The zero accountability salesperson is at a big disadvantage. Selling is all about being able to produce. And the only way you’re able to produce is if whoever is doing the selling has some level of accountability, whether it’s to themselves or to a sales manager, or to your spouse, whoever it is, right?
If you get home from work, and you didn’t sell anything as a salesperson, you might get in more trouble at home than you got in at work.
So accountability is always big.
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David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the zero accountability sales person.
Welcome back, Kevin.
Kevin: Good to see you. Zero accountability salesperson. What does that look like in a sales team?
David: Salesperson? Salespeople? It’s not pretty, man. It is not pretty. And it’s nothing that anyone deliberately sets out to do. In most sales organizations, the problem is that the company itself does not have the systems and processes in place to allow their salespeople to become more accountable to anything.
I mean, a lot of times salespeople are held accountable for sales. Are you hitting your numbers? Are you generating the sales that you need to generate? But if they’re not tracking other things, then they really have no idea what it is that’s going to get them to the numbers that they really need to reach.
Kevin: So how does that lack of accountability affect the overall sales performance of the team?
David: Well, it’s not good because it’s just erratic. It’s all over the place. You’ll have some salespeople who are very good and very consistent because that’s the way they’re wired, and you’ll have other salespeople who are all over the place.
And the reason I thought this was a good topic to have, is that I was having a conversation with someone earlier today, someone who’s considering joining our Total Market Domination program, and she was talking about the fact that she’s got a number of salespeople in her organization, and she doesn’t feel like they’re all sort of on the same page.
They’re not doing the same things. And when I started talking to her and asking her about what sort of accountability was in place, she was sad to admit that there wasn’t a whole lot of it.
And what happens when you’re in this situation, as a business owner or as a sales manager, if you find that you’re having conversations with your salespeople and you’re saying to them, so what’s going on?
How’s everything going? And they say, oh yeah, it’s going great. Having a lot of great conversations. Got a bunch of people on the fence or people I’m working, got a lot of leads I’m working and everything like that.
That tells you nothing, right? It tells you nothing.
It’s feel good talk, but it’s wasted words. Because until you are able to provide any sort of metrics, any sort of numbers, any sort of accountability that turns those comments into something real, you just don’t have anything that you can even help them with.
Kevin: I think a lot of times salespeople have their methods. They love their methods. That’s their tried and true, understandably so. Is it hard to get sales teams on the same page when it comes to accountability when people want to kind of do it their own way?
David: Well, it certainly can be, and if you’ve got a sales person who is a high performer, that person may just want to do it their own way, and they might not be open to a whole lot of conversation or a whole lot of interpretation
Kevin: And you might not worry about it.
David: Exactly. And that’s very true. And I’m not saying that you should have different standards for different people in the organization. I’m just talking about what actually happens in the world.
And so when you’ve got salespeople who are very good at what they do, and they don’t need to provide you with some of the additional data that would allow you to help them figure out where things might be going wrong, then that’s a decision that you have to make.
But I think it’s very important to have those procedures in place for the people who are not the superstars, who might not be generating everything they need to be generating.
We hear the term culture a lot when it comes to businesses, sports teams, organizations, whatever. You know, zero accountability, it seems like it could be kind of a culture in a lot of companies.
Culture is not easy to change. It’s not an easy thing to shift. How can a business owner or a sales manager try to shift the culture without alienating their teams?
It’s a great question. The first thing I’ll say about culture is that there is no organization that defines itself as having a zero accountability sales team.
They don’t talk in terms of we have zero accountability salespeople. That’s not something that’s in their brochures. It’s not something that’s discussed internally. It’s a deliberately provocative title, because for a lot of business owners, they look at that and they’re like, oh man, my salespeople are pretty unaccountable.
Kevin: That’s my situation. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
David: And that’s the reason I thought it would be important for us to have this discussion. Because, it happens. And it doesn’t happen because people set out to do it.
