Hold Your Sales Team Accountable: Proven Strategies for Sales Leaders and Managers

Accountability is the backbone of a successful sales team—without it, even the best talent can fall short of their potential.

In our years of helping sales leaders and sales managers, we’ve found that many struggle to hold their teams and individuals accountable. You need to hold every person on your team accountable for their goals, not only because it’s important to reach your own goals, but it is also the only way to ensure each person succeeds.

Here, I share a structure that allows sales managers to feel good about accountability. This process will help you be a better leader and help your teams succeed.

Key Components of Accountability in Sales Teams

1. Expectations: You cannot hold someone accountable for something if they aren’t aware of what is expected of them. It is unfair to be unhappy with someone who doesn’t meet unstated expectations.
2. Timeline: Accountability requires that something be done on or before a specific date and time. Without a deadline, there can be no accountability because the clock can run endlessly.
3. Purpose: When you require a person on your team to produce a result by a certain time, you must also provide an understanding of why it's important. Purpose improves their commitment to achieving the outcome.
4. Resources: If there are resources you believe the individual needs or that you want them to use, you must provide access and ensure the person understands what to do with them.
5. Help: Follow up with the person about their progress and explain what they should do if they struggle to produce the result.

Best Practices for Imposing Accountability in Sales

1. Scheduled Review: There is no accountability if you don’t review the results—or lack thereof. It is important to schedule reviews to ensure each person on your team is on track. When you fail to do this, you fail your team by allowing them to miss the results for which they are responsible.
2. Humanely Imposing Consequences: Consequences should always be humane. Start with coaching sessions, more frequent reviews, and additional support. There is rarely a reason to impose harsh consequences—especially when you haven’t done everything in your power to help a person succeed.

Common Pitfalls in Sales Accountability

1. Unclear Expectations: Poorly communicated expectations and lack of clarity put accountability at risk. Accountability requires clear and strong direction. Each person must have clear guidance to succeed.
2. No Rationale: When you compel people on your team to produce certain results, you must explain why it is necessary. Never use “because I said so.” The rationale needs to be meaningful for your salespeople.
3. No Strategy: In many cases, it’s not possible to hold someone accountable unless you explain exactly what they must do to be successful. If you don’t provide a strategy for your team, you risk them failing.
4. Treating Expectations as Suggestions: One of the easiest mistakes in accountability is communicating an expectation as if it’s a suggestion. Make sure your team knows you truly expect them to produce the result.
5. Skipped or Rescheduled Reviews: The longer you go without inspecting the results, the more you ensure a lack of compliance and accountability. Keep your commitments to meet with your people.
6. Allowing Your Team to Fail: One of the reasons we build a culture of accountability is to allow us to intervene before individuals fail.

Structures for Ensuring Sales Team Accountability

A structure of accountability supports a salesperson by providing strong direction and action. These structures also support the sales manager by ensuring the right work is being done at the right time and in the right way, making it easier to hold their team accountable.

1. Territory and Account Plan: A territory and account plan requires the salesperson to document the clients they are going to grow in the coming period, and the prospective clients they are going to pursue through prospecting. This process provides the sales manager with a way to hold the salesperson accountable for creating new opportunities and acquiring new clients.
2. The Pipeline Meeting: The pipeline meeting is a group accountability session where each salesperson reports on the new opportunities they created and the existing opportunities they moved forward in the prior week. It is not a review of all the opportunities the salesperson is pursuing. It supports prospecting and opportunity creation in a structured way by setting a weekly tempo and the expectation that each salesperson will create new opportunities.
3. Opportunity Capture: The opportunity review is designed to ensure the salesperson has a plan to pursue and win new opportunities and clients. By reviewing key opportunities with a salesperson, you can provide coaching, identify blind spots, and challenge them to improve their deal strategy. The sales manager benefits from reviewing deal strategies to ensure the salesperson uses an effective approach. Opportunity reviews prevent the unforced errors that cause salespeople to lose must-win deals.
4. Sales Call Reviews: These structures ensure the salesperson has planned each sales call to be valuable to the client. This helps the salesperson differentiate themselves and create a preference to buy from them. Because salespeople have made hundreds of sales calls, they often do what is comfortable instead of what might better serve the client. Verifying the approach to critical sales calls ensures the salesperson has an effective plan.
5. Personal and Professional Development: Surveys show that salespeople want more coaching from their managers. As the selling environment changes, they request more help in pursuing deals. Individual coaching provides the salesperson with a chance to explore improvements they might make to enhance their overall effectiveness. The sales manager has the opportunity to provide feedback in a safe environment, helping the salesperson explore new beliefs and new choices. This can also help them pinpoint additional resources for development so they can enhance their selling skills.
6. Time Management and Expectations: Salespeople spend around 34 percent of their time on sales-related tasks. Increasing the time spent on sales-related tasks increases both activity and results. By reviewing how a salesperson spends their time, their sales manager can coach them on ways to gain more time for selling, eliminating less valuable tasks, especially anything beyond their job description.

The structure of accountability and the structures of your meetings can help you take good care of each person on your team, ensuring each person succeeds under your leadership.