A sales team that is lacking accountability might not be the most effective. Lack of accountability can lead to poor results and lost opportunities. In order to make your sales team more effective, you will want to hold them accountable for their actions. Every person on the team needs to be doing their share of the work and keeping up with quality standards.
If you can implement some or all of these best practices into your sales team, you will likely see an increase in the number of clients that you have on your books. You will also be able to better set goals, meet sales targets, and make your company more profitable overall. So whether it is one of your goals for this upcoming year or not, consider training your sales team to help you close more sales and increase profits.
What Does Accountability Mean?
Accountability is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot but is rarely well understood.
Accountability is a concept in which one is responsible for their actions, and can be counted on to do what is right. It is a key component of leadership and personal development. The word accountability comes from the idea of being answerable or liable for one’s actions.
In a team setting, accountability is the act of taking responsibility for your actions, and acknowledging when you’ve made a mistake. As with most things in life, it’s better to try to prevent mistakes than to fix them after the fact. But sometimes we all mess up, and it’s important to know how to handle those situations as well.
Why Accountability in Sales is Necessary
Accountability is the acknowledgement and assumption of responsibility for actions, decisions and policies. When you have accountability in your sales process it means you’re responsible for setting goals and objectives, tracking progress, monitoring performance, and taking corrective measures.
You are ultimately accountable for the results of your sales processes. If your sales are up or down, if your clients are won or lost, if you’re making money or losing money; all of these things fall on you.
1. Enable Problem-Solving
To help sales reps become more self-sufficient, managers and leaders should coach them to solve problems instead of just telling them what to do. When you enable salespeople to take ownership of handling problems, you’re helping them learn to solve sales challenges for themselves.
Accountability means giving employees the power they need to get their jobs done, which includes decision-making, resource allocation and autonomy. If you don’t give your sales reps the tools they need to be successful and succeed on their own, they’ll never be accountable.
2. Communicate Clear Expectations
When it comes to sales, it’s important to give your people clear expectations. Consistency and clarity in sales expectations are important for keeping up motivation and accountability across the sales team. To keep each other motivated and accountable, your sales team should set goals together.
3. Keep Expectations Realistic
Employee training is expensive, but it can reap great financial benefits down the line. However, it’s important not to let this investment cause you to fall victim to the sunk-cost fallacy — that is, assuming a worker shouldn’t be fired because you’ve already spent so much money on training him or her.
If someone on your team consistently fails to hit their goals, then it may be that the goal isn’t realistic or achievable. If they fall short each month, they may start to feel discouraged or less motivated to try in the future. Periodically, change goal targets as needed.
4. Define What “Accountability” Means to You
It’s important to have a clear understanding of what accountability means for you and your team. This can be used as a reference point when defining individual goals and performance metrics for each rep.
Let salespeople know what things are the most important to you. Create a way for reps to communicate with you when they’ve fallen short on a task. Or, create a way for reps to develop their own plans for tackling tasks and presenting them to you for feedback.
5. Follow up and Follow-Through
Help a sales rep succeed by following up regularly during the on-boarding process. Keep them accountable to the plans you laid out and measure their progress so you can be sure they’re hitting their goals.
Eventually, the person you’re talking with should feel comfortable enough to be frank with you. You’ll know they’ve reached that stage when they start pointing out your own shortcomings. Friends look out for each other, right?
Tips:
- Focus on building an accountability system that requires people to be accountable for their actions.
- Create clear guidelines and targets and make sure everyone knows what they need to do and when it needs to be done by.
- Schedule regular meetings with your team so that everyone knows what’s expected of them.
- Measure progress and results at regular intervals so you know who is meeting their goals and who isn’t doing enough to meet them.
- Encourage your team members to share how they are doing with each other. This will keep everyone up-to-date on what’s happening in each other’s lives.
Your sales team holds the keys to your business’s future. Make sure they hold them tightly, or risk seeing your firm fall into the cracks. Creating a sales team that works well together, is productive, and dedicated to their role is crucial to your business’s success.
The sales team at Service Station Live Call Answering Service are all skilled professionals in the glass industry. It helps that everyone is on the same page, and the team helps motivate each other and stays on top of accountability.
