Ïn my last two blogs, I discussed finding the best candidates for your sales positions. Now that you’ve found your people, how do you build more team camaraderie, have your A-players sell even more and spur your consistent mid-tier under performers to the next level? Enroll your team to take personal responsibility and to hold each other accountable.
Reciprocol Accountability links personal motivation and accountability within your sales organization to deliver beyond established business goals. It’s a great alternative. Top down leadership can be arduous for the leader and the team.
How can your consistent mid-tier under performers or B-Players improve? You know who these team members are; Carolyn, who just doesn’t do the outreach work necessary to build a strong sales pipeline – for her, 85% output is enough. Or Joe, who does a great deal of outreach for first meetings but turns a high percentage of initial opportunities to lost/no decision status in the pipeline within two sales calls. What about Craig, who plans assiduously, wanting to succeed but never quite translating the specific direction you provided on the ideal accounts to pursue. Finally there is Melissa, who says she is motivated but whose work product and follow-up are inconsistent and require review. Asking for more and better work from the team doesn’t always cause the needle to move in the right direction. Techniques such as demonstrating and training the right sales habits as well as demanding results work for some team members, but how can you induce laggards to deliver more?
Inspiration and grit come from within. Cultivate this by helping the team tap into their personal ambitions to drive success: goals like being the best on the team, earning big money for a stretch financial objective like college or homeownership, or reaching new income thresholds. Connecting individual ownership to planning, setting stretch quotas and reporting results creates personal investment and engagement.
Enthuse your team through where they’ll have a personal stake, connecting internal motivation with organizational goals. Here are some tips to consider:
- Establish personal goals first with business goals naturally flowing from them. Have each team member list two or three personal goals along with their annual sales commitment as the catalyst to accomplish that personal goal. Where they are comfortable, ask each person to share either with the entire group or in small groups their personal and business goals and the implications of achieving (or not achieving) them. In the case of Joe or Craig in the examples above, this approach may cause more contemplation and directed activity with less action for its own sake.
- As a team, develop an organizational Sales SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for the year. Use the results of the Sales SWOT as a way to collectively prioritize advantages of Strengths and Opportunities and mitigate Weaknesses and Threats. Some will be within the team’s control as individual contributors and some will not. The team’s combined view will contribute to more effective planning. A competitive threat resulting from the SWOT might be a way for Melissa to see the benefit of rapid follow-up and proposals relevant to customer needs to differentiate her from the competition. You can also use the Sales SWOT to educate and obtain more support for your teams objectives from other company teams like Product, Sales Ops, Marketing and Finance.
- Invest the team in identifying metrics for sales success. Ask the group to list the building blocks for success and coalesce around the top three to five success factors by sales territory and for the overall team. The results will become the team’s Key Performance Metrics for prospecting, forecasting, pipeline to quota ratio, time to move through sales stages, quarterly quota achievement, meeting deadlines, knowing results relative to goal at all times, etc. Ask each team member to personally, and as a group, to commit to meeting these mutually developed metrics. They become a way you can hold Joe, Craig, Carolyn and Melissa accountable as they had a stake in their formation and they are ultimately tied to personal goals.
- Ask your team to hold one another accountable for the goals they now own. Each team member is responsible for holding the others to meeting their personal and collective metrics. To reinforce this culture change, ask team members to rotate being the leader in weekly or quarterly meetings reviewing metrics attainment to goal. Encourage effective, supportive and positive communication and reinforce practicing it. Talk as a team and one-on-one about how it feels to have the entire team hold one another responsible and what experiences they’ve had around that over the ensuing weeks. If misunderstandings or challenges around this shared accountability arise, address them immediately. Celebrate and reinforce successes around productive group accountability with a fun event or dinner.
- Demand performance. Quota attainment and the requisite sales activity are an expression of personal integrity. You empowered your team to set their own performance goals and your team committed to attaining them. Your reasonable expectation is that these goals will be met. Praise success and address shortfalls early and often. You may not feel you have the time and focus to sit down and plan difficult yet crucial performance conversations, hold those meetings and document them. Doing so will pay big dividends in evolving your team members like Joe, Carolyn, Craig and Melissa to achieve. Or you will identify more quickly, that they cannot.
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Reciprocal Accountability is the glue between personal motivation and company sales goals. Building a sales culture of Reciprocal Accountability asks all team members (including the leader) to own their responsibility to make the team achieve and exceed collective goals. Reciprocal Accountability produces full participation with clear purpose.
