A culture of taking responsibility!

A culture of taking responsibility!

A culture of taking responsibility for your own results is pretty rare in my experience yet a vital ingredient to a successful high performing team…and No 6 in my 7 Principles that underpin a successful high performing sales team.

What does ‘Taking Responsibility’ look like?

It’s where the entire sales team (including the Sales Leader) cuts the reasons and excuses for not achieving what they set out to do. No BS. No blaming. No poor me. No victim mentality.

It’s only when you accept that your thinking and actions didn’t get the result you wanted that you can begin to identify what needs to change or be improved.

What do you have in your Sales Team?

If any of your sales people give you plausible excuses for not winning a deal or missing target you have a person playing the BLAME game…I call it being in The Valley. They can’t see the landscape and have no plan to get out of it…because it isn’t their fault. They are victims of external circumstances.

Recognise anyone?

How are you contributing to The Valley culture?

You need to include yourself when you’re after cultural change. Where do you play the BLAME game? Where do you blame the organisation or senior management or the system or whatever…it’s not you right?

Every time you do this you are feeding the blame culture…and saying it’s OK for your team to do it too.

Another big contributor to The Valley is the unacceptable stance to mistakes or failure. When a Sales Leader doesn’t accept a pipeline below target or a lost deal or anything similar it creates a culture of presenting a false picture which is more pleasing.

When things are not as you want them…accept the situation as where it currently is then decide on your next steps. Coaching your sales person so they learn and grow from the situation is the only way to increase their skills and mindset to avoid the same situation in future.

What can you do about it?

Whenever you hear reasons and excuses from your sales people going forward, ask this simple question:

What are you going to do about that?

It’s the perfect “Get out of The Valley” question and works every time as long as you are in rapport and on their side.

If you’ve not used this approach before you may need to coach your sales people to come up with their solution but very quickly they’ll expect your question and come up with actions ahead of time.

The questions also works for you 😉

Until next time,

Leigh 🙂