposal. That was a reason to join: a new senior buyer, a renewed risk. They agreed Raj would lead, Wei Ming would introduce himself and speak only about the implementation timeline, and they would debrief over coffee straight after.
If you join a call and leave without a debrief, you did the rep's job for an hour. If you debrief, the visit turns into coaching.
Keep it short and ask before you tell. Start with the rep's view: what went well, what they would do differently, what they think the buyer will do next. Then add one observation of your own, tied to something specific that was said. "When she asked about the training days, you went straight to the price. What else could you have asked?" Finish with what the rep will do next time a similar moment comes up.
The debrief also tells you whether your presence helped. If the buyer only engaged when you spoke, that is worth knowing, and the fix is preparation, not more visits.
Watch the pattern across the team, not one deal at a time. If Aisha asks for you twice a quarter on her biggest accounts, that is normal. If Raj asks on most of his deals, he does not have a closing problem that you can solve by closing for him. He has a skill gap, a confidence gap, or both, and your presence has been covering it.
Wei Ming counted. In his first three months, Raj had asked for him on seven deals and the other three reps on four between them. That count is a coaching need: something in Raj's process breaks down before the close, and module 6 shows how to find it from his recorded calls. Meanwhile, Wei Ming agreed with Raj that for the next month he would join only on calls that met one of the three good reasons, and they would review one of Raj's calls together every week instead.
There is also a quieter cost to joining too often. Clients learn to wait for the manager. The rep learns that the hard part of the job belongs to someone else. And you spend hours on one person's pipeline that should have gone to the whole team.
The activity below asks you to write your own version of the pre-call agreement. Write it so you could send it to a rep the day before any joint call, and so the debrief is booked before the meeting starts.
Write the pre-call agreement you will use when joining a rep's meeting, covering roles, goals and the debrief.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).