How Sales Managers Can Create a Culture of Accountability in the Workplace

How would you rate the level of accountability of your sales team? Do the members of your team possess a sense of obligation for their activities, accept responsibility for them, and disclose their results in a transparent manner? How do they handle responsibility for growth and profitability?

Quality leadership hinges upon accountability and if your sales team isn’t being held accountable, you’re not leading. Here are 4 practical steps that will increase the level of accountability in the workplace.

Create Structure

Every successful sales person recognizes that they attain a higher level of success when they are held accountable. In fact, they crave it. If you want to create accountability, you must create structure.  Where there’s structure, there’s accountability.

Create structure by having each member of your sales team:

1. Document their expectations in an annual sales business plan.
2. Record their activity in a daily scorecard.
3. Report their results in a weekly sales meeting.

Instill Confidence

As often as you can, show the members of your sales team that you believe in them. Each time you do this, you will instill confidence. Over time, you’ll notice a change in the attitudes of your top performers.  They’ll take interest in the overall performance of the entire team and the level of accountability will increase.

Instill confidence by having each member of your sales team:

1. Meet with you weekly for coaching.
2. Conduct a monthly sales call in front of you.
3. Present a learning topic quarterly at a sales meeting.

Promote Collaboration

It requires a great amount of courage to be a sales manager who promotes collaboration. When you promote collaboration, you relinquish control to others and give them the opportunity to excel. Because many managers are controlled by fear and insecurity, this can be extremely difficult. However, collaborative environments are high-trust environments which have a high-level of accountability.

Promote collaboration by having each member of your sales team:

1. Be accountable to a sales process that everyone on the team follows.
2. Maintain personal sales activity within the CRM software you provide.
3. Meet with each other in a weekly meeting to discuss activity and results.

Expect Greatness

Three types of individuals make up sales teams: climbers, campers and quitters. While campers and quitters hide from accountability, climbers require it. As you expect greatness, you’ll make it increasingly more difficult for campers and quitters. As a result, you’ll end up with a highly accountable sales team.

Expect greatness and:

1. Help climbers climb to a higher level of success.
2. Allow campers to be coached.
3. Show quitters the door.

Accountability not only increases productivity, it increases predictability of results. When you create structure, instill confidence, promote collaboration, and expect greatness you will realize a dramatic impact on your team’s performance because accountability will be a priority. As a result, you will notice the members of your team stepping up to protect the interests of the organization and making efforts to continuously improve performance.

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