Sales Competency Ratings Guide
Sales Competency Frameworks
First thing’s first, make sure you have a clear competency framework for each role in sales. That needs to be from entry level SDR, right up to Sales Leaders. This needs to cover the skills, behaviours and objectives that someone needs to have in order to excel at their current role. If you don’t currently have one, this handy whitepaper will get you started: Sales Competency Whitepaper.
In building out your competency framework, you need to look at it in the context of HOW you are going to use it and rate against it. This enables you to be clear on gaps and development pathways.
The Rating Scale
Be clear on how you are going to rate your sales reps against each competency on the framework. We like either a 1-5 or 1-4 rating scale.
If you want a broad brush approach, you could opt for something like:
This broad approach is simpler when it comes to defining your competency framework and is best suited to smaller sales teams.
On the flip side, you open this up to more subjectivity on behalf of the Manager and rep.
If you have a lot of new starters or promotions, many of our customers (including ourselves) choose to allow for an ‘unknown’ category in the rating system so you can adapt it to look more like this:
By having a ‘too early to tell’ at the beginning of the scale, it gives the sales rep and Manager time to build up a bank of evidence while they settle in.
This is much better than just not rating them at all as it gives clarity on their position.
There is much debate on whether it is better to opt for an odd or even number for your ratings scale. The premise being that human nature is more inclined to plumb for the middle ground so end up with a lot of 3’s. There’s also the challenge of differentiating between ‘Exceed expectations’ and ‘Exceptional’. If you’d prefer a 1-4 rating scale then we would recommend you simply remove the 5:
The above simple rating system is a great place to start.
However, remember, what you are looking for when managing competencies and performance is consistency and objectivity.
Therefore, the more guidance you can provide to both your sales leaders and sales reps on HOW they should be rated and what this means, the better.
Instead, you could opt for a more indicator led guide such as:
This approach requires a little more thought up front thought as you need to add indicators to your competencies but it will pay off in greater consistency and objectivity across your sales teams.
This level of guidance for large, distributed teams is essential if you really want this to work as a career progression ladder.
This type of scale needs to be mapped to your competencies and the negative or positive indicators you want your Managers to observe. This will give you consistency and a level of objectivity across your sales teams.
Let’s take “Problem Discovery” as an example competency.
Positive indicators would be:
Leads with problem questions
Digs further into the pain to uncover related implications
The customer acknowledged the pain
Has a high call to meeting or meeting to opportunity ratio (depending on their role)
Negative Indicators would be:
Jumps straight to solution without understanding customer challenges
Only asks situational questions
Collected no evidence of customer pain or challenges
Has a low call to meeting or meeting to opportunity ratio (depending on their role)
If you don’t want to use negative indicators then simply adapt it to remove this element to correlate with the positive indicators in your competency descriptions only.
Ratings Vs Job Levels
We often get asked the question on whether the ratings should align to the job role. The short answer is yes, but not perhaps in a direct correlation way. i.e. a rating of 4 does not indicate you are a ‘level 4’ job role in your company. Instead think of it this way:
The rating is distinct for that job role and that competency.
e.g. If I am an SDR, I can be rated a 5 for the requirements of ‘Problem Discovery’ specifically for my role. When I move role to a ‘Strategic SDR’, the competency remains the same but the indicators change, therefore my rating is then changes to apply to the new requirements:
Approaching your ratings Vs job levels this way has a positive impact on your career progression frameworks.
You can now set minimum ratings to enable you to complete your promotion pathway, e.g. as a current SDR, you must be rated a ‘4’ to be considered for promotion to a Strategic SDR.
You can read more on that here: SDRs and Career Progression.
Taking the time to build your competency framework and set out the expectations for each role, alongside choosing the right ratings system for your business will pay dividends.
You’ll get consistency and a greater degree of objectivity meaning you can scale confidently across the whole team.
You’ll understand exactly where the gaps are and can create structured, automated pathways to support your reps on their development journeys.