Todd made a confession recently about his boss. He was considering leaving the company.
His sales were above average and he wanted to be outstanding and his boss was slowing him down.
How so?
It was all about feedback.
Todd’s boss thought the best way to coach was to run a feedback session like this:
“Todd, you are great at setting up new appointments, but…” and list 6 things he thinks Todd isn’t doing well.
Guess what just happened?
Todd stopped listening and shut down completely.
Have you ever taken a golf, piano, guitar, singing, or dancing lesson?
I have and on many occasions I’ve been frustrated and haven’t gotten better at the rate I would have liked.
My current pro has shown me the difference in a good golf lesson and a bad one.
Last week in my golf lesson I wanted to work on why my shots were going left. After watching me hit about 10 shots, the pro gave one compliment and one suggestion.
I hit 20 more balls working on the one suggestion. 10 were getting it and 10 in a row were correct.
I asked for more.
The pro said – “That’s it for today.” She agreed there were a few more things to ‘fix’ but said i had to master one at a time. I wouldn’t be able to do two or three fixes at a time.
My assignment was to work in a minimum of two practice session before our next lesson in 10 days.
Tips to improve your coaching and being certain your reps are listening:
- Define the objective of the coaching and/or feedback session. What is your rep trying to achieve? Start with their goal and they are more likely to listen to your feedback and take action.
- Observe several selling situations. One selling situation isn’t accurate to how the rep is selling each time. One could be perfect or a mess. Three or five observations demonstrates more accurately what’s happening in real time.
- Pick one! You are going to observe several skills to be improved. Hold back from a data dump and select one. The brain cannot process too many ideas at one time. Select the one skill, if improved, to get the biggest impact.
Now your reps are listening…and not thinking about leaving like high performing Todd.
