Accountability: Roles, Responsibilities, Expectations
The Case Study:
The owner of a niche consulting company we worked with was talking about the frustration he had with getting everyone in his company focused on growing the business.
“My team has been together for 3 years, so everyone knows what we offer and what our competitive advantage is in the marketplace, but there is no sense of urgency. I just can’t seem to get people unified around growing our client base,” he lamented.
Small businesses are faced with many issues, but the major issue is the inability to drive sales and to get each member of the team to focus on sales and not just the performance of his/her individual daily tasks. Often people in the professional service industry simply want to perform the service they provide and leave the sales and client facing aspects of the company solely up to the business owner.
The Outcome:
After discussing this issue, we recommended a monthly sales meeting. In this meeting the CFO of the company opened up a P/L statement, which included all the target accounts with revenue goals for the entire team and bottom line budget for expenses. The idea was that employees could get a sense of real/time profitability and be aware of the sales successes and failures across the organization. While this strategy does not make sense for every company, our client saw significant results in accountability and camaraderie within his team.
