We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.
—C. Malesherbes
When I arrive at the gym for my morning workout, there are usually several personal trainers helping their clients with the exercise routines. The main job of a personal trainer is holding clients accountable to achieve their fitness goals.
The highest performing businesses are those that set high performance standards and then hold their professionals accountable to those high standards. It begins with sales leaders and executives walking the talk and being openly accountable to the standards they set for themselves, and typically everyone else follows suit.
Building an accountability is often easier said than done. For rain makers, a culture of accountability includes, establishing objectives, preparing sales plans, motivation, and rewards.
What Are Objectives?
Great sales leadership begins with everyone setting specific goals. Goal setting is one of the activities most highly correlated to the success of top performers. Best Practices Insurance study found financial services businesses that are effective at goal setting grow roughly twice as fast as those that are not. Goal setting involves more than just establishing new business numbers, it is also helping professionals determine their focus (niche markets). An effective goal-setting process should get professionals focused in the areas holding the best potential for them.
Coordination of sales plans assures that everyone is not stepping on each other and that opportunities are not being missed. Goals are the foundation for developing strategic sales action plans—which is the end product. The best sales plans include both activity goals and result goals. It is difficult to hold someone accountable or even to know how best to support and equip them without effective goal setting.
Sales action plans are usually determined by using one or a combination of the following approaches:
A series of activities
Problem solving approach
A series of smaller short-term objectives
A Series of Activities or Events
These are not necessarily inter-related, however, they will relate to the accomplishment of your overall objective. For example, becoming the market leader within your niche could include any of the following activities or events:
Becoming a member of the trade association
Developing a special report to send out to members
Speaking at conferences
Sponsoring events
Researching problems, issues, and concerns of key players
A Problem-Solving Approach
You have first clearly identified a problem that needs to be overcome. You have been analyzed to determine the appropriate course of action, which, if implemented successfully and sequentially, will lead to the eventual accomplishment of your objective, for example, an increase in your retention rate might include:
Compiling a list of all lost customers.
Identify reasons why they left, service, product, or relationship.
Identify vulnerable existing client relationships.
Create action plan to correct any issues with existing customers.
Retraining employees to improve future performance.
A Series of Smaller Short-Term Objectives
These breakdown the objective into smaller pieces of the larger result. A good example of this type would be new business annual sales goals:
Breaking sales plan into quarterly objectives
Show by branch and individual
Break figures into monthly results
Weekly activity plans
Daily activity
What goes into a sales action plan?
Once you decided on a course of action, you intend to follow in the long-term perspective of sequence of activities or events and an order in which to work, so that you can begin to concentrate your efforts on what needs to be accomplished in the short run. This does not need to be an elaborate detailed action plan, however, it should be easy to identify significant milestones and to make significant modifications as your proceed.
Figure 11.1 Strategic action plan
What About Compensation Plans?
To attract and retain top professionals, a business needs to develop an attractive compensation package. Top professionals like income regularity, extra reward for above average performance, and fair payment for experience and longevity. Your business also would like to achieve growth, economy, and simplicity. Sometimes business objectives such as growth may conflict with a professional’s objective such as financial security and this is a major reason why compensation plans can vary tremendously from industry to industry and even within the same industry.
Three compensation approaches:
Straight salary
Straight commission
Salary and commission
Straight Salary
Straight salary plans have several advantages they provide professionals with a secure income and this makes it more willing for to perform the nonselling activities and give less incentive to overlook key customers. From a business perspective, they provide simplicity and help lower turnover.
Straight Commission
The advantages of straight commission (commission only) plans is that they attract higher sales performance, provide more motivation, require less supervision, and control selling costs.
Combination Plans
Combination plans feature the benefits of both straight salary and commission plans while reducing their disadvantages. They are designed to provide the safety and security that someone needs, by providing a secure income it also provides the incentive to exceed objectives and the incentives can linked to a wide variety of goals and priorities.
After deciding your approach, the next step is to determine the mix. There are four options:
1. Fixed amount
2. Variable amount
3. Expense allowance
4. Benefits
Fixed amount salary—Intended to satisfy the professional’s need for income stability.
Variable amount—Which might comprise of commission, bonus, or profit sharing, and is intended to stimulate and reward for greater effort.
Expense allowance—Enable the professional to meet expenses involved in travel and lodging and entertainment.
Benefits—Include paid vacations, sickness or accident benefits, pensions and life insurance. These are intended to provide security and job satisfaction.
Motivation
The most critical ingredient in sales leadership is investing the time required to identify promising salespeople. Bill Belichick is considered as one of the greatest coaches in NFL history with six Super Bowl titles coaching the New England Patriots for the almost 20 years. He spends as much time recruiting as coaching, scouring the landscape for the unique blend of talent, character, perseverance, teamwork, and strength to continue to build his team.
