Your sales team member ignores feedback on pitch delivery. Are you ready to address their resistance head-on?

Understanding the resistance and why it is blocking the team is crucial. It's essential to grasp their complete understanding of what's expected and their concerns. This insight is vital as their viewpoints may or may not be valid. Personal feedback can help you pivot strategies to secure full buy-in from each team member. Once you have their commitment, set clear goals for them to achieve, establish how they will collaborate, define milestones, and create ways to celebrate their achievements, even small ones. This approach fosters a supportive environment, driving motivation and ensuring success.

Effective coaching involves guiding salespeople towards identifying areas for improvement. When discussing challenges, employing open-ended questions such as 'How do you feel about that?' or 'Is there an alternative approach?' encourages ownership and fosters a collaborative problem-solving environment. Dictating changes, rather than facilitating discovery, undermines the coaching process. Using a consultative approach significantly increases the likelihood of successful behavior modification.

Address resistance with empathy and clarity: - Understand that resistance may arise from fear of change or lack of confidence. - Acknowledge your team member's efforts and intentions behind the feedback. - Create a safe space for open dialogue to uncover and address their concerns. - Collaborate on solutions to resolve resistance and support their growth.

Agree on effective and constructive feedback. If you really want to deliver a message to anyone - always the best way is to provide examples or I call them "scenarios". Example/scenario can be built in following steps: 1. the example scenario 2. why this scenario 4. how to execute this scenario 3. the outcome of this scenario

Deliver feedback effectively by being clear and actionable: - Focus on specific, objective behaviors rather than personal attributes. - Provide concrete examples and explain why improvements are needed. - Ensure feedback is relevant to the recipient’s goals and performance. - This approach helps team members understand and act on the feedback constructively.

Practical Application that can surely break the wall: 1. Ask Open-Ended Questions: Instead of telling your team member what they did wrong, ask questions like, "How do you think the client perceived your pitch?" or "What aspects of your delivery do you feel could be improved?" 2. Encourage Reflection: Give them time to think and respond. This pause allows them to process the feedback internally and come up with their own insights. 3. Guide, Don’t Dictate: Use follow-up questions to steer the conversation towards constructive outcomes. For example, "What strategies could you employ to make your pitch more engaging?" or "How might you adjust your approach to better meet the client's needs?"

Enhance feedback reception with effective coaching techniques: - Use the Socratic method to encourage self-reflection through probing questions. - Facilitate self-discovery, helping team members identify areas for improvement. - Promote greater acceptance of feedback and commitment to change. - Tailor techniques to individual needs for more impactful coaching.

In my experience, building trust is essential to effectively address resistance to feedback. Part of building trust is to start by being explorative versus prescriptive. If we deliver feedback in a prescriptive way, we are more likely to experience resistance. When delivering feedback, try coming from a place of collaboration and curiosity. Provide the feedback concisely, from your perspective, then ask the team member what their experience was like and what they think. Continue getting curious about the subject and support the team member with creating more awareness. With this approach, any resistance becomes something to get curious about and to learn from, rather than something that needs to be overcome.

Establish accountability to drive action from feedback: - Set clear expectations and agree on specific goals and timelines. - Schedule regular check-ins to monitor progress and provide guidance. - Reinforce the importance of feedback and its impact on performance. - Foster a sense of accountability to motivate sustained effort and improvement.