Most people in senior sales leadership would agree that coaching is the single most effective activity for improving sales performance. Most would quickly add that there are lots of pieces to put in place to get it right. One such piece is the skill of giving feedback.
One of the cardinal rules about feedback is that there should be a balance – a mix of things that don’t go so well and things that do. The problem is we tend to get out of balance. It’s easier to see the ineffective – the faults and mistakes – than to detect skillful performance. Inevitably, this tends to color the feedback we give. It is much easier to focus on the very visible negatives than on the positives that we may be less skilled in detecting.
This problem is often magnified by how we give the feedback. Recently we can across an interesting article by Michael Flatt in Inc. Magazine that addressed this issue. Flatt made the point that the problem often originates from tips in how-to-give-feedback training sessions.
“The usual advice is to serve it up like a cheese sandwich. Start by saying something encouraging (the bottom slice of bread), then move on to the behavior that needs to be improved (the cheese) and close with some heartening parting words (the top slice).”
What happens? Naturally, the recipient only “tastes” the corrective cheese and forgets all the positive stuff. So, although balance is attempted, it isn’t achieved.
The morale of the story is, don’t wait to give positive feedback on good performance until it’s time to correct a mistake. The reason? The praise portion of the feedback will often come across as patronizing and insincere. Instead, look out for good performance and immediately provide some positive feedback. If you are the one on the receiving end, the difference is dramatic.
One of the unique aspects of sales, of course, is the immediate feedback a salesperson gets from closing a deal. After all, the closing alone is positive feedback! And for large opportunities or those that focus on a solution sales management, the win often is celebrated inside the sales team too.
Yet, positive feedback often stops there. All too often sales leaders do not sit down with a salesperson who has closed a winning deal and use the win as an opportunity to have a comprehensive positive feedback discussion. A couple of best practices for conducting such sessions are worth highlighting:
Analyze the win. Particularly in complex accounts, it can be difficult for the salesperson to analyze the critical activities that lead to winning the opportunity. So in the feedback session, the sales leader cannot only congratulate the salesperson for the achievement; they also need to help the salesperson to better understand why the win was achieved.
Leverage the win. Focusing on the positive has a number of secondary advantages. One case in point is helping salespeople to understand how what they did well in winning one account can be leveraged for handling difficult situations in other accounts. If someone is good at something, helping them to parlay that something in as many ways as possible is not only positive feedback, it’s smart business.VV
Positive feedback tends to be underutilized and its power underestimated. Doing a better job in determining what to provide positive feedback about and how to provide it can be another step toward improving sales coaching.