'How One Sales Manager Turned a Difficult Feedback Moment into a Trust-Building Triumph'

So direct feedback to a colleague,

I think definitely an example was with Informer when it came to. A situation that I was in. So when I was working with Informa they specialize in exhibitions and events in the brand licensing space. And if you can imagine during corona, Covid, right, you had. A company that's 80% income comes from events. Completely go to a halt. And we had to, as you know, account executives, we had to work with our clients to try to shift them to a new proposed date. So essentially what happened is You had a date that was going in May 2020. And with the COVID, they shifted it to August, thinking this thing's gonna go away. So, to set that as the, as the premise so you understand, we had to call each and every single one of our clients. To try to shift them and logistically get the contract shifted, all the vendors, uh, get all the amendments on the agreements, addendums, everything. Uh, so I recall I had a client who was very, uh, difficult, uh, as you can imagine. And so I managed to go through the whole process with that climb and my colleague was having a lot of difficulty, and I recall that they were getting a lot of objections, a lot of Almost aggressions toward her personally. When she really didn't have to do with it. So the feedback I gave her said, hey, here's what I did with my clients. I proactively, logistically took over all their vendors, called them myself, and instead of waiting for them to call me, so I think if you were to take a proactive approach to reach out to them, to try to get them um to provide you that information uh instead of on the offense, but you taking the defensive stage. Uh, you'll probably get better results because you know, I'm having difficult clients, but even that I'm able to diffuse them because I'm helping them out. So I gave her the feedback and. She didn't take it very well at first. Why not? Because uh I had been with the company for at that point, you know, less than 1 year and she had been with the company for close to 8 years, so hearing this kind of uh feedback when the fire is burning, uh, was a little challenging, but I think she ultimately came around to it at the end of the day and she said, you know, Karim, I apologize. I was just heated with this whole situation. I, I've just been getting hammered and battered by all these clients. I, I didn't even hear you out, but I actually see where you're coming from and I, I'll go ahead and try it and she did and she had, you know, better results, much Improve conversations and I think ultimately the stress levels of everyone was definitely lower with that feedback so it helped her out and I think that would

Sure, well, I told her essentially you have several components, right, to every show. You have your booth space. Which includes your vendors, your contractors, and your accommodations. You have all your travel arrangements. So if you have your travel with all of your team, your tickets, um, you know, whatever accommodations and transportations they have that you need to get. Also, any of the contractual stuff, so getting the team involved with the contracts is if you were to get the addendum and the amendment done prior instead of them coming back to asking for it. And it would essentially be that and I told her to contact every single one of these vendors to do the shift from the dates from the May to the August date to get in touch with all the contractors and shift that and see what the repercussions of the deposit are and trying to persuade them to waive it. And essentially to get in touch with all of these companies that provide the flights, the hotels, the limo service, or transportation service. And to really just get in touch with them to shift it so that you've done really all the heavy lifting and, and that was essentially the details of each task, uh, to get those involved. OK.