Sales Accountability

“Can you send me an email and tell me what you did last week?”

is not a bad question

Preface:  This is not a political commentary despite using a political reference.  This is all about accountability and improving your sales results.

“If you are working as hard as you possibly can toward growing your sales and taking care of customers, then responding to an email like this shouldn’t phase you a bit.  I would gladly fill it out and hope that someone calls me to let me know how I can do it better.”   Greg Martinelli

For my entire life, I have heard how ineffective and inefficient the government is at spending our money.  I heard it on TV, in movies, from friends, from co-workers, and from all sides of the news world. I have even heard it from myself at times.

Then, for the first time, someone asked government employees to respond with an email to let people know what they accomplished the previous week.  The world reacted to this both positively and negatively.  On the negative side, people felt like this was at best, micro-management.  At worst, it was the beginning of an unfair mass layoff. 

Seeing this story, it kept coming back to me that this is very applicable to the Ag sales industry, which has operated in a WFH (work from home) structure forever, long before 2020.  Long before it was even called WFH.

If you think about the question these government employees were asked to do, it’s no different than you hiring a contractor to work on your house.  If you hire a contractor to redo the siding on your home and each week, the contractor sends you a bill for 40 hours of work.  You won’t go very long before demanding to know what the contractor actually got done.  As a contractor, that is just part of doing business and I would respond promptly to the homeowner with my accomplishments.

Somehow, when we change from being a contractor (1099 hire) to an employee (W-2 hire), we get sensitive to the homeowner asking us what we accomplished.  In this latest case, these were government employees, who most of the general population think are not getting enough done. 

The question itself is not bad, not unfair, and not micro-management……unless

• It depends on the manager asking
• It depends on the employee being asked
• It depends on their relationship
• It depends on why it is being asked

Think about yourself as an Ag salesperson.  How would you interpret this question from your manager? Your VP of sales? Or your CEO? 

I’m in my 38^th year of coaching, managing, and leading people. Most of those have been salespeople, and most of those salespeople operate in a work-from-home role. On an individual basis, sales accountability is required at some point. At some point, you will need to sit down with a salesperson and get into the weeds of what they are actually doing.

As sales managers, we like to think we hire good salespeople and entrust them with a sales territory, company resources, and all the support they need to make a productive sales territory. 

Over time, the salesperson is going to have ups and downs in their results.  The ups are great and easy to manage.  All systems go!  Just provide them more of what they need from you.  However, it’s the downtimes that pose a challenge for our sales manager and the company.

In this WFH scenario, we don’t see or know exactly what our sales team is accomplishing each day.  During good times, we think they are working hard, doing great, and we don’t want to break what’s not broken.  So, we leave them alone.

But it’s during downtimes that we begin to wonder if our salespeople are hustling as hard as they should.  Are they being productive with their time?  Are they getting stuck in the selling process and need help?  Are they actively disengaged and not making sales calls?  Is this temporary or the beginning of a long downward trend?

This situation doesn’t typically happen overnight.  It’s gradual as sales take time to develop and show up in results later than the actual selling effort.  Cold calling in March may not show up on a sales report until July, November, or next year sometime.  This makes it difficult to correlate today’s results and today’s activities.

As sales struggle in the down times, our sales manager is increasingly under pressure from their manager to get a handle on the situation and turn the results around.  But how?  Digging directly into the activities of your salespeople can be viewed as micro-management and a sign that you don’t trust them.

Many companies have the mandatory weekly sales report which every salesperson has to send to their manager.  However, week after week of filling these out is tedious and disengaging for every salesperson, even the high-performing ones.  It’s a check-the-box report with very little info. 

Yet, there is still the need for accountability.  As salespeople, we are accountable for making sales to feed revenue into our business. 

If and when you find yourself in the scenario described, here are my thoughts on this subject:

• Salesperson: 
  • If you want to be left alone and judged solely on results, and not have someone send you this type of email, then you must hit your results.  If not, then your company has every right to ask what you are doing. If you are continuously striving to grow your sales results, then this email can be a great opportunity for you.  Reply to the email and ask for a verbal discussion about it.  If my manager is going to ask me for the info, then I’d like to know how my actions are viewed.  By that, I mean, am I doing what I should be doing?  How do my actions compare to those of the top performers in our company? What actions am I missing in my time management? 
  •  If this email makes you feel micro-managed, then I have found there are only a few possibilities.  The first possibility is you have a poor relationship with your manager.  Either you don’t know each other well enough yet or don’t communicate often enough.  Trust levels could be low.  The second possibility is that you really do need micro-management.  Maybe your sales results are down, you’re not getting your internal work completed, or customers are complaining about you to your manager.  The public tends to view micro-management as a bad thing.  It’s only bad if you don’t need it and are managing yourself effectively.

• Sales Manager
  • Before you send this email, ask yourself a few questions. 
    • Can I pick up the phone and ask the questions instead of sending an email?  Could I do it in person?  It’s hard to read body language or interpret tone in an email.  And the non-verbal message is much more important than the words.
    • If I have too many people to manage and can’t do it by phone, then how are you going to possibly use their answers? For example, if you are the CEO and have 200 employees, asking for this type of email is not designed so you can review all of them for accuracy or meaning.  Again, it depends on why you would want them to respond. 

• Why send an email like this?  It seems there are three reasons:
  • To Lead:  As the leader of a team, it can be used as a way to tell everyone that personal accountability will be a focus area for everyone on our team.  Everyone has to contribute to the team’s goal.  And to be an effective leader, you lead by example, which means you should go first.  If I’m asking my team to tell me what they did, then I would put my answer at the bottom of that email. Hard-working people on the team will appreciate this leadership approach.  They have been hustling and holding themselves accountable.  Finally, we have a manager who is asking about those who aren’t working so hard.  Company culture and productivity can easily be destroyed by not holding people accountable.
  • To Manage:  As the manager, you have to allocate resources.  Employees are part of those resources you are entrusted with.  In this email exercise, you may discover inequities in workload.  In seasonal businesses like Ag, you typically can’t staff for peak times.  Spring in a crop inputs business and loading unit trains at a grain elevator in the Fall require large numbers of employees.  Only to be followed by periods of trying to keep them busy and employed.  Digging into the details of who is doing what can be an eye-opener. Yes, it can also be used as a way of determining who is not needed.  If that’s the case, then I would not suggest a self-generated email to make decisions.  With good writing skills, you can make an email sound like you accomplished a lot.
  • To Coach:  The most effective use of this type of email would be for coaching your salespeople.  Since most coaching is done in one-on-one meetings, this allows the opportunity to further discuss the salesperson’s reply to the email.  It gives you the chance to have dialogue, interpret verbal and non-verbal body language, and facilitate change.  It also lets the employee know why the email was sent.  And that is the most important aspect of all to your employees; “Why do you want to know this?”

This entire discussion around salesperson accountability comes up frequently in agribusiness.  Always has and probably always will.  Especially when companies are facing lower sales revenue or deciding on investing in a CRM program (customer relationship management). 

So, asking an employee to be accountable for the results that they are achieving is a reasonable expectation from anyone paying someone to do something. 

The success of using an email like this or asking the question that was asked is all in who, how, and why it’s asked.  Know the answer to all three of those questions before you send the email!