3 Steps to Operationalise your Sales Competency Framework
Before we start, I’m going to hazard a guess here… you fall into 1 of 3 categories:
You are thinking about creating a sales competency framework because you’ve heard they are really cool
You have a sales competency framework but it is languishing untouched in a dusty filing system after an initial flurry of activity
You live a breathe your sales competency framework, it sits at the heart of everything you do but it’s a bloomin’ nightmare of admin to maintain
Now that you have unburdened yourself with that truth, and assuming you are not currently satisfied with you status quo, you are in the right place!
We’d like to give you a few tips to avoid your beautiful sales competency framework a) becoming unloved and gathering dust and b) causing you a headache of admin to maintain.
Tip: If you are in the (1) category, you might want to take a look at our handy whitepaper that will help you define your sales competency framework. Don’t forget to pop back here once you’ve had a read.
Step 1: Align it to your Sales KPIs
Right now, your sales teams are driven and reviewed predominantly by hard metrics and dashboards from CRM. Lagging indicators like quota achieved and leading indicators like conversions of meetings to opps.
Most sales teams live and breathe these metrics. They are understood, they are adopted, they are tracked. Importantly, they form part of the natural evaluation and operating rhythm of sales.
To plonk a whole new framework on top of your sales team and sales leaders without articulating how it relates to their own internal measures is a path to a dusty old unused framework.
By aligning each of your competencies to the indicators it most impacts, you MAKE IT RELEVANT to the target audience.
You also set yourself, and the sales teams, up to be able to use the framework and measure it more easily.
Tip: Download our whitepaper on aligning leading indicators to your sales competency framework to get you started, or read our short blog here.
Step 2: Ownership
Category (3)’s will be familiar with this one. You are tracking sales competencies but that requires you to:
Periodically send out spreadsheets to your sales leaders, asking them to update their sales reps’ ratings
Chasing the sales leaders to complete them
Chasing the sales leaders again
Collating all that data into a meaningful single view / view by team to understand ongoing gaps
Repeat
What you’ve got here is an ownership and accountability issue.
Once again, the sales competency framework sits outside of sales. It is an additional ‘ask’ from sales who are already handling competing pressures and a ton of admin.
Aaron Evans shares his view on where ownership of your sales competency framework should sit
Instead, make your sales competency framework consumable for sales leaders and sales reps. Have them own it and align everything to it.
Have it embedded into a 1-2-1 coaching template so sales leaders have a practical use of it and it can guide coaching conversations. Step 1 will help with that as it will show sales leaders how to align it to performance gaps.
Align your learning and development content / resources around it. Make it easy to index and find content based on the competency gaps rather than any other naming convention. Only build new content based on the gaps you are seeing in team sales competencies.
Align career development and pay reviews to it.
Talk about wins in the same language. What competencies impacted a particular win or great news item - peer learning and reinforcement is proven to be effective.
Have it centralised so that updates out in the teams are immediately fed into your central view for actionable intelligence.
Step 3: Measure it
In fact, don’t just measure it, publicise the measurements and report it up and down the organisation.
In step 1, you aligned your sales competency framework with the key indicators.
Show your dashboard and performance benchmarks by skill or behaviour.
e.g. Those that score above expectation in sales competency ‘Problem Discovery’, see an average order value of x% higher
After completing training courses associated with sales competency ‘Deal Control’ attendees saw deal cycles reduce from 90 days to 30 days.
By measuring the outcomes, publicising the successes, and addressing the gaps, you will demonstrate the value of having the sales competency framework in the first place.
There is of course a 4th option where you have reached nirvana and you’re sales competency framework not only sits at the heart of everything you do but is admin free and a living, breathing thing of joy…but it would mean you were a customer of e4enable :) and I didn’t want to make you feel bad.
If you want to join the club, take a peek or just jump in and request a demo!