Structured for Success: Sales Meetings That Boost Accountability

You cannot enforce accountability among your staff without reviewing the outcomes each member of your team self-reports. Even though you have a CRM that reports each member’s activity and outcomes, you are better off with each person directly reporting how they did in the last week. Your meetings should boost accountability, while also helping salespeople see what is possible and what it takes.

There are a number of meetings that can help you establish accountability and help your team reach their individual and collective goals. We’ll look at the meetings you might have to improve accountability among your team and also help your sales team to succeed.

Territory and Account Meeting

Most sales organizations don’t require each salesperson to build a territory and account plan. If you want to make it easier to hold your salespeople accountable, you would do well to require them to build their own plans for their territory. This accountability for prospecting, focusing on their strategic targets and avoiding wasting time.

You or your salesperson must create the territory and account plan. If you want your sales reps to have skin in the game, have them produce it, then coach it to ensure you believe it will work for the client. You can find more about this practice in Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue.

The Pipeline Meeting

Your pipeline meeting may have you going over each person’s pipeline, looking at each opportunity. This is a poor practice. If a salesperson is allowed to repeat an opportunity they have reported in previous meetings, you send the message that creating new opportunities is not a priority.

A better practice is to ask each sales rep to report only on the last week’s meetings, their new opportunities, and what deals they moved forward. Because professional selling comes with autonomy, this discipline can ensure your sales force creates new opportunities. If you have eight people, this meeting will take less than an hour, and you will know how many new opportunities you added to your pipeline.

Pro tip: Never allow a salesperson to log an opportunity in your CRM until they have a second meeting. This will give you a much better view of what is true and what isn’t.

Opportunity Reviews

Opportunity reviews ensure your sales team will win enough of the deals in their pipeline that everyone can reach their goals.

Some sales managers use a one-on-one meeting to review and strategize each deal; others do this with their team. One-on-one opportunity reviews are better because they don’t pull your salespeople out of the field for so long to listen to their colleagues talk about opportunities that have nothing to do with them.

Give each opportunity as much time as it needs, taking no more time than is necessary to ensure the salesperson is prepared to win their opportunities. If you want to improve your sales results, you will focus heavily on improving your team’s sales effectiveness. There is nothing more important than your win rate, individually and as a team.

Quarterly Internal Business Review

You now have your team self-reporting and increasing their activity, even if a few came along kicking and screaming. You are also now conducting weekly pipeline meetings focused on net new opportunities created in the prior week. Your territory and account plans are in place, and you are supporting the acquisition of new clients with a prospecting sequence that increases your team’s activity while also positioning them as consultative experts. The final structure of accountability is the quarterly internal business review.

This meeting will require each salesperson to report their results in the last quarter before sharing what changes they will make going into the next quarter. Both you and your team will recognize how different your quarter looks compared to before you put these structures in place. In simple terms, these structures are a set of disciplines that help you create net new opportunities, win new clients, and generate net new revenue over your churn.

Bonus Accountability: Prospecting

Your team needs to sell effectively. There is a serious problem in how salespeople prospect. One person in a private workshop suggested that she had sent eight emails, one each week, before picking up the phone and calling a prospective client. The time cost her eight weeks she could never get back.

Ensure your team is prospecting by imposing a phone-first approach to cold outreach. You need not follow a long prospecting sequence if you get a first meeting on the first call.

Autonomy and Accountability

You will hear people say that people do better when they have autonomy. Many who believe this is true may not have spent any time in sales or leading a sales force. They may also work in roles with much less variability than you find in B2B sales.

Accountability prevents salespeople from failing. If you worry about holding your team accountable, without guardrails like the ones in this article, you allow the sales rep to fail. Their failure becomes their family’s problem. It also means your company is missing the revenue it needs, while also failing the salesperson’s prospective clients.

Sales Meetings That Boost Accountability

A structure for success will make it easier for you to reach your goals. Your sales meetings boost accountability in your sales teams. With several meetings that create a cadence, you can improve the value of your sales meetings.

If you want a highly effective sales force, this approach will help your team in creating and winning the deals they need to reach their goals and your sales objectives. If you need more help with accountability see Leading Growth: The Proven Formula for Consistently Increasing Revenue.

Leaving this article, make a list of accountability meetings and build a calendar that will work for you and your sales team.