Your Team Doesn’t Care About Your Goals | Sales Strategies

Sales leaders ask me all the time about how to make their sales team take accountability, or hold them accountable, for the set goals. I have to remind them that it’s very hard for anyone to want to be accountable for someone else’s goals.

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Here’s a way that you can help sellers be accountable for the bigger picture.

Get your sales team into small groups of 10-15 people. State what the current goal is. It could be to break into a new territory, cross-sell more products, find a new set of customers or to grow faster than the industry. Make sure everyone understands what the goal is.

Next, ask the group how they will be accountable. What are they willing to do to be accountable? What are their accountabilities? During this meeting, it’s not your job to say that there are bad ideas amongst your team. You just want to gather what everybody says they will do and what their own accountability strategies are. Document them, look for trends, and then follow up with your team in one-on-one meetings.

Now, some of those accountabilities will be great and you’ll be able to help your sales team reach those accountability goals. However, some will not be as great and in that case, talk to your sales team member about the other tactics that the team is using. Get that person to massage their accountabilities and talk to them about the challenges and concerns they might be having so that they can adjust to a modified accountability.

People will do what they have stated they will be accountable for, not what you state they have to be accountable for. When you do that, you’ll improve performance because people are hitting their goals.