8Structures of Accountability

THERE ARE STRUCTURES you can put in place to strengthen and maintain your positive culture of accountability. Instead of imposing and enforcing accountability yourself, you can release some of that responsibility to these structures—helping ensure your team creates the outcomes they are responsible for while you focus on reviewing their results.

When it comes to revenue growth, there are two paths to failure: not creating enough new opportunities and new clients, or not winning enough of them. Accordingly, to reach your goals and avoid these two pitfalls, your structures should enhance prospecting, creating net new opportunities, and acquiring new clients. Let's look at how they'll work.

Self-Reporting

We have made a major mistake by relying on technology to track our sales force's activities and results. The larger and more complete your CRM dashboard, the more you prevent accountability. For instance, even when a team has a minimum quota for daily or weekly sales calls, few salespeople reach that level. They know that there are no consequences for not putting forth the effort to make, say, 20 outbound calls a day, proving that the dashboard is an obstacle when it comes to accountability. This approach prevents the salesperson from having to confront their lack of activity. A sales leader who says nothing about the low output is certain to get more of what they don't want, namely low activity.

Overemphasizing activity isn't the only way dashboards ...

Get Leading Growth now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.