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Competencies

Developing your sales and marekting team(s) to ensure they are highly skilled at winning and retaining customers is critical and is often left to chance. Skill development not only drives consistent and repeatable sales results for you but also underpins staff engagement and retention.

Why this is important

Competencies of the sales and marketing team(s) and their managers/leaders is critical to successfully winning and retaining customers profitably. By their nature, sales teams are often not willing to admit gaps in knowledge or approaches and will learn by doing without always appreciating what good looks like. Being clear about the importance of individual competency, providing a framework for success and supporting individuals is critical to retaining a high performing sales team.

How to Grow Better and Faster

We recommend applying  a simple 4 step process:

Define what you need

  • Create a framework for the attributes, skills and knowledge that you need for each sales role within your organization based on the required output. This is sometimes called a competency framework.
  • Include definitions of what each competency means and what good looks like for that competency.
  • As part of this design, consider what your end-to-end sales process looks like to shape your needs

Assess your team(s)

  • Assess where your team is currently vs the defined competency framework.
  • Use a combination of methods to conduct assessment, including in-role observations (eg customer visits or calls), feedback from colleagues and from customers.

Develop the team

  • Develop individuals by putting in place a development plan or programme for them.
  • This is best developed for your/their specific needs and deployed over time – potentially as part of a development programme. It should address the gaps that exist vs the competency framework and may also develop existing strengths.
  • Using external providers to support these development interventions and programmes can bring external perspective and expertise.

Assure progress

  • Assure the individuals, managers and organisation that progress is being made towards the expected outputs.
  • Monitor and measure through ongoing observation, tangible sales/growth results and customer feedback. This is not only critical for management- but also for the individual – to ensure they are developing in role and career as required.
  • Putting a development plan in writing can also be beneficial. It should comprise learning by doing, learning by theory and learning from others.

Case Studies

Helping a global professional education company improve its sales team competency

This global team of tele based sales-people had no consistent approach to inheriting and nurturing  ‘marketing qualified leads’.  The team had a mixed experience of training and development and were incredibly open minded to outside support and ideas. The program for this team included a variety of interactive virtual training sessions over 4 months, culminating in a 2 day ‘on-site’ face to face program. NPS scores for the program were +95.

Supporting multiple sales teams in an electrical cable distributor to drive a standardised sales approach

This sales organisation had multiple teams within it, from international enterprise selling to UK regional to depot-based telesales. The whole company needed a consistent approach to converting inbound enquiries to quotes, while the field-based sales teams specifically needed to develop a nascent proactive outbound approach. A program of face to face, virtual and 121 coaching was delivered over 5 months to more than 60 employees.

Find out more

Read our Perspective on how to maximise your investment in formal sales skills development and/or get in touch.