At Salestrong we know from experience that the best sales people actively seek out sales performance feedback and act on it. But our experience also tells us that there is a large proportion of the sales community for whom receiving feedback is a weakness and not a strength. A recent poll conducted on a Salestrong sales training programme of 110 business to business sales people, asked this question: “When your sales manager says they want to give sales performance feedback, describe how that makes you feel?”
While there are some positives, the majority of adjectives are negative with ‘apprehensive’ and ‘nervous’ being the most popular responses. From this we can clearly see that most sales people are apprehensive and nervous about recieiving sales performance feedback from their sales managers. Why is this?
Sales Performance Feedback
Sales performance feedback, especially when negative, can be counter to our self image and sales people typically have a strong self image. For this reason sales people often discount feedback out of hand with reasons like:
- That’s not reflective of ‘my world / my buyers’
- I’ve been hitting target for some time now so there’s no issue
It sounds obvious, but for feedback to work you need to have a giver and a reciever. If you lose one of those, the feedback fails. It is essential, therefore, that sales people are good at recieving feedback. In this article we show how to receive feedback . In our article ‘How to give feedback to sales people? ’ we also cover how to give great feedback.
REACT To Feedback
To help people to recieve better feedback, that is more likely to be acted upon, Salestrong have developed the REACT feedback model. REACT stands for:
- Really listen
- Examples
- Ask questions
- Control emotions
- Thank them
- Really listen – don’t just wait for the other person to stop talking. Actually listen to what they have to say! This is hard when you may feel under a level of personal attack, so you need to focus and ‘really listen’!
- Elicit examples – ask for examples to illustrate their point. This will allow them to give observations which makes the feedback more accurate and less personal.
- Ask questions – to ensure you understand specifically what they mean. Feedback should be a two way process, so asking questions will improve the quality of the communication for both parties.
- Control emotions – you need to control your emotions. We look at the DARE model which shows the emotional journey the sales people go through and how to get through it more quickly.
- Thank them – you should thank them for taking the time to feedback to you. It may seem trite when we say that feedback is a gift. But it is, and without the person giving the feedback, there would be no improvement.
A gallup pole also found that 58% of managers feel they need to give more feedback. Whilst this is true, from our experience of working with sales teams we think that people should also be taught how to react to that feedback. And to do that better, Salestrong has developed the REACT to feedback model to help with sales performance feedback.
