When running a sales team, how often do you find yourself encouraging your team to make that 1 more call, to deliver that final customer pitch, and often what you hear coming back is “I’m not sure that I can”, or “I don’t think I’m quite ready”? How often do you double guess yourself before taking affirmative action? If you are like me, you do this on a regular basis, and this simply means you are human. It is amazing how, as individuals, we somehow find it challenging to easily identify what we are good at, and yet can rattle off a list of 5-10 things in 2 minutes flat on where we can and should improve.
It often plays out like this; “So Tom, what did you do well in that customer conversation”? And Tom’s reply is typically something along the lines of “Well, I think I did this well, but……”. As we know, everything that is spoken before the word ‘but’ is ignored, because the real feedback is what comes after the ‘but’. And we also have a tendency to try and ‘soften’ self feedback, so we use the words ‘I think’ far too often. It is rather unusual to hear someone provide positive self feedback with certainty without the ‘I think’. This played out exactly like this last week during a 2 day presentations program with a great group of corporate managers. Every single person in the workshop used the terminology ‘I think’ to provide themselves feedback, after delivering a small presentation. Continue Reading