Reilly’s Tips for Delivering Feedback and Coaching

-- Industrial Distribution, 10/26/2007 8:25:00 AM

Providing feedback is a major part of coaching your salespeople. Use these ideas for delivering feedback—positive and negative—when coaching your staff:

1. Inspect what you expect. Since behavior is maintained by its consequences, joint calling and feedback are important.

2. Be specific with your feedback. It doesn’t matter whether you’re praising or delivering “constructive criticism”, the salesperson must know exactly what he’s doing right or wrong.

3. Ignore the small stuff. Often, sales managers will nit-pick salespeople. Focus on major critical issues that affect performance.

4. Use a variety of reinforcers. Too often, we assume that the commission or bonus on a sale is reward enough.  Praise and recognition are complements to the money.

5. Focus on behavior. Avoid vague criticisms and references to attitude. If your rep’s attitude stinks, cite behavioral examples (e.g. cynical comments, tardiness, too much frowning).

6. Explain the feedback. If you’re having a problem with something the salesperson does or doesn’t do, tell him why it’s an issue.

7. Lend a helping hand. If possible and prudent, help the person change the behavior.

8. Use a sandwiching technique. When you must deliver “negative feedback”, begin with something positive. Then, deliver the criticism and explain why it’s an issue. Follow-up with something positive.

9. Give three times the praise as criticism. This is the bare minimum. Five times the praise as criticism is even better. The idea is to reinforce (a lot) the behavior you desire.

10. Do it often. Ongoing dialog between the salesperson and manager is critical to your success also. Nothing you say in your annual performance reviews should be a surprise.

11. Make it routine. Joint calling and feedback sessions should not be punishment for failing to do one’s job.

12. Show empathy. Everyone gets nervous and a little defensive when the boss starts handing out criticism. And most people feel anxious when they’re “on-stage” performing.

13. Standardize your feedback. When joint calling, have a standard format for delivering your feedback. This helps salespeople know what to expect and on what they’ll be evaluated.