Boost Your sales Team's Growth: Give Honest Feedback

Good advice isn’t designed to make you feel better. "It’s designed to make you better," says author, entrepreneur, marketer and public speaker Seth Godin. If you’re reading this, it means you want to learn how to boost your sales team's growth.

Maybe you want to see your team embrace a stronger sense of camaraderie. Or, perhaps you want your salespeople to set realistic goals quarter after quarter — and reach them. Sometimes you may need to address negative behavior head on.

Most managers and CEOs don’t enjoy giving feedback. But when you ground feedback in strategic understanding, root it in constructive honesty, and use it to promote individual and collective growth, feedback creates a profound moment of vulnerability between you and your team. This can be a catalyst to elevate your team from good to great.

Here’s how to boost your sales team's growth. 

Focus on Your Organization First

Giving feedback to individual employees without first taking deep stock of organizational health is like having your doctor only examine your liver during your annual check-up. You’ll get a really great picture into one small aspect of your health. But, that information will be partial at best and deadly at worst without a clear understanding of the bigger picture.

In the same way, all the following advice will fall flat — or worse, give a false sense of progress — if your feedback strategy isn’t grounded in a deep understanding of your organizational strengths and challenges.

Tailor Feedback to the Individual

Feedback isn’t one-size-fits-all. One employee may need you to include a lot of actionable ways they can improve while another may work better if you let them work out solutions on their own. Some may prefer a lot of praise and recognition before any feedback, while others may need direct problem-solving conversations.

Before you start revamping your feedback strategy, explore what kind of feedback is best for each team member's sales growth. Consider implementing personality or strengths assessments. Pay attention to what feedback strategies yield the best results for each of your employees. And, as you read the rest of this article, reflect on how each of the suggestions may be implemented differently to best serve each person.

Lead with Questions

Think about the different meanings of feedback. When there’s something wrong with the way a sound system is set up, everyone within earshot may hear the telltale whine of feedback. And often, it takes someone with a view of the entire system to locate the reason for the offending noise.

In the same way, your employees will likely know something needs to be improved. They can hear the urgent sound, like an alarm, telling them that things aren’t operating smoothly. But, they need your system-wide view to help them locate the problem and fix it. And just as a sound engineer may need to examine an individual amp or microphone, you need to ask an employee the right questions to fix the problem.

When you begin a feedback session, start with curiosity. Find out your sales team’s or salesperson’s thoughts, then explore the overlap between their challenges and the feedback you’re providing.

Be Honest, But Not Too Honest

When a leader isn’t honest with their sales team, it’s pretty obvious. It may manifest as passive aggressive comments that avoid naming necessary changes. Or, a leader may scapegoat all problems on an individual instead of looking at ways to make systemic change.

It’s important to be honest with your team. It shows vulnerability and breeds trust. However, being honest doesn’t mean being harsh or shutting down conversations. You want to boost your sales team's growth, and judgment and negativity won’t get them there.

Out of anger, you may feel like telling Dan, a new sales team member, that he ruined a potential client relationship for good by not being prepared for his presentation. Even if it’s true, that feedback won’t inspire him to make changes. Most likely, it will make him feel unproductive.

Instead, shape your feedback using the previous items on this least. Consider if there are any organizational issues that may have made it difficult for Dan to do his best. Explore what kind of feedback will be most meaningful to Dan. Ask him for his thoughts and rationale on the presentation, and see how you can become better aligned in the future.

Focus on Forgiveness

Even though you know intellectually that erring is human, when the health of your business is on the line, it’s hard not to expect perfection. Holding a grudge because of a mistake a team member makes, though, can breed a negativity that infects the team. Not truly forgiving an employee leaves them vulnerable to future punishment — something that doesn’t inspire a sales team to improve.

Instead of dwelling on mistakes, you get the divine role of forgiving. Make it part of the feedback process. Kim Cameron, from the University of Michigan, notes that "a culture of forgiveness in organizations leads to increased employee productivity and less voluntary turnover." That creates a company culture that breeds trust.

Increase Your Sales Team's Growth by Evaluating Yourself

​When a team leader doesn’t look at how they can improve themselves, it makes it difficult for team members to follow suit. If you aren’t honest about your own performance, it causes blind spots that don’t allow you to lead your team effectively. When those blind spots are around leadership and the behavior you model for your team, the problems you’re hiding from can spread quickly and stifle your sales team's growth. 

So as you’re doling out feedback, don’t forget about yourself. Ultimately, it’s your job to drive company growth, and asking for feedback yourself makes you a more effective leader.

In the Dan example, you could end with a question: “Do you have any feedback for me as a leader? Is there anything I can do to help you be more prepared in the future?”

Make it a habit to ask your sales team for advice on how you can be a better leader for them. Listen to their ideas and take action on them. When your sales team sees you consistently improving and making an effort to grow with them, it sets a foundation for a team that trusts one another.

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If you want your team to grow, start with giving individualized feedback. While it’s not always enjoyable to deal with a team that isn’t performing, addressing what needs to change is the first step in creating the success you want to see.

How do you create the most effective feedback for your team? Let us know in the comments below. Read more about boosting your sales team's growth by developing a positive culture in this recent blog.