accountability

I was speaking at PAC Park in Pittsburgh this week when an audience member asked what he could do about Mavericks.  Since this is a common issue and I haven’t previously addressed it here, I’ll do so today.

If you’ve been reading my Blog for a while you’ve probably learned  that sales managers should be spending about 85% of their time on Accountability, Coaching, Motivation, Growth and Recruiting.  We mined some of our never ending data to see what sales managers actually spend their time on. 

It’s not unusual for management to get push back during the sales development process.  Whether it’s during the evaluation of the sales force, raising expectations, initiating accountability, when coaching, modifying compensation or during training, push back is the one thing you can count on. 

I often post about overachieving and posted a comprehensive article on over achieving a few weeks back.  I’ve also written about under achieving and, for the first time, want to draw some comparisons between over and under achieving.

One of my most popular posts, from September 2006, What Can a Trip to Italy Teach You about Managing New Salespeople.  Well we just returned from a trip to Cancun and I have some new lessons to write about today.

Last week I posted an article about horrific customer service and non-existent follow-up by salespeople.  Today, I offer you the post-mortem, the “I can’t believe this is still not completely resolved after everything that happened in the last two weeks” post.

Yesterday, I was the keynote speaker at an Executive Luncheon, addressing around 175 CEO’s.   It was a typical audience that responded in a typical way – except for a couple of them.  One attendee (not a CEO) wanted to know how his large company could be more effective getting people who appeared to be a good fit to actually succeed.  He also said that while they wanted to improve in that area, he wasn’t willing to change their processes, tools, sequence, management involvement, etc.  Consider this analogy: You’re sick, taking medicine and the drugs aren’t working.  The Doctor suggests changing meds to help you him get better and he prefers to continue using the drugs that aren’t helping.  Stupid?  Only if we grade him.