"The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart."

St. Jerome

As a CEO, your face sets the tone for every sales conversation that happens after you leave the room.

St. Jerome wrote, and to reinforce the above-mentioned quote,

"The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart."

Your salespeople and managers don't just hear your quarterly targets, they read your reaction when a big deal slips, when salespeople miss their numbers, and when the pipeline looks thin.

It's those unspoken reactions that become the ceiling on what your team believes is possible.

A flicker of doubt in your eyes during a rough month can quietly convince your sales team to play it safe; a flash of genuine curiosity about a lost deal can turn a loss into the next win.

Before you look at another dashboard, ask yourself... What is my face telling my sales team about growth, that it's a fight they're bracing for, or an opportunity they're leaning into?

Your salespeople and managers are modeling your mindset long before they hit their numbers.

As we start our journey together, there's a question every CEO should be asking themselves and answering honestly... Am I creating an environment of accountability, discipline, coaching, and learning or an environment of excuses, rationalization, and deflection?

It's an uncomfortable question, isn't it? I believe it's a necessary one.

The environment you create inside your sales team doesn't just influence morale, it influences revenue, profitability, client retention, sales retention, execution, and ultimately the trajectory of the business.

Culture isn't what you write on the wall, culture is what your sales team learns they can get away with.

• It's what gets tolerated

• It's what gets rewarded

• It's what gets coached

• It's what gets ignored

Culture is revealed when things don't go according to plan, and sometimes that will happen.

• When sales are missed

• When margins erode

• When clients leave

• When a salesperson's pipeline dries up

• When a strategic initiative stalls

• When a team member isn't performing

• When the market changes

What happens when all of this occurs? Do you and your sales team look in the mirror? Or do you all look for someone or something else to blame?

Your Mirror Moment

When results fall short, what happens inside your organization?

Do you hear this...

• The market is tough

• Our competitors are giving everything away

• Our customers aren't buying

• The economy is uncertain

• We've always done it this way

Or do you hear this...

• What did we miss?

• What can we learn?

• Where did our execution break down?

• What are we going to do differently?

• What part of this belongs to us?

• What do we need to improve?

Those two environments produce dramatically different outcomes, as the first one creates rationalization, and the other creates responsibility.

One protects people from discomfort, while the other develops people through discomfort.

One may make everyone feel better temporarily, the other makes the organization better permanently.

As Henry Ford once said,

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right."

What your people believe about responsibility, learning, discipline, and accountability eventually shows up in the numbers. Now, I ask you to think about your sales team.

Accountability Isn't a Punishment

Accountability has totally gotten a bad reputation.

Some will hear the word accountability and immediately think about pressure, consequences, performance reviews, or someone being called into the CEO's office.

Accountability is ownership.

Accountability is the willingness to say... This is my responsibility, even when the circumstances aren't entirely your fault.

Your salespeople may not control the economy, competitor's pricing, a client's budget, or what happens inside their territory, however; they can control their...

• Preparation

• Prospecting

• Follow-up

• Questions

• Conversations

• Learning

• Consistency

• Attitude

• Effort

• Willingness to ask for coaching

• Willingness to change

The CEO's responsibility is to create an environment where ownership is expected, supported, coached, and reinforced.

If you consistently allow your salespeople and managers to explain away poor performance, don't be surprised when poor performance becomes predictable.

What Gets Tolerated Gets Repeated

One of the most expensive things a CEO can do is tolerate behavior that contradicts the results they say they want.

You say you want revenue growth, but do you tolerate inconsistent prospecting?

You say you want stronger margins, but do you tolerate salespeople discounting because they haven't uncovered enough meaningful value?

You say you want client retention, but do you tolerate transactional relationships?

You say you want sales retention, but do you tolerate managers who don't coach?

You say you want accountability, but do you allow your highest performers to operate by a completely different set of rules?

Whether you believe me or not, the team is watching you. They're paying attention to what you say, but they're paying even closer attention to what you do.

Peter Drucker famously said,

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

You can have the best strategy in the world, but if the environment doesn't reinforce accountability, discipline, learning, and execution, strategy becomes nothing more than a document.

Discipline Is a Revenue Strategy

CEOs often will talk about growth as though growth is primarily about finding more opportunities, it's way more than that.

Growth is about executing the fundamentals consistently.

Allow this to sink in for a moment...

• Salespeople need to prospect when they don't feel like prospecting

• Salespeople need to follow up when the prospect doesn't respond

• Salespeople need to prepare before important meetings

• Salespeople need to ask better questions

• Salespeople need to understand the client's business

• Salespeople need to continue developing their skills after they've become successful

• Salespeople need to manage their pipeline before it becomes a crisis

This my friends is discipline, and discipline isn't glamorous.

Discipline is repetitive, often boring, rarely produces immediate gratification, but over time, disciplined behavior compounds.

Revenue compounds from disciplined activity, profit compounds from disciplined execution, relationships compound through disciplined follow-through, trust compounds through disciplined consistency.

CEOs must stop asking... What are our salespeople doing? and start asking... What behaviors are we consistently reinforcing?"

Coaching Shouldn't Begin When Someone Is Failing

I just gotta ask... Is coaching something your organization does proactively, or is it something that happens when somebody has a problem?

If coaching only appears after performance deteriorates, coaching has become a correction mechanism.

Great teams treat coaching differently, as coaching becomes part of their operating system.

When it comes to coaching, great teams know that...

