Your Team Knows What to Do. So Why Aren’t They Doing It?
By Rhonda Bettis
Chief Operating Officer & Managing Partner, Zach Global Inc.™
The conversation happened on a Tuesday afternoon in a cramped conference room that smelled like stale coffee and frustration.
One of my strongest leaders, a woman who had been in financial services longer than some of her team members had been alive was sitting across from me, running her hands through her hair like she was trying to pull answers out of her own head. Her business had just posted another disappointing quarter. Not catastrophic. Just… underwhelming. The kind of results that make leadership start asking questions nobody wants to answer.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “My people are smart. They’ve been through every training program we offer. They can walk you through the sales process step by step. They believe in our products. But something isn’t clicking.”
She paused, then said something that stuck with me for years: “It’s like they know exactly what to do, but they’re not doing it. And honestly? I’m not sure I know how to fix that.”
That moment changed everything for me.
The Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves
I spent more than three decades in financial services, leading, and influencing teams that ranged from a handful of people to thousands of professionals across hundreds of locations. I’ve been responsible for portfolios worth tens of billions of dollars. I’ve driven wealth sales revenues that made finance teams very happy and kept executives off my back.
And in all that time, here’s the lie I watched organizations tell themselves over and over: “We just need better training.” Or its cousins: “We need a new CRM.” “We need to refresh our methodology.” “We need to redesign our incentive plan.”
None of those things are wrong, exactly. But they’re treating symptoms while the disease keeps spreading.
The real problem, the one that almost nobody wants to confront, is that most sales organizations have a massive gap between knowing and doing. Your people understand the strategy. They’ve memorized the methodology. They can probably recite your value proposition in their sleep. What they don’t have is the infrastructure that makes consistent execution inevitable rather than optional.
What I Learned Running Large Teams
When you’re responsible for that many people, you learn something humbling very quickly: your personal presence is a rounding error. You can’t be everywhere. You can’t motivate everyone individually. You can’t course-correct every deal or coach every conversation.
What you can do is build systems.
Not “systems” in the bureaucratic sense, not more reports and dashboards and approval workflows that slow everything down. I’m talking about the invisible architecture that shapes behavior even when nobody’s watching. The rhythm of how work gets done. The way goals connect to daily activity. The conversations that happen between managers and their teams when you’re not in the room.
I started calling this “execution infrastructure” because it’s the foundation that everything else sits on. And I noticed something fascinating: the locations that consistently performed weren’t the ones with the most talented people or the best territories. They were the ones where the infrastructure was solid.
The Five Things Nobody Wants to Fix
When I talk to executives about sales performance, they usually want to discuss tactics. What’s the latest methodology? Should we adopt this new technology? How do we train our people on consultative selling?
Those conversations are fine. But they’re avoiding the harder questions.
Let me ask you something: How are goals set in your organization? Not the official process, the real one. Does finance hand down a number that gets mathematically divided until it lands on individual salespeople? Do those salespeople understand why they have the targets they have? Can they draw a straight line between their daily activities and their annual goal? Does their manager have any say in what that goal should be?
In most organizations, the answer to at least two of those questions is “no.” And then we wonder why people aren’t motivated to hit numbers they don’t understand, that were set by people who’ve never seen their territory, using a process they had no input into.
Goal architecture is just one piece. There’s also how incentives influence behavior, not theoretically, but in practice. There’s the accountability rhythm: how often are managers having real performance conversations, and do they know how to have them? There’s execution discipline: what happens every day, every week, every month to keep the work moving forward? And there’s results management: how do you know if you’re winning or losing, and can you adjust fast enough to matter?
These aren’t exciting topics. They don’t make for splashy conference presentations. But they’re the difference between organizations that execute consistently and those that lurch from hero to hero, praying that top performers stick around long enough to carry everyone else.
The Incentive Conversation Nobody Has
I want to stay on incentives for a minute, because this is where I see organizations make the most expensive mistakes.
Here’s a test: Walk up to any salesperson in your organization and ask them to explain exactly how their compensation works. Not the basics, the details. What behaviors maximize their earnings? How does the accelerator work? What happens if they blow past their target in Q1 versus Q4? What’s the interaction between the different components of their plan?