Great sales leaders continually prepare, they understand their overall business strategy and what is required of professionals for the business to achieve its growth objectives. Similarly, to a winning sports coach, great sales leaders begin preparing their team in training. They know what needs to be covered to develop their professionals to a required level.
They also take pride. Personally, I have been a sales leader, educator, and coach inside and outside formal settings on sports teams and in the office. There is nothing like knowing you had a hand in the development of someone’s career.
Top Performers’ senior manager and owners recognize they must not only support the creation of a sales culture, but they must also personally engage in and contribute to the sales culture. Here are seven steps to build a culture of accountability:
1. Take Ownership
A common key to the success of top performing businesses is that someone has assumed ownership over sales leadership (on occasion more than one person), who is fully empowered with the authority to take responsibility for addressing the key components of sales leadership.
2. Measure What’s to Be Managed
Unless a business has the ability to measure key business development activities and results, it is very difficult to manage them. Top Performers measure results with a level of detail that allows them to understand what is happening. In addition to tracking new business, they also track what accounts they have failed to write and why they failed. Further, while renewal results are important. Top Performers also want to know how changes in attrition (losing accounts) are impacting results. This is key because problems with renewal results are difficult to address without understanding the source of the problem.
3. Manage What You Measure
The Top Performers hold their people accountable for results. If results are not being achieved, top firms ratchet up accountability, monitoring, and focusing on the activity that drives results. This is achieved in a number of different ways. For example, regular sales meeting on a weekly or monthly basis, provide written feedback on the performance of each and all of the producers, which can have the added benefit of simultaneously providing perspective on how each producer compares with their peers.
4. Provide Help
When someone is falling short, the first step is to find out why and provide them the help needed. This could mean more training or education. For others, it may need to be a change in their sales focus or strategy. Still others may need additional support or to be partnered with another salesperson or technical resource that will help complement their weaknesses (and strengths). The best find ways to help their people succeed, which may involve removing organizational obstacles someone is facing or personal habits or actions that are limiting their success.
5. Have Courage
This is the Achilles heel for businesses that are not achieving superior results. Many leaders are too tolerant of poor performance, particularly when it is coming from a senior producer or executive. Top Performers recognize that until they are willing to address nonperformance, their words and threats are hollow and ineffective. The willingness to act also involves properly recognizing the superior performance of the agency’s top producers. Treating your best and worst the same is a formula for mediocrity.
6. Raise Expectations
Many of the Average Performers have average results because their people are allowed to set average goals and management has average expectations. Top Performers, on the other hand, have gotten there by raising the bar on performance. One of the best ways to make such a transition is to introduce into a sleepy group of producers a race-horse or high performing producer who will redefine potential and excellence and light a fire under the rest of the producers. Complacency, comfort, and acceptance of poor results are a common problem within many average performers.
Great sales leadership frequently involves raising the bar on the definition of acceptable behavior and results. Provide direction. A top Performer Perspective “We changed our culture, which required us to remove those sales and service staff that were not willing to make that change with us. The key to our success is a stronger focus on sales throughout the organization and increased accountability of producers for new business development.”
7. Get Buy-In From Everyone
Your business cannot develop a true sales culture unless there is buy-in to the need to be a real sales organization and to create a true sales culture. Those providing the actual sales leadership must be committed to it, but the ownership group must be totally committed as well. Trying to create superior sales results in an organization with a nonperforming ownership group or senior producer group is extremely difficult, if not impossible.
A wealth advisory business had been experiencing stagnant low growth for three consecutive years. The leadership team had invested thousands of dollars into training with very little to show in terms of organic growth. The problem, whilst management invested money into training—the advisors were left to own their own devices to implement their learning to grow their portfolio. The leaders started managing what they measured through weekly meetings with their advisors to better track activity. The regular feedback started holding people accountable eliminating excuses and procrastination, within 60 days, activity levels improved and within 12 months, the business posted positive growth for the first time in three years.
Summary
The highest performing businesses are those that set high performance standards and then hold their producers accountable to those high standards.
It starts with sales leadership, when the leadership team walks the talk and is openly accountable to the standards they set for themselves, and typically everyone else follows suit. Building an accountability is often easier said than done. For rain makers, a culture of accountability includes, establishing objectives, preparing sales plans, motivation, and rewards.
Accountability involves:
• Taking ownership
• Measuring what’s to be managed
• Managing What You Measure
• Providing Help
• Courage
• Raising Expectations
• Obtaining buy-in