Many of you reading this article right now have a team (or teams) of people that report to you in some form or another. As you think about those people, your time spent leading them, managing them, coaching them, developing them, working with them, and yes… all of the other things you have to do as part of your roles or responsibilities, it doesn’t leave much time to add on a thorough accountability process to that list… or does it?
Accountability is misunderstood. Most leaders view accountability as them, the leader, holding someone to a result or set of results. For example, my salesperson must hit 110% of plan and deliver net $200,000 in new business in 2020. The question we have for you is, who set that number? You? Or Did They? Was there a plan to achieve that number? What was behind that number? What’s in it for them? If they hit that number, do you know what that person will do with that result? Most likely the answer (if we were being honest) is, “I don’t know.”
It’s 100% okay by the way to have answered that way, most leaders don’t have those answers and struggle mightily to hold their people to those results. They wish their people were more committed, they don’t understand why their people give them the run around and frankly wonder what their people are doing all day.
We have a better answer. What if you could do two things; get your salespeople to own their number (magic right?) and know exactly what they were doing every day and every week? That right there is the key to sales leadership. Your job as a sales leader isn’t to be a micromanager running around from conversation to conversation and by the time you get to Friday wondering what happened that week. Your job is to help your people be successful and you have to be fully in control. That would be like an airline pilot taking off with no plans, no processes, no check-points, no dashboards, hoping to land in Chicago, yikes!
Here are a couple of things to start doing:
- Help your people with what they want to accomplish in 2020 both personally and professionally.
- Help them understand their goals, plans and activities they need to do daily to achieve those goals.
- Implement a Monday Check – In (5 Minutes or Less) and a Friday Check – Out (15 minutes or less) with each team member.
- Implement a Sales Funnel Review meeting (45 minutes or less) once per week with your entire team.
Easier said than done, right? If you want to see HOW to do this, which we highly recommend, we invite you to attend our session, voted 2019’s “All Time Favorite Speaker” at the 2020 Sandler Summit March 5th and 6th in Orlando, Florida. For the first time in Sandler history, you will be able to watch a 3-part improvised show highlighting this exact process – the triple crown of accountability.
Click here to learn more about everything the 2020 Sandler Summit has to offer.
