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Creating a Sales Culture of Personal Accountability – Part 1

Guest post by: Danita Bye

Article Overview: Essential tips for creating a sales culture of personal accountability.

Creating a Sales Culture of Personal Accountability – Part 1

Essential tips for creating a sales culture of accountability within a hearing care practice. Accountability can be a sensitive subject because most people like to think of themselves as responsible employees or managers. However, excuse-making and "waiting for things to get better" generally don’t improve a business situation. Here are some tips for fostering greater accountability within a hearing care business or practice.

Sadly, the "Blame-Game" has become a pervasive phenomenon in America’s corporate culture—with Enron, Tyco, and other companies epitomizing the increasingly popular sport of finger pointing among top management. In helping client companies build their businesses, I invariably meet Blame-Game players in all strata of the organization: the people who make excuses for non-performance, and the leaders who make their own excuses and accept excuses from their team. Several business experts believe that lack of accountability is the number-one challenge facing organizations today. ⁽¹⁾

Those involved in finger-pointing in a sales team are the unwitting subversives who sabotage growth.

According to John Miller, author of QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, "In today’s business culture, the lack of personal accountability is a problem that has resulted in an epidemic of blame, complaining and procrastination. No organization or individual can achieve its goals, compete in the marketplace, fulfill its vision, or develop people and teams without personal accountability." ⁽²⁾

Dave Kurlan, president of Objective Management Group, contends that "real growth and change will not occur until an individual stops making excuses and [takes] responsibility for their weaknesses." ³ While this may be easier said than done, it is important to identify and eradicate lack of accountability in the corporate culture—as well as in small and medium-size businesses— in order to promote growth.

Identifying Lack of SalesAccountability A number of examples can be cited to demonstrate the need for accountability. For example, one practices revenues had been declining for 4 years, and margins were creeping downward. Determined to stop the bleeding and reverse the trend, the management team requested an objective assessment of their organization’s business-development processes. The evaluation revealed that the entire team had a problem with excuse making—even the president/owner of the company.

Interviews with key players in the organization yielded commonly found accountability-ducking comments, such as blaming the poor economy, tough competition, or new management. These included statements like:

• Why do patients expect so much?
• When will the market turn around?
• When is someone going to train me?
• When is someone going to put together a decent marketing program?
• When is management going to get its act together?
• When are we going to become more competitive?
• When are we going to have better products?
• Why aren’t my people motivated?
• Why do I have to do everything myself? ²

In reality, when people blame the economy—an external element—they don’t believe they have control over the outcome and therefore aren’t likely to do anything that will improve their effectiveness. When competition is cited, it is really an admission of being outsold by the competition. When management is blamed by workers, it can often be viewed as a cop-out and failure to become committed to changing the situation or, at least, changing what they can change. As Kurlan explains, "They would be criticizing themselves if they were to take responsibility for not following through on something or letting something fall through the cracks." ⁽³⁾ In most cases, employees do have the ability to affect change.

The following are symptoms that may indicate the revenue-generation side of a hearing care business/practice lacks accountability and personal responsibility:

• The patient management pipeline, or flow of patients from the first appointment to the fitting of the hearing instruments, is weak.
• This weakness is due to not enough new patients or not enough patients who are being adequately prepared to make a commitment to use amplification.
• The dispensing professional always discounts price in order to get the business.
• There is a low conversion rate from those patients who are qualified for amplification to those who make a decision to be successfully fit.

Eliminating Lack of Sales Accountability There are four effective ways to eliminate lack of accountability while building a culture of personal responsibility in the workplace:

• Hire the right people;
• Set the right expectations;
• Ask the right questions;
• Match the right behaviors.

Hire the Right Sales People is Critical for success. Jim Collins’ research for the book Good to Great ⁽⁴⁾ identified a set of elite companies that made the leap from good to great and maintained their results for at least 15 years. After the leap, these good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns over 15 years that outperformed the general stock market by an average factor of 7 times. Although these companies are significantly larger than hearing health care businesses, some common principles still apply. One of these principles is to get the right people involved in your organization.

Although recruiting personnel was discussed in detail by the author in a previous HR article, ⁽⁵⁾ having the right people cannot be over-emphasized as a critical component in creating a high-performance, revenue-generating team. Disciplined people, who operate with a high degree of personal responsibility (ie, they don’t make or accept excuses for themselves or others), have disciplined thoughts, which fuel disciplined actions, which fuel disciplined results. ⁽⁵⁾

We’ve often heard the comment, "People are your greatest asset." Interestingly, the good-to-great leaders think differently, stating that the right people are a company’s greatest asset. Collins contends that "if you have the right people, management and motivation problems go away because they have the inner drive to create excellence." ⁽⁴⁾

Case in point: A client company had a growing gap between their business plan’s revenue projections and year-to-date results. A visit with the owner revealed that he was quite proud of the leadership team he had recently put together. Each person had more than 25 years of experience in the industry with excellent technical expertise and a good track record. However, each new member of the leadership team blamed their lack of recent success on the flat economy in their respective markets. During the assessment phase, we discovered that they saw the economy as an obstacle—versus a stepping-stone—to creative brainstorming and strategy. The outcome was: Disappointing results. It’s true that the economy can help determine business success and failure. However, people with the right thoughts about personal responsibility would have taken action to deliver better bottom-line performance in the face of poor economic circumstances instead of accepting under-performance "inevitability."

Set the right sales expectations. Like the president of the above company, it is often easy to accept excuses. What can we do to turn the tide and create a culture of accountability in our individual practices? Since insisting on worker accountability is one of the most dreaded and confrontational of all management responsibilities, what can a leader do to actively build a team of "right" people?

Kurlan ⁽³⁾ says the answer is to recognize excuses and stop accepting them. "Effective immediately, you must stop accepting excuse-making of any kind, from any one, at any time, or for any reason—even if there is a shred of validity to it!" says Kurlan. He advises clients to raise expectations by asking, "If you couldn’t use that excuse, what could you have done differently to overcome that obstacle? This strategy empowers your people and forces them to hang in there and work harder and smarter, knowing that you won’t accept that excuse ever again." ⁽³⁾

For example, an I.T. (Information Technology) company for whom I consulted has experienced steady growth over the last 3 years in spite of the "IT-bust" and the languishing economy. Why has this company been successful when many of their counterparts are either out-of-business or operating in the red? Barb, a principal in the group, says "When we get discouraged about what we see in the marketplace, we ask each other, 'What can we do differently so that the slowing economy becomes a stepping-stone to growth?" The result was: Steady growth in a market where many companies have failed.

References:

1. Connors R, Smith T, Hickman C. The Oz Principle: Getting Results Through Individual and Organizational Accountability. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall; 1994.

2. Miller JG. QBQ! The Question behind the Question. Denver: Denver Press; 2001.

3. Kurlan D. Objective Management Business Development Overview. Westboro, Mass: Objective Management Group; 2003.

4. Collins C. Good to Great. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

5. Bye D. Five steps to building a great team. Hearing Review 2003; 10(7):28-31.

6. Kaplan R, Robert S, Norton DP. The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. Boston: Harvard Business School Press; 1996.

© Copyright 2009, Danita Bye Sales Growth Specialists, All Rights Reserved.

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Article Tags: Sales Accountability, Sales Culture, Sales Hire
Referred by: http://www.jonathanfarrington.com/



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