• It's expected

• It's normal

• It's developmental

• It applies to everyone, including your best salespeople

Your top salespeople still need coaching, your veteran sales leader still needs coaching, your newest salesperson certainly needs coaching, and yes, you need coaching, too.

The best athletes don't stop practicing because they made the team, they practice because they want to stay there.

The same should be true in sales, but for some reason, it's not.

A culture of learning says,

You don't have to be broken to get better.

Imagine what would happen if your sales team and managers viewed coaching not as criticism, but as an investment in their future.

Imagine if asking for help wasn't perceived as weakness. Imagine if saying... I don't know was followed by... Well, let's figure it out.

The Cost of an Excuse Culture

Excuses don't appear on the income statement, but they absolutely affect it.

Every excuse represents an opportunity to avoid taking ownership, and repeated often enough, excuses become culture.

A salesperson misses quota, the explanation is accepted.

A salesperson's pipeline is empty, the market gets blamed.

A client leaves, the client gets blamed.

Margins deteriorate, pricing gets blamed.

A salesperson doesn't prospect, they say they were too busy servicing existing accounts.

A manager doesn't coach, they say they were buried in administrative work.

Eventually, everyone has a reason, but nobody has responsibility.

Rationalization protects the past while accountability creates the future.

The question isn't whether your people will make mistakes, as we all know they will.

It's about... What do they do next?

Do your salespeople and managers hide and deflect or rationalize and learn?

Revenue Growth Requires Personal Growth

Here's something many executives overlook...Your company cannot consistently grow beyond the growth of the people responsible for producing that growth.

If your salespeople aren't learning, your sales team eventually stops evolving.

If your managers aren't learning, management becomes stale.

Why might I be saying this, because...

• Markets change

• Buyers change

• Technology changes

• Expectations change

• Competition changes

If you haven't noticed, AI is accelerating the pace of change.

What concerns me and hopefully you as well, is how many teams continue operating the same way they did five, ten, or twenty years ago.

Then they wonder why growth has stalled.

Growth requires curiosity, humility, experimentation, coaching, and massive amounts of discipline.

Growth requires the team who are willing to look in the mirror.

Sales Retention Matters Too

Allow me to poke the executive bear a bit... What kind of environment are you creating for the salespeople you want to keep?

Good salespeople want to grow, and they want to be challenged.

Good salespeople want leadership, and they want coaching.

Good salespeople want clarity, and they want to know what winning looks like.

Good salespeople want to be surrounded by people who take the work seriously, not empty suits.

Good salespeople don't want to work in an environment where poor performers are protected, excuses are normalized, and accountability is optional.

Your culture either attracts and retains salespeople who want to get better or it drives them away.

Replacing good salespeople is expensive, as you lose relationships, institutional knowledge, momentum, revenue, and most of all, time.

Sometimes the salesperson wasn't the problem, the environment was.

Questions To Start Asking

I encourage you to take these questions into your next leadership meeting.

What behaviors are we rewarding?

Not what do we say we reward, but what gets rewarded?

Are salespeople rewarded for revenue at any cost? Or for creating long-term client value?

What behaviors are we tolerating?

Where are you accepting excuses, allowing inconsistency, and where have you lowered the standard because holding it feels uncomfortable?

What are our salespeople learning?

Are your salespeople becoming more skilled every year?

Are your sales managers becoming better coaches? Or are you simply asking the same salespeople to produce bigger numbers using the same behaviors?

What would change if everyone took complete ownership?

My friends, this may be the most important question of all.

• What would happen to revenue?

• What would happen to profitability?

• What would happen to client retention?

• What would happen to sales retention?

• What would happen to morale?

• What would happen to execution?

The Environment You Create Becomes the Business You Have

Every CEO is creating an environment, the only question is whether you're creating it intentionally.

An environment of accountability says... Own it.

An environment of discipline says... Do the work.

An environment of coaching says... Get better.

An environment of learning says... Stay curious.

An environment of excuses says... It's not my fault.

An environment of rationalization says... Here's why it couldn't happen.

An environment of deflection says... Someone else needs to fix it.

Which environment are you creating?

Eventually, your environment will reveal itself in...

• Results

• Revenue

• Profit

• Client retention

• Sales retention

• Culture

• Quality of salespeople and managers you attract

Jim Rohn once said,

"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with."

Your salespeople and managers become a reflection of the environment they spend their careers in.

Your Mirror Moment

If you walked into your company today as an outsider, what would you see?

• Would you see salespeople taking ownership?

• Would you see salespeople learning?

• Would you see managers coaching?

• Would you see leaders asking hard questions?

• Would you see salespeople doing the work when nobody is watching?

Or would you see the sales team explaining why the numbers aren't where they should be?

The answer may be uncomfortable, and good, because discomfort is often where meaningful change begins.

Final Reflection

Your job isn't to create a comfortable environment, it's to create an environment where salespeople can learn, grow, perform, take ownership, and win together.

When accountability becomes cultural inside the sales team...

When discipline becomes habitual inside the sales team...

When coaching becomes normal inside the sales team...

When learning becomes expected inside the sales team...

Then revenue has a better chance to grow, profit has a better chance to follow, clients have more reasons to stay, and great salespeople have more reasons to stay.

With loving encouragement don't just look at your numbers this quarter, look deeply in the mirror, then ask yourself... Is the environment I'm creating today capable of producing the numbers I say I want tomorrow?

Your answer might be the most important business decision you make this year.

Originally published on Larry Levine's LinkedIn.