How to Create a Culture of Sales Accountability

A lack of accountability can quickly sink a sales organization. 

Skipping qualification steps. Sloppy CRM notetaking. Not following the playbook. These little things add up.

That said, accountability is hard to teach. 

You want your team to want the business to succeed and feel like they can contribute to that success within their role, but you can’t police them or force them into that mindset. They have to get there themselves. 

So how do you encourage that? 

It’s doable if you’re thoughtful, process-oriented, and strategic. It just takes a culture of consistent feedback, leading by example, providing ample support, and encouraging teamwork whenever possible.

In this article, we’ll share tips from B2B sales leaders we’ve interviewed on Grow & Tell, and pair them alongside some of our own research to showcase how to create more accountability on your sales team. 

What is sales accountability?

Sales accountability is the ownership of the results and responsibilities that come with any sales role. This is best executed when the ownership is shared by the leader and the team member. 

As a sales leader, you likely already knew this. Still, we find sales accountability to be a broad term that can be approached from multiple angles. 

For example, sales accountability can mean: 

• Being accountable to the operational aspects of sales (e.g., setting a lead status, updating CRM notes, or creating an action plan)
• Following agreed-upon sales playbooks
• Reps hitting their sales quota 
• Creating a culture where reps consistently share stories of both successes and failures to create learning opportunities for the entire team
• Having a leadership team that creates clear goals that are tied to outcomes and can be easily tracked and reported on
• Leading by example as a leadership team

Where most sales leaders struggle with accountability

Encouraging accountability amongst your team is undoubtedly a priority for many sales organizations. 

According to an HR Drive Study, “91% of employees would say that ‘effectively holding others accountable’ is one of their company’s top leadership-development needs.” 

However, that same study indicated that “fewer than one in five people are able to successfully hold others accountable for delivering on expectations in the workplace.” 

So why is this happening? 

How to encourage accountability on your sales team 

Below, we’ll dive into some of the areas where it is well worth it to spend time and resources to succeed in creating a culture of accountability:

• Hiring – how does your hiring process create future accountability?
• Training and onboarding – how do you ensure reps have the proper training, and ramp times to do their job effectively?
• Selecting goals – how do you select both the correct goals, and goals that are very easy for reps to consistently monitor, and report on?  
• Identifying blockers - what issues are preventing your team from taking accountability for their results? 
• Ongoing coaching - Do you consistently find opportunities to help your team reflect on their performance, while also giving them tips on how to improve?
• Creating your tech stack - Do your reps have the tools they need to both move quickly through their operational tasks and measure their own sales success? 

1. Make accountability a key part of your culture 

Dini Mehta, Former Chief Revenue Officer at Lattice, grew sales to $100M during her tenure. She credits a lot of that growth to the culture she and her team created. 

“I've always felt that great teams are built on the foundation of trust and accountability.

“I knew that when I became a manager, I really wanted a culture where people would feel comfortable enough to voice opposing opinions, push back, and give feedback.

“I think that happens through fostering psychological safety where people feel comfortable being themselves, questioning the strategy, and sharing feedback.”

One way to create a culture similar to the one Dini mentioned above would be by creating a core value around accountability itself. Once this core value is established and expanded upon, it’s important to consistently call to it, and raise up employees who are exemplifying it in their everyday work. 

Another way to incorporate accountability into your culture is to create “accountability partners.” 

This can easily be done by partnering a more senior rep with a newer rep. This person can be a safe resource to turn to for feedback and ideas, review sales strategy, and act as an additional layer of support when you’re inevitably a bit busy.

2. Set clear goals before you hire reps

Set clear goals and expectations for your team before even hiring a new team member, and consistently reiterate those goals throughout the hiring process. 

This ensures you bring in the right people for the job from the very outset. 

An easy way to do this is by following a proven hiring process. We like the Who Method from Geoff Smart and Randy Street. This method encourages hiring managers to determine both the outcomes and competencies they hope to see from a new hire before even bringing them into the role and then ensures they ask questions related to those said outcomes in the interview process. 

For example, let’s just say you have an outcome like “Generate $X in sales from net-new mid-market clients each quarter.” In the interview, you could call attention to this outcome and ask questions to surface examples of where this outcome was previously met in another role. 

3. Align on repercussions and rewards

Once you’ve created those goals, you next need to establish how you’ll both compensate and reprimand reps when hitting or missing these targets. 

A clear process of repercussions and rewards also helps establish the psychological safety aspect that is needed in a high-performing culture. 

Determining commission structures, accelerators, bonuses, etc, is a deep and detailed process. You need to outline payout structures, ”clawback” provisions, ethics, and conduct standards, and ramp times. 

This could honestly be an entire article so instead, we’d encourage you to check out the resources below for inspiration:

• Todd Busler, CEO @ Champify 
• Jason M. Lemkin, Advisor @ SaaStr
• Casey Hill, Sr. Growth Marketing Manager @ Active Campaign
• Sales Commission Rates by Industry 
• Average B2B Sales Commission Rates. 