No business owner decides in advance, I want to create a culture of non accountability. Nobody does that.
You want to have a culture where people are enthused about going to work each day. They know that the people that they’re working with have their backs, that they’re going to do whatever they can to help.
And so when I talk about accountability, I’m not talking about it from the standpoint of punishment or making salespeople do things that they don’t necessarily want to do.
It’s just a matter of saying, okay, do I have, in this organization, enough procedures and processes in place that conscientious salespeople will be able to sort of latch onto a few key metrics and say, okay, if I improve this, I’m very likely to improve the next thing.
We talked about bottlenecks in a previous podcast, and this is a great example of that. When I’m able to identify those early bottlenecks, then I can move on to the next one.
So for most salespeople, the idea of being accountable is not terrible, as long as people aren’t asking for stupid, unrelated, ridiculous information, right? And some businesses go that way, too.
They’re asking them for all kinds of things that may not make any difference, and that’s a waste. So you have to find the balance of being able to ask your people about the things you need to know about, so that they can document this stuff in a way that it’s useful to you and useful to them, because that’s what will provide a level of accountability that makes sense.
It makes sense to the business owner, it makes sense to the salesperson, and people are actually happy to do it.
Kevin: What are some practical ways that someone could introduce accountability, in a small way to help kind of build it without just like changing everything right off the bat?
David: Well, you could do it one step at a time. I mean, you could ask for one metric from your salespeople initially. I’d like to know how many new contacts you made this week. How many brand new prospects did you initiate contact with this week? And you would have to define what that means, initiating contact.
Does it mean I made a hundred calls and I didn’t reach anybody? Because that’s kind of zero, right? But if I initiated a hundred contacts and I actually interacted with 10 people (or whatever the number is,) that’s a solid metric.
It’s not hard to track, and it’s an important one to track. Because if you are not getting that information as a sales manager or as a business owner, that is the beginning of zero accountability.
You’re just assuming or hoping or waiting for them to bring in the sales each day or each week or each month. And if you just start earlier on in the process and say, all right, what about this? What about this metric? What about that metric? Then you can follow from there.
Because if you start out with how many new people did you introduce yourself to, or how many new people did you interact with this week? Then you could follow it from there.
It’s like, okay, well I initiated contact with 10 new people. I went to a networking function. I met 10 new people there. It’s like, okay. Then a next metric could be, how many of those were you able to get qualified in or out?
How many of them are actually qualified to do business with us? That would be a second metric that you could track. And then you can start to track the stuff down the line and eventually you’ve got sort of a cadence of accountability. I think I’ve read that in a book by, uh, Stephen Covey, I believe.
But it makes a whole lot of sense. It’s sort of a drumbeat, right? I’m keeping a cadence where I want to know what’s going on, sort of here and here and here and here.
Each step of the way, you’re giving me some clue as to what’s going on out there, as opposed to, yeah, things are going well. I’m talking to a lot of people. I got some people in the pipe, right?
Kevin: To have really good accountability, it’s going to take consistency Because it’s probably a very easy thing to let slide or let slip over time.
Your salespeople are probably not going to be accountable without some level of oversight. How can business owners, sales managers reinforce the idea of accountability without coming across as annoying or nitpicking or micromanaging?
David: Well, ideally you build it into the process upfront. Now, of course, if you’re just doing this now, you’re going to have to build it in later. But if you simply have slots in your CRM for where this needs to be entered, how many new prospects this week? How many people did you initiate contact with? How many were qualified in or out?
It can be maybe four or five different metrics. It’s just a number. I just have to enter a number into this box. Anybody who’s doing this can do that, and it’s not hard to do.
I’m not talking about creating advanced spreadsheets with all kinds of crazy calculations. It’s kind of like the question, what did you do this week?
And I think we’ve learned, some people really don’t like that question.
Kevin: Yes we did.
