Sales Accountability

Sales accountability for your salespeople is key to medium and long-term sales success. The sales people should feel like they own the process and results. Sales accountability for your team is a great way to grow your revenue. Here are a few suggestions on how you can drive sales accountability.

Set Expectations:

Make sure you are setting objectives and attainable sales goals. These should be easy for the rep to monitor and determine how they are doing versus their targets.  I would suggest no just tracking revenue or customer acquisition, but also activities that lead to revenue.  This could include things like booked discovery calls, demos, proposals, and anything else that is significant that helps lead you to a sale. This is especially true sales rep roles like a BDR or SDR as they are only driving the sales opportunity to a certain stage and then passing it on.

Reps Own their Opportunities:

Sales reps owning their opportunities can mean a few things for an account executive sales position. It means that they are leading the sales effort. The sales leader should not be swooping in to manage a sales meeting. It does not mean that they should not be involved, but the salesperson should own the opportunity. To help reinforce the sales accountability the salesperson should also own taking the sales leader through their opportunities in the pipeline update portion of their individual meeting.

Inspect What You Expect:

As a sales leader you should inspect what you expect. That could be looking in greater detail into your CRM or joining salespeople on meetings and calls.  This will allow you to be accountable to their development.  Providing feedback to the salesperson allows you to help them be more successful.

Next Steps:

Completing next steps helps sales opportunities move forward.  This can be matching what the sales rep has committed to customers and also what they said they would do in your individual meetings.  This also applies to the sales leader.  You must get your next steps done in the time that you committed to.

Allow Them to Provide Feedback:

Part of sales accountability is the salesperson being part of the plan. They should have an opportunity to provide input on the sales process, opportunity strategy, and even to hold the sale leader accountable. If you are interested talking about how VA Partners can help with your sales planning and strategy please connect with me for a discussion.

Sales Accountability