The Power Of Marginal Gains To Win Sales – Part 4: Coaching Competency Into Your Sales Team

In a recent LinkedIn post, my business partner Andrew Davis, talked about how to measure salespeople and how it’s not enough just to assess their sales results but 3 key areas of their performance:

1.      Sales activity – prospecting, meetings, calls, follow ups etc

2.      Sales pipeline – the number of real opportunities to achieve forecast

3.      Sales competency – engaging with customers and securing their business.

In this article, I want to explore the 3rd item, COMPETENCY. Before I do however, I want to explain that at Gains4Sales Ltd, we subscribe to a belief that training salespeople, although important, if done in isolation, rarely results in seeing an increase in sales.

As a sales leader, you’ll no doubt have your own view or assessment concerning what constitutes a competent salesperson but if that view is that hitting target equals competency, then you’re leaving money on the table.

The issue I have with sales targets is that they’re often either based on pressure to achieve or exceed forecast or for the business to survive or they’re calculated based on data provided by salespeople.

The former requires a good, hard look at pipeline, one aspect of which is the accuracy of data entered into the company’s CRM (competency), for the latter (data from salepeople)….well, I’ve lost track of the number of CRM systems, used to calculate sales pipeline that are filled with inaccurate and out of date prospect/customer data.

Defining competency

One definition of Competency is ‘having the necessary ability, knowledge, or skill to do something successfully’. In the case of your salespeople, if you had to rate each, how would you score them out of 10 for the following competencies:

1. Prospecting – includes; telephone, email, social media, networking, event attendance.
2. Stakeholder engagement – are they constantly aware of and building relationships with all relevant influencers and decision makers or simply maintaining a ‘friendship’ with their ‘trusted’ contact, (who often doesn’t have sufficient influence to make the buying decision)?
3. Building rapport – the ability to build know, like and trust with new prospects and existing customers.
4. Qualification – are they asking the right questions – do they really understand the issues that keep your customer awake at night or do they simply present features and benefits?
5. Listening skills – are they great listeners or is it all about the presentation?
6. Investigative – do they manage each sales call/visit by focusing on the one product of interest right now or are they continually looking for opportunities to add further value?
7. Presentation skills – the ability to physically and verbally articulate the value proposition of your company’s products/services.
8. Negotiation – do they cave in at the first mention of the word ‘Discount’ or are they skilled negotiators?
9. Assertiveness – how well do they manage difficult situations – are they prepared to challenge customers, their colleagues, even management but do so, not in an aggressive or passive manner?
10. A strong ‘Why’ – do each of your salespeople have a strong sense of purpose – their ‘Why’? When was the last time you asked any of your salespeople why they get up in a morning? 
11. Planning and scheduling meetings/calls – are they territory or opportunity focused – do they simply ensure they cover a geographic area and take repeat orders or will they put themselves out to ensure regular visits to those accounts that present the biggest opportunity?  
12. Time management – do they turn up for work and for their appointments on time, do they complete admin and other tasks when required?
13. Event management – how well do they manage their time at events and conferences – do they research who else is attending, make pre-event appointments or simply sit on a stool or stand in a corner waiting for potential customers to flock to them?
14. Investigative – do they manage each sales call/visit by focusing on the one product of interest right now or are they continually looking for opportunities to add further value?
15. Deal resurrection – when a prospect hasn’t been heard of for a while, how good are they at bringing them back to life?
16. Resilience – what strategies do each of your salespeople have to deal with the peaks and troughs of sales, especially the troughs?

 By focusing on each competency and having your salespeople make a 1% improvement with each, will have a compounding effect that will see your sales team move from average to outstanding.

So, how would you rate each of your salespeople against these competencies? Remember, salesperson competency is just one aspect of achieving sales success, but it is an important one, which can help you avoid the difficult conversation, when your CEO asks you for the company’s sales forecast.

Thank you for viewing my post and would you please share it with anyone you feel would benefit from the advice provided.

If you have any private questions on the subject matter you can connect with me on LinkedIn and send me a message, or else you’ll find my contact details on my LinkedIn profile uk.linkedin.com/in/stevephillip

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