YourSalesManagementGuru by Ken Thoreson, Acumen Management Group
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Accountability: Ingredient No. 2 to Great Sales
Last time, I mentioned the three ingredients that sales managers should have in their leadership pantry to maintain sales focus:
- Discipline: Orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior.
- Accountability:"Obligated to give a reckoning or explanation for ones actions.
- Control: A standard of comparison for checking the results of an experiment or process.
We recommend that you actually share these definitions with your sales team and your entire company; this will help you increase everyone's focus on the need to execute brilliantly during challenging times. Accountability means that every department and every person -- sales, marketing, delivery and admin -- must be held accountable for meeting the expectations of their job.
(Hint: The expectations or standards must first be set).
By explaining the definitions first to your teams, you can fight the reaction of "this is micro-management." It is not; it is simply good management. Next, we discuss the concept of how "control" makes it all work.
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Posted by Ken Thoreson on March 10, 2009 at 11:59 AM