The One Behaviour Salespeople And Sales Leaders Need To Stop Hiding From…
This comes down to one thing: sales accountability. It’s the behaviour that separates elite performers from everyone else, and most salespeople and sales leaders would rather look anywhere else than at themselves first.
OK, I won’t make you read to the end here so comes an early spoiler alert!
For Salespeople, that behaviour is Responsibility, and to complete the equation, for the Sales Manager it is Accountability. Both in equal doses!
What if I was to tell you the difference between the top 1% of over a million salespeople evaluated and the bottom 1%, 94% of the top 1% of salespeople choose to take responsibility for their results, yet only 20% of the bottom 1% choose to take responsibility for their results.
In other words, 94% of elite salespeople don’t make any excuses or blame, compared to those 20% who, perhaps, shouldn’t be in sales.
And what if I was to tell you that from the sales leadership evaluations I work with, and in over 16,000 surveyed, sales managers demonstrated best practice accountability with an average result of 59%?* (and this dropped to 42% for family run businesses).
Now Before You Roll Your Eyes, Hang In Here For a Bit
Sales leaders know they are to hold their people accountable, but the truth is that many really don’t know how. They are in leadership roles and yet don’t know how! And some of those that do, won’t!
Some think that ‘micro-managing’ is what they should do and others think that just ‘focussing on the numbers’ is what they are supposed to do, while others think ‘free reign’ is acceptable.
For those of us with kids, it’s a bit like parenting. How do we make sure our children become responsible contributors to the world and still have them love us?
In business, how do we make sure our salespeople become responsible contributors to the business and still have them respect us?
If we continue with the analogy of parenting, it’s a case of making sure our kids realise a couple of things:
· There is a code of conduct in the house
· There are consequences for inappropriate behaviour
· There is always a conversation to be had around expectations
· Everyone has tasks to perform in order to make the household run smoothly
· The home is always a safe space for mistakes to be made
· We respect and love each other, no matter what
At around seven years of age, the human brain shifts focus and decides its time to step up. After being joined at the hip, sharing their parents thinking and living in a fairy-tale world of princesses and astronauts, kids step into a new phase of thinking and reality at this age.
Their levels of consciousness, their logic, as well as their emotional stability takes on a new form and their brain takes on a new level of internal and external awareness. Some parents sense the shift and will educate their kids to a more adult way of viewing the world especially for the future, whilst others continue to treat them as the children they still are, and once were.
This is the Accountability Stage.
It’s when kids can start to see that there is a payoff for doing things themselves instead of having things done for them. It’s when they can use their own logic to achieve results for themselves without being asked. It’s when they realise the rewards they receive by taking on more responsibilities cause them to want to do more. It’s the brain’s pre-frontal cortex kicking in.
Kids are capable of taking on responsibilities and being held accountable at this age because their brains can cope and they realise they can stand in their power.
So where does a salesforce sit when it comes to Responsibility and Accountability?
Well if we agree with Freud’s three personalities, then we would have to surmise that there is a percentage of salespeople and sales leaders who operate in each:· The child – someone who blames others, takes credit from others, makes excuses, lives in a fantasy world, continually sidesteps, cheats and takes shortcuts
· The parent – someone with a this is my way or the highway mentality, who operates from an ‘I’m telling you what to do’ angle, uses language such as ‘because I said so’, a bully.
· The adult – someone who asks rational questions, who s, gives the benefit of the doubt, holds people accountable and demonstrates patience and respect.
Just as kids we learnt our times tables, understood currency, sang our alphabet and represented our School House in some kind of sports, it was preparing us for our future. It was ensuring that we could go out into the big wide world and make something of ourselves.
Responsibility and Accountability!
Just as we had to do the dishes, the lawns, babysit and do the newspaper run – it was preparing us for our future and ensuring we could be independent and make choices that set us up for success.
Sales Accountability: Responsibility and Accountability!
The same responsibilities and accountabilities apply today in business – for both the leader and the salesperson.
Same Horse. Different Jockey.
Because the secret is in having a room filled with adults.
And adults are humans who:
· See the bigger picture and define their objectives
· Are not obsessed with being liked, rather appreciative of being respected
· Can say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at exactly the right times
· Are able to address the unacceptable behaviour and not the person
· Will not drop the ball on their reporting and administration duties
· Are responsive to others and aware of others
· Realise their behaviour impacts more than them
· Is able to say ‘Fair cop, the buck stops with me’
· Has a beginners mind
· Makes decisions not excuses
· Takes feedback and then says, ‘thank you’
· Says ‘yes I will’ and does!
It’s about preparing yourself for YOUR future. And that future will depend on you being more responsible and holding yourself, and those around you, to be more accountable.
Kids Rule!!! (Sometimes!)
*OMG Group Research
What Sales Accountability Actually Looks Like
Sales accountability isn’t a poster on the wall or a line in the onboarding deck. It’s a sales manager who owns a missed forecast instead of blaming the market, and a salesperson who owns a lost deal instead of blaming the price. Real sales accountability shows up in the small, unglamorous moments – the follow-up call you didn’t want to make, the honest number in the pipeline review.
Teams with strong sales accountability don’t wait for a crisis to have the hard conversation. They build it into the rhythm of the week, so accountability becomes a habit rather than an event.
Sales Accountability Starts At The Top
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: sales accountability breaks down fastest when leaders exempt themselves from it. A sales manager who demands accountability from the team but never models it themselves – who blames the CRM, the market, or head office for a missed number – undermines every conversation about sales accountability that follows.
Building sales accountability that lasts means the leader goes first. When a sales manager owns their own numbers publicly, sales accountability stops being a rule imposed from above and becomes a standard the whole team chooses to hold each other to. That’s the difference between accountability that’s demanded and sales accountability that’s genuinely earned.
How To Coach For Sales Accountability
Coaching for sales accountability isn’t about catching people out. It’s a weekly rhythm: a short pipeline review where the salesperson, not the manager, states what they committed to last week and what actually happened. When a sales manager runs this consistently, sales accountability stops feeling like a performance review and starts feeling like a normal part of doing the job well.
A few practical habits build sales accountability fast. Write commitments down, in the salesperson’s own words, so there’s no ambiguity later. Review them at the same time each week, not just when a number is missed. And when sales accountability slips, address it as a pattern to fix together rather than a failure to punish – that’s what keeps the whole team owning their sales accountability rather than fearing it.
Over time, this turns sales accountability from a leadership demand into a shared team habit – which is exactly the point.
Building Real Sales Accountability In Your Team
If you’d like help building genuine sales accountability across your team – the kind that shows up in the numbers, not just the meeting – Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations are built to make this behaviour stick.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
BOOK A NO-OBLIGATION 20-MINUTE CALL
And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