I’ve done this exercise dozens of times. The results are almost always the same: people can’t explain it. They have a vague sense of what matters, but they can’t articulate the mechanics. Which means they’re not actually optimizing their behavior around your incentive plan. They’re guessing.
And here’s the thing, if you’re paying people to do certain things, and those people don’t understand what you’re paying them for, you’re just burning money. That fancy compensation plan your HR team spent six months designing? It’s not motivating the behaviors you think it is, because nobody understands it well enough to respond to it.
I learned early in my career that the best incentive plans are the ones a salesperson can calculate on the back of a napkin. If it takes a spreadsheet and a decoder ring, you’ve already lost.
The Manager Conversation That Isn’t Happening
Here’s another place where infrastructure breaks down: the rhythm between managers and their teams.
Most organizations have some version of a one-on-one process. Managers are supposed to meet with their people regularly, review performance, provide coaching. On paper, it looks great.
In practice? Those conversations often devolve into status updates. “Where are you on your numbers? What deals are closing this month? What’s in your pipeline?” The manager is gathering information to report up the chain. The salesperson is defending their forecast. Nobody’s coaching anything.
When I restructured the performance conversation rhythm in my organizations, I stopped asking managers to report on their teams’ numbers. They already knew the numbers. I started asking them what they were doing to change those numbers. What specific coaching had they provided this week? What skill gaps had they identified? What was their plan to help their struggling performers improve?
It was amazing how quickly the conversation shifted. Managers stopped being scorekeepers and started being coaches. Because the infrastructure, the questions we asked, the cadence we used, the accountability we created made coaching the path of least resistance.
Why This Matters Now
I’m writing this because I’m watching organizations respond to economic uncertainty by doubling down on the same approaches that weren’t working before. More training. More technology. More pressure on salespeople to “work harder”.
None of that will fix an infrastructure problem.
You can buy the most expensive CRM on the market, but if your salespeople don’t trust the data and your managers don’t use it for coaching, it’s just an expensive database. You can bring in world-class sales trainers, but if there’s no infrastructure to reinforce what people learned, the knowledge evaporates within weeks. You can design the most sophisticated incentive plan in your industry, but if people can’t understand it, it won’t change their behavior.
The organizations that will thrive in the next few years aren’t the ones with the best strategy. Strategy is table stakes. They’re the ones that have built execution infrastructure that makes strategy happen.
Five Questions to Ask Yourself This Week
If you’re a CEO, a Chief Revenue Officer, Leader responsible for driving production or anyone responsible for sales performance, I’d challenge you to sit with these questions:
Can your frontline salespeople explain exactly how their goals were set and do they believe those goals are achievable? If you asked them today, what would they say?
When was the last time you listened to a performance conversation between a manager and a salesperson? Was it coaching or scorekeeping?
If you removed your top three performers tomorrow, would your revenue collapse? Or does your infrastructure create consistent performers across the board?
How quickly can you identify when execution is breaking down and do you have a system to course-correct before it shows up in the quarterly numbers?
What would your best middle manager say about the support and resources they have to drive performance? Have you asked them lately?
The answers to these questions won’t always be comfortable. But they’ll tell you more about your revenue trajectory than any pipeline report ever will.
Methodology matters. Training matters. Technology matters. But none of it matters if you don’t have the infrastructure to translate it into consistent, daily execution.
Your people know what to do. The question is whether you’ve built the systems that make sure it gets done.
That’s the conversation I’d love to have.
About the Author
Rhonda Bettis is Chief Operating Officer and Managing Partner of Zach Global Inc.™, a boutique consulting firm specializing in organizational transformation and cross-border banking solutions. With more than 34 years of executive leadership Rhonda brings a practitioner’s perspective to revenue execution. She developed The Revenue Execution System™ to help organizations bridge the gap between sales strategy and consistent results.
I’d welcome a conversation about what’s working and what’s not in your sales organization. Connect with me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/rhondabettis or visit www.zachglobalinc.com