Today, let’s talk about your team. Specifically, how everybody on your team should be accountable to you.
Remember, as a friend of mine likes to say, “This is show business, not show friends.”
So if you’ve got a team of people, each person on that team must be accountable in some way. They must have some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that allow you to know what they’re doing and whether they’re being productive.
For example, you might have somebody who you’ve given telephone work to do or research. Let’s say you’ve asked this person to look up X amount of
LinkedIn contacts, something like that.
And then later that day, or the next day, or that week, you ask them for a report, and they say, “Yes it’s going fine” and “Yeah we connected with four people or five people,” or “I called x amount of people.”
That’s not really acceptable in terms of accountability. What you need
to do is to carefully monitor the progress that they’re making.
Are they being productive with their time?
Here’s a quick checklist to gain solid metrics that answer the question.
- How many contacts did they find?
- How many of those did they make?
- How many of those did they get on the phone or have a substantial online interaction with?
- How many appointments did they make?
- How many sales did that lead to?
You could say, “Well, that person reached out to or connected with 25 people. They looked up 25 potential customers on Google and from those 25 that they looked up, they made contact with five people. And of the five people that they made contact with, they actually spoke to two or three of those people. From that they made you one appointment, or they closed one deal,” or some metric that is easily measurable.
That way whenever you ask that person to be accountable, you can say, “Tell me what’s the KPI? How are you performing with your Key Performance Indicator?”
“There’s an expectation that you have to get me five appointments a week.” Or it could be ten appointments a week, or however many it is. And if they haven’t reached those goals, then you can find out where the blockage is.
But unless you’ve carefully mapped out all the steps that person is expected to do, and you’re measuring their success, you don’t really measure anything.
Instead, you’ve got this touchy-feely, wishy-washy thing that doesn’t really make them feel comfortable. And it definitely won’t make you feel comfortable when it comes time for payroll.
Because you’ve got to account for every person who is on your payroll. They’ve got to be productive and moving and swimming in the same direction, so that you get much better results.
Remember, when you have a business it’s great to have a lot of people doing different things. But…
Don’t have anybody if you can’t measure it.
Basically, don’t do it. If you’ve got somebody doing a task, and you can’t measure what they’re doing, they might as well not be doing anything.
Now, I’ve had people say, “Well you can’t measure quarters, and you can’t measure designers, or you can’t…”
That’s just not true.
You can absolutely measure every single task everybody does, in some way.
Some of it might be broader parameters, but you’ve got to be able to measure everybody who works for you.
So “measure everything” is the thing for today. I hope it helps.
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