What is feedback?
Feedback is information about someone's performance, shared to help them improve or to repeat what worked. Useful feedback names a specific, observable behavior and its effect. The Center for Creative Leadership teaches this through its Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) model, which keeps the comment factual and tied to a moment. Feedback can point to a gap or to a strength.
Why it matters to a revenue leader
Sellers get constant feedback from the scoreboard in the form of wins and losses. Feedback on the behaviors behind those results has to come from the front-line manager. Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall argued in HBR that strengths offer more room for growth than weak spots do, which suggests managers should name strong work as precisely as weak work. For a revenue leader, how specific your managers' feedback is tells you a lot about whether coaching is happening at all.
Example
After a site walk with a new seller, a branch manager at an environmental services firm tells him that asking the facility manager about compliance deadlines before presenting price opened up a conversation about two more sites. The manager names the moment and the result. The seller uses the same opening on his next site walks and starts finding added scope earlier.
"What was the last specific piece of feedback each of my managers gave a seller, and was it about behavior or results?"
Sources
- Use SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) to Inquire About Intent (Center for Creative Leadership) checked 9 Oct 2026
- The Feedback Fallacy (Harvard Business Review) checked 9 Oct 2026