Accountability for sales people and sales managers starts with understanding your numbers and metrics. What is something that you can measure? Is it a leading indicator or a lagging indicator? A lagging indicator is easy; things like revenue and margin. Leading indicators are harder, but have better accountability numbers. These are things like first time face to face meetings or number of referrals gotten.
Once you have your metric, then make sure that you measure that metric not only by setting a goal, but tracking to that goal. You will be ineffective if you start a goal and do not track. That is like setting a goal to walk 10,000 steps on your Fit Bit, but when you look it doesn’t tell you how many steps you have. If you are tracking without setting a goal, you won’t change your behavior.
Do not forget to define your metric, set a goal and track to it, and then begin to develop a cadence of accountability. Who will hold you accountable? Someone outside of yourself. People judge themselves by their intentions and judge everyone else by their behaviors. It is important to find someone outside yourself. It could be a peer, a spouse, manager, or mentor. It must be someone outside to hold yourself accountable so that you can work on getting better within those metrics.
Follow these steps to ensure accountability:
1. Find a metric to measure to
2. Set a goal and track it
3. Develop a cadence of accountability
4. Work on getting better
Accountability is a two-way street and needs to be approached this way. Just like in sales, it is all about the execution, everything else is just talk.
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