David: But in sales and in marketing, we kind of have to know, right? Your salespeople need to know what they’re doing. They need to be able to track what they’re doing. Your sales managers need to know that. The business needs to have some idea of that, particularly if you want to be able to grow it.
If you want to be able to hire more people and have them produce at comparable results to the people that are already in there, you need to know what they’re doing. You need to have some of these benchmarks along the way, so that you can know what to do in order to replicate the results.
Kevin: Do you find when you help businesses rethink their accountability strategies and all this, are the salespeople grumpy about it a lot of times? Are they resistant to it or are they generally pretty open to the idea?
David: Well, some are resistant to it. I think it is kind of natural for most employees to be resistant to any kind of change. Doesn’t mean that everyone is. Not everyone is. But it’s hard, because a lot of times if something is changing, people will wonder, is this something I did?
Am I the only one who has to do this? Do other people have to do this? So a lot of it is going to be about how you explain it to people. And you just let them know, listen, we need to get some of these procedures and processes in place, so that we can track the results. We can try to find the bottlenecks for you ,right?
Because that’s what you’re doing is you’re helping them to find the bottlenecks in their own sales process.
Kevin: Right.
David: So getting them to buy into the idea that this isn’t so that I can yell at you. This is so that we can both know where the gaps are in our process.
Kevin: So we can both make some more money.
David: Yeah, exactly. And most salespeople are very interested in doing that.
Kevin: Yes. I’d say all. I would think all, at least. For a business owner who might know their salespeople might be coasting a bit, but just have no idea how to address it, is there a piece of advice that you have for starting the conversation?
David: Well, I think it begins by asking them about their activities, as it relates to their results. I noticed over the past couple of weeks, you seem to be struggling with some things. What’s going on? I mean, just as simple as that. And they might tell you about some sort of personal thing that they’re dealing with or whatever.
It’s like, okay, if you understand that and they’re working their way through it, then that’s what that is. But if they don’t have basic answers to basic questions like the people they’re interacting with, the number of people they’re initiating contact with, the number of existing clients they’ve reactivated this week, things like that, that are very easy to know and very easy to document, then. that’s a good way to sort of get them back into it.
You could say to them, okay, listen, I understand it might be tough to maybe do some new prospecting this week with everything that you’re doing. Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you just reach out to some of our existing clients, get them requalified, try to figure out where they are and what they have coming up. That might be a little easier, it’s more comfortable.
Why don’t you do that this week? Focus on that. And then it lets them know that you’re not just out to hit certain numbers. You’re trying to help them. You’re trying to help them get results in a way that’s going to be doable for them while they’re dealing with other stuff.
Kevin: For business owners who might have a smaller business that have a sales team and the business owner themselves is the one that kind of manages the sales team, do you try to tell people to get a sales manager? Do you encourage business owners to have someone kind of overseeing the operation?
David: Well, you have to be at a certain point before you can do that, you have to be generating enough sales from the salespeople or from the business owner. And a lot of times in smaller businesses, the business owner is the main salesperson.
Kevin: True.
David: So if that person is generating sufficient revenue that they can then hire someone else to sell, then they can move to the position of sales manager for a while. And if they hate that, as long as they’re generating enough sales, they can then hire a sales manager to get in between them and the sales person.
But it’s all about being able to produce, to begin with. And the only way that you’re able to produce, is if whoever is doing the selling has some level of accountability, whether it’s to themselves or to a sales manager or to your spouse, whoever it is, right?
If you get home from work, and you didn’t sell anything, as a salesperson, you might get in more trouble at home, then you got in at work.
So accountability’s always big. Yeah,
Kevin: That’s true. Where can people go to learn more about these ideas of zero accountability?
David: You can go to TopSecrets.com/shift. Pick up a copy of our free PDF. That’s TopSecrets.com/shift.
Kevin: Awesome. Thanks so much, David. Great conversation. Really enjoyed it.
David: Thank you, Kevin.
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