As far as repercussions go, this is all dependent on your state requirements, but ADP suggests companies follow a structure with written warnings, coaching opportunities, and performance improvement plans. 

With that being said, there should also be time to allow new sales representatives to get comfortable in their new role, and ensure you have a sales readiness system in place. 

Whatever you decide, it’s important to make this process clear, easy to understand, and quick to access. That way, reps aren’t worried they could get terminated at any given moment, and will never be surprised if and when repercussions start occurring.

4. Use a consistent agenda for one-on-ones and team meetings

One-on-ones and team meetings are ideal places for leaders to encourage and reward accountability. This is also where you can establish a culture of consistently giving and receiving feedback. 

Pete Hancock, the former VP of National Sales at Yelp talked to us about the importance of creating a feedback loop when establishing an accountability culture. 

“The first and most important part of the culture [at Yelp] was the culture of feedback. People had to be very open to receiving coaching and getting feedback. Because otherwise, it was just going to be really, really hard. People needed to get better every single day.”

So how do you create easy opportunities to take and receive feedback? 

For one, we suggest creating a document or spreadsheet that can consistently be updated and used for one-on-one meetings. These documents should be updated by your reps before each meeting—not the manager. 

Team meetings should also follow a defined structure, and agendas should always be sent in advance. 

A great way to uplift and showcase accountability in team meetings is by asking team members to share success stories and even lost-deal stories in every single meeting. Team members can showcase what they did right or wrong, and even open up the floor to take and receive feedback from others about what they should repeat and what they should do differently next time.

5. Collaborate with other teams

When budgets are tight, and teams are smaller than they’ve been in years in B2B organizations, cross-team collaboration is essential. With fewer people ready to buy, sales experiences have to be seamless in every way, requiring help from all departments. 

But you know that. You also know how challenging it can be to create this type of collaboration between teams that have historically been at odds. 

So how do you create collaboration that in turn fosters accountability?

The most extreme solution is to bring your Sales, Marketing, and CS teams under one Revenue team umbrella. You can hold weekly or monthly meetings where every team reviews shared revenue targets like pipeline generated, closed-won deals, or renewals.

An easier solution is to create one centralized RevOps team to own all your operations. This allows for your teams to have shared goals across teams, and holds them accountable to one another. It also centralizes data and tools, creates cross-team visibility, and prevents repeat work, and silos from happening. 

Another way to ensure accountability, and encourage sales collaboration, is by partnering reps with leadership team members. This is especially helpful for smaller, founder-led companies. 

Creating opportunities for sales to connect with leadership team members for sales coaching and support on larger deals helps sales team members feel both valued within the organization and supported. This automatically creates a space where they can collaborate with someone they respect and learn from, and also, take ownership of their own career and success within the organization.

6. Lead by example

The best way to create accountability is to be accountable as a leader.

Tushar Makhija, former VP of Sales at Airbase, explained how he gained trust with his first sales team by leading by example.

“I'm still in touch with many of them. They said, ‘You always led by saying, “Let me do it first, and I'll show it to you,” rather than saying, “Go and figure it out.”’ 

“If there's a cold call, I'd make cold calls. I did cold email. I did all the demos. If I was available, I'm on the demo with you…

“I've made tons of mistakes. But I think to become a leader, first, you have to be accepted as a leader by the team. Then they let you become better at leadership. So that was a whole journey for four years.”

Tushar says it’s important to prioritize both management and leadership to create accountability.

“I'm a sucky manager. But I am a decent leader.

"I'm diligent with doing my one-on-ones. I write things down. I use a Notion page—I'm not just remembering things. I think becoming a manager is harder than becoming a leader, at least for me.

"I think managerial processes are what makes a good manager and a good team. Everybody who has not read Scaling People should start reading Scaling People.”

Tools & resources to keep your sales team accountable

Now that we’ve dove into all the tangible tips on creating a culture of sales accountability, let’s get into the actual tools all B2B sales teams need in order to track and take ownership of their number. 

Conversation Intelligence: for coaching

Sales calls are an absolute goldmine for coaching opportunities. Conversation Intelligence tools like Gong (the industry gold standard right now) can help you do just that. 

With Gong, you can get total visibility into the topics and behaviors reps struggle with on calls, and insights into the soft and hard skills that win deals. Additionally, with Gong, managers can see team trends, spot patterns in individual reps, and quickly identify critical areas for coaching across their team. 

Pro tip: If you have a call that you plan on reviewing for a rep inside Gong, send it to them first and ask them to write out their own areas they felt they could have improved upon in advance. This will allow them to look deeper at their own performance, and feel a sense of ownership in the review process.

You can also share the calls of your A-Players with the rest of your team and identify the areas where each team member excelled. This creates a culture of learning and encourages them to do the same.

Sales Performance Management: for sales training

Of course, it’s excellent to regularly listen to sales calls, but not all leaders have the time to do that regularly. That’s where a performance management tool can really streamline coaching needs. 

