Sales & Marketing Management offers this quick article – Avoiding Accountability Talks. First, the context of the article is the reluctance of employees (and managers) to engage in holding other employee’s accountable. A couple of survey stats:

• 50 percent say they are afraid of negative outcomes.
• 16 percent say they don’t know how to start, hold or finish such a conversation.

Sales managers take note – this activity is one of the most important components to effective sales management. We encounter this reluctance often. Salespeople need to be held accountable to their activities, their behaviors and ultimately, their results. You don’t even have to be good at it. But you do have to do it.

The first step is to stop allowing excuses. Something will always go wrong when selling. The best salespeople handle the problems while moving forward with their selling process. Don’t allow the weaker salespeople to use excuses to explain poor performance.

Once salespeople understand the old excuses are not going to work, you can then start to hold them accountable for their calls, prospects, qualifying, everything. This slight change by the sales manager will have a fundamental effect on the entire sales culture.

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Let’s keep this ad riff going. From another sales ad (I removed the city name from the ad):

About this Career Opportunity:
We are currently seeking an experienced Sales Professional to work at our showroom store location in the TH-CitySSP to help accelerate our growth further!

A large company posted this ad and they serve the B2C (business-to-consumer) market. I am guessing from the frequency of their ads that they have consistently high turnover.

However, when I read such obvious boilerplate ads, I get the impression that this company’s culture is mechanistic. Might not be fair, but impressions are the subjective interpretation of the person. The poorly-spaced, strangely-coded city field immediately makes me think they are sourcing often and everywhere. Had they taken the time to check the formatting of their ad, I would probably assume they have a people orientation to their culture (the rest of the ad is well-written).

I realize their are applicant tracking systems and tools for handling responses, but I would not recommend technological automation at the expense of human impression. Check your ads and read them as if you were a candidate.

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We posted about typos in resumes back in September and mentioned a significant survey result:

Eighty-four percent of executives polled said it takes just one or two typographical errors in a resume to remove a candidate from consideration for a job opening; 47 percent said a single typo could be the deciding factor.

Time to turn the tables on these executives. I just read a sales ad from a sizeable company that had this typo in the description:

…seeking an outstanding individual for Territory Account Manger

Perhaps Christmas is still on their mind, but this error leaps from the page. Obviously from the survey mentioned above, typos on resumes are potential deal-breakers. What does it say about the company when they post an ad that contains a typo? My initial impression is that the company lacks an attention to detail in their work. If candidates are expected to be perfect in their proofreading, I would argue the same standard should be applied to hiring companies.

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