The Sales Mastery Podcast · Episode 19

The Accountability Equation

With James Denny · Sales Geek

Almost every business I walk into wants more accountability, and almost every one of them is describing surveillance instead. Sales accountability is clarity multiplied by visibility multiplied by consequence, so a zero anywhere takes the whole thing down.

I want more accountability in this business. I have heard that sentence in nearly every business I have walked into over the last ten years, and I always ask the same thing back. What would it look like if you had it? The answer is usually some version of the same thing. People would do what they said they would do, and I could stop chasing them.

So I go and sit in that business for a week, and what I find is a leader who spends most of Thursday and Friday saying things like where are we on this, did you send that, has this come back yet. That is not accountability. It is surveillance, it runs entirely on one person’s memory, and the memory is yours. Go on holiday and the whole thing grinds to a halt, because the memory went with you rather than staying in the business.

Think about what that means. In most sales teams, however, accountability rests on one person remembering to ask. If the leader forgets, nothing happens. That is not a culture. It is a single point of failure with a diary.

Picking up the cliffhanger

I ended the last episode deliberately hanging, so let me pick it up. You can design the best meeting rhythm in the world. But if a commitment made on Monday can be missed on Friday and nothing whatsoever happens, then inside about five weeks nobody is committing to anything at all. They are saying words in a meeting, because that is what they have worked out the meeting is now for.

The word gets used to mean about four different things, and most of them are wrong. So two are worth clearing out of the way first.

It is not chasing

When you chase somebody, you are carrying the memory for them. Every time you do it, you lift the responsibility off their shoulders and put it back on your own, all while genuinely believing you are holding them to account. It is the most exhausting way there is to run a team, and I have been there myself. What it produces is a team that sits and waits to be asked.

It is not just consequences

Plenty of businesses have consequences. They tend to be unpleasant ones though, arriving late and out of nowhere. Somebody has a flat six months, then one Tuesday there is suddenly a formal meeting and everybody is shocked. That is not accountability either. It is a business that let something run and then reacted to it.

Sales accountability is what happens when somebody knows exactly what is expected of them, everybody can see whether it happened, and something predictable follows either way.

There are three separate things buried in that sentence. An expectation, visibility, and a consequence. Take any one of the three away and accountability does not weaken. It collapses.

Notice also what is missing from the definition. You. Your chasing, your memory, your involvement. A properly accountable team holds itself to account because the standard is clear, because everybody can see it, and because what follows is predictable. So you get to stop being the memory of your business, and that is a far bigger prize than most leaders realise until they have had it.

Accountability that runs on your memory is not a culture. It is a single point of failure with a diary.

Those three ingredients turn into something you can use. Clarity times visibility times consequence. And I want you to treat it as a multiplication rather than a list, for a reason I will come to.

Why it multiplies rather than adds

Leaders overwhelmingly fix the component they are most comfortable with, then wonder why nothing changed. So somebody rewrites the KPIs for the fourth time, which is clarity, and clarity was probably fine already. The real problem was that missing them never mattered.

You have gone from three times three times zero to four times three times zero. Both of those are still zero. You improved the thing that was not broken, and the answer did not move.

Score your own team

Have a proper go at scoring out of ten on each of the three. When leaders do this with me, they tend to land around eight for clarity, maybe six for visibility, and two or three for consequence. Consequence is also the one they least want to work on, which is precisely why it is the thing holding everything else down.

The trap inside visibility

Visibility means both of you can see it, not just you. So if you have built yourself a lovely dashboard and you are the only person who ever looks at it, you have not built visibility. You have built monitoring, and the person being monitored can feel the difference immediately.

Most businesses are convinced their standards are clear, and very few are as far up the ladder as they think. In my experience they are sitting on rung two while believing they are on rung five.

1	Assumed.	Everybody obviously knows the standard, except nobody has ever said it out loud. The test is brutal, so brace yourself: ask three of your people to write the standard down separately, then compare the answers.
2	Stated.	You have said it, probably more than once and possibly quite loudly. But said is not the same as agreed, and being told something is not the same as signing up to it.
3	Agreed.	The person has said it back to you in their own words, so you know they have taken it on. The test is simple. Can they state the standard right now, without you prompting them? If not, they are still on rung two.
4	Visible.	Both of you can see performance against the standard without anybody having to ask. And if you do have to ask, then you are the reporting system and it is not visible.
5	Enforced.	Something predictable follows every time, in both directions. The test here catches nearly everybody: has the standard been enforced with your very best performer as well as your weakest?

