Good sales coaching is a balance – a mix of feedback on things that go right, as well as things that don’t. The problem is that we tend to get out of balance. It is easier to see the ineffective – faults and mistakes – than to detect and analyze skillful performance. Inevitably, this colors the feedback we give. It is much easier to focus on the negatives than the positives.
As a correction, a common how-to instruction for giving feedback suggests that sales leaders should start by saying something encouraging, then move on to the behavior that needs to be improved, and close with something positive.
A second and more effective approach is: don’t wait to give positive feedback on good performance until it’s time to correct a mistake. Reason being, under the first idea, the praise part of the feedback can come across as patronizing and insincere. Instead, be on the lookout for good sales performance and immediately provide some positive feedback. If you are the one on the other side of the table, the difference is absolutely dramatic.
Let’s take the example where a salesperson has successfully closed a deal. One of the unique aspects of this situation, of course, is the inherent positive feedback a salesperson gets from closing a deal. After all, closing a deal is great! And for large opportunities, the win is often celebrated inside the sales team – again, automatic positive feedback.
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 leverage the win as an opportunity to have a second-level feedback discussion with the salesperson. Two best practices for conducting such sessions are:
Analyze the win. Particularly in complex sales, it can be difficult for salespeople to analyze the critical activities that lead to winning the business. So in the feedback session, the sales leader cannot only congratulate the salesperson for the achievement but also help them to better understand why the win was achieved.
Leverage the win. 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. It’s also possible for the sales leader to blueprint how the win was achieved into a set of best practices that can be shared with others members of the team.
Positive feedback tends to be under utilized and its power under estimated. Doing a better job in determining when to provide positive feedback and how to provide it can be another step toward improving sales coaching.