Peter Kazanjy, founder of Atrium, talked to us about the way most sales organizations view performance management. 

“Most organizations do a poor job of instrumenting the quantity and quality of selling behavior that's happening by their reps. The best way to understand what's going on with a rep, a set of reps, many reps, many teams, etc. is through instrumentation.”

Atrium automates those coaching insights and selling behaviors for sales leaders. It provides AI-driven insights to tell you which teams and specific reps are doing the quantity and quality of work required to move more deals down the funnel.

For example, let’s say one of your reps, Kyle, has a lower conversion rate than most of his peers. Atrium will identify that, flag the manager, and even point out the stage where Kyle tends to get stuck. This is an excellent opportunity for Kyle’s manager to review his work in that stage across multiple deals, and provide feedback. It’s also a great opportunity for Kyle to reflect, learn, set new sales goals, and track his own improvement in this area. 

Content Management: for sales and buyer enablement

Sellers often waste time trying to find the right type of sales enablement content to use at each phase of the buyer journey. 

This gets especially challenging when sales teams work with multiple industries and roles. Not to mention, the more content that exists, the harder it is to know about each one, and how it can be used. 

As a result, sales teams will often ignore all the great enablement content your team put together.

Dock set out to solve this challenge with our content management solution. 

With Dock, marketing and leadership team members can share tons of content within a content library sorted into boards and tags. This tagging system makes it extremely easy for sales teams to find exactly what they need to do their job well.

As far as accountability is concerned, managers can see exactly what content their reps are sending, and how often they are sending that content. 

If you notice a certain asset isn’t being used, or that a specific rep isn’t sharing content as much as they should, you can use this moment as another coaching opportunity. 

Additionally, if you’re seeing reps send content at the wrong phase of the buyer journey or isn’t as relevant to the audience they are sending it to, this can be an indication that the team member needs to be coached in this area. 

Digital Sales Rooms: For follow-up and multithreading

Dock’s sales deal rooms consolidate all your follow-up materials into one place for your buyers during the sales process. 

Instead of reps sending ad hoc, sporadic emails with lots of links and attachments, they can use a pre-made template with everything available from one link.

Reps can also embed mutual action plans, pricing and order forms, contracts, and other assets that drive the sales process forward.

What’s helpful from a leadership perspective is that you can replicate the follow-up process of your top reps into an easily copy-able template that’s used across your entire organization—so you can always be confident sellers are taking all the right steps.

Dock’s sales rooms also provide engagement analytics to help you and your reps understand which deals are likely to close — and which deals need a little more love.

For example, you can see how effectively reps have multithreaded into the buyer’s organization based on how many contacts have checked out the sales room.

This gives you great coaching opportunities and talking points for your one-on-ones with your team and allows you to help them prioritize their activities. 

Mutual Action Plans: For standardizing process

A mutual action plan is a customer-friendly sales roadmap shared between a sales account team and a buyer team. It’s used throughout the buying process to track the actions necessary to achieve mutual success. 

A mutual action plan holds reps accountable for following your standardized selling process and pushes them to check off each task as they complete it. It also gives more visibility into the progress of a deal beyond traditional CRM stages. 

With Dock, you can create your mutual action plan inside your sales deal room. It also looks far more professional than the standard spreadsheet action plans that many people are used to.

Dock’s mutual action plans also provide far more collaboration functionality than your average spreadsheet, allowing your team to assign contacts, create due dates, and set a milestone risk status. 

This keeps both the seller and buyer accountable by making buying steps and deadlines clear. 

CRM extensions: To track sales activity

CRM extensions can enhance your team’s ability to take notes, be detail-oriented, maintain CRM hygiene, and move quickly from one task to the next.

Some of our favorite Salesforce extensions for maintaining CRM hygiene and providing updates are Scratchpad and Dooly. 

With Scratchpad, your team can automate CRM updates with AI suggestions from sales calls and emails. Finally, Scratchpad can help you encourage accountability and motivate your sellers by measuring individual or team hygiene metrics with leaderboards, trends, and streaks. Gamification like this has often been viewed as a way to enhance accountability. 

Dooly, alternatively, helps with smart notes and documentation, manages pipelines, and provides best-in-class deal reviews. With Dooly’s DealSpace feature, sales managers can access the critical deal information they need to know before their 1-1’s so they can best use that time to strategize on how to advance deals to closed won.

Dock’s CRM integrations can also help with activity tracking and CRM hygiene. 

All Dock activity is automatically logged to Salesforce or HubSpot, and you can sync notes, custom fields, and more between the two platforms.

Get started with Dock today

We hope this article gave you actionable changes that you can start incorporating on your team as soon as possible.

We also hope we were able to showcase how much of a partner Dock can be for sales leaders, especially sales leaders who are hoping to inspire a culture of accountability amongst their teams. 

If you’re ready to get started with Dock, you can request a demo now.