Where most of the damage happens

The gap between rung two and rung three is where businesses lose most of it. I said it, therefore they know it, therefore they have agreed to it. Those are three separate assumptions stacked on top of one another, and every one of them is a coin toss.

The fix, which feels awkward the first few times

At the end of any conversation where you have set an expectation, ask them to say it back to you in their own words. Do not ask does that make sense, because everybody on earth says yes to that. It is a social reflex. Ask instead what their takeaway is, and how they have interpreted it.

You will be surprised more often than you expect, and every surprise is a problem you have caught early enough to do something about.

The exemption that turns a standard into a price

Look hard at the top rung too, because the best performer test catches almost all of us. Most leaders have one person they let off, because that person delivers the numbers, and everybody on the team knows exactly who it is.

The moment there is an exemption, the standard stops being a standard. It becomes a price, meaning a thing you can buy your way out of by hitting a number, and your team has already worked out precisely what the price is.

Consequence is the component usually sitting at zero, and it is where nearly every sales accountability culture falls apart. When people hear the word they think of the negative kind. Discipline, warnings, difficult conversations. But a consequence is simply something that follows, and it runs in two directions.

There is what follows when somebody does the job well, and there is what follows when they do not. Two dials, then, and where you set them decides which of four cultures you end up with.

Diagnosing which one you are in

Drift is by far the most common, and it does not feel like a problem because there is no conflict anywhere in it. That slow decay is the same thing I described in the episode on sales discipline, where things fall apart gradually and pleasantly rather than dramatically.

Fear is the one leaders sometimes build on purpose after a bad quarter. It does work, but only briefly. You get compliance, and what you lose is your early warning system, because in a fear culture nobody brings you a problem while it is small. You hear about the stuck deal in week nine instead of week two, which makes a fear culture a machine for manufacturing exactly the stall we talked about in the pipeline velocity episode.

What separates fear from accountability

Most leaders who want sales accountability reach instinctively for the negative dial and turn up the pressure for missing. Yet look again at those two cultures. The negative consequence is strong in both of them, so it cannot be the thing that separates them.

The difference sits entirely on the positive side. It is whether anything good happens at all when somebody does the job properly.

What separates fear from accountability is not the consequence for missing. It is whether anything follows when somebody gets it right.

Most people reading this are in drift, so please do not march in on Monday and start enforcing everything at once. You will frighten precisely the wrong people, because the ones who scare easiest are usually the most conscientious, and they will assume all of it is aimed at them.

Start with the positive dial instead. It is faster, it is safer, and almost nobody does it properly.

Pick up the one standard that matters most. One, not six. Make it visible to the whole team, then make sure something good and specific happens when it is met. I do not mean a bonus. I mean recognition that costs you nothing but proves you were paying attention, given by name, in front of people, for a specific thing they did.

Once that has bedded in, tighten the other dial. One standard, applied consistently, including to the person you have been letting off. That single act, holding your best performer to the same line as everybody else, will do more for the credibility of every standard you have than a year of announcements.

And if all of this does eventually take you into a genuine performance conversation, there is an earlier episode on handling that properly, with the diagnostic, the sixty day plan and the decision at the end of it. This episode is about building the system that means you have to have far fewer of those.

That is the series. Hiring decides who you are working with, and whether you saw past the person who was brilliant in the room. Onboarding installs the standard, which means whatever you tolerate in month one becomes their normal. Rhythm runs it, through four clocks and four jobs and commitments made out loud in front of people. Accountability keeps the whole thing straight, through clarity, visibility and consequence, with something good happening when the job gets done properly.

The reason I split it across four episodes rather than one is that every business I have watched try to fix accountability on its own has failed. Seen from the outside, with the component parts laid out, teams start to rebuild it together, which is the only way it works. Everybody plays a part in it.

1	Chasing is not sales accountability.	Every time you chase, you lift the responsibility off them and carry it yourself, which produces a team that waits to be asked.
2	Clarity times visibility times consequence.	It is a multiplication rather than a list, so a zero anywhere makes the whole answer zero, and improving the part you are comfortable with changes nothing.
3	Consequence is almost always the zero.	It is also the one leaders least want to work on, and those two facts are not a coincidence.
4	Stated is not agreed.	Ask them to say the expectation back to you in their own words, rather than asking whether it makes sense, because everybody says yes to that.
5	A standard your best performer is exempt from is not a standard.	It is a price, and your team worked out what it costs long before you noticed.
6	Most teams are in drift, and drift is hard to see.	Nothing follows a hit, nothing follows a miss, nobody is unhappy, and the number is always just short.
7	Turn up your positive dial first.	What separates fear from accountability is not the consequence for missing. It is whether anything good happens when somebody does their job right.