What are the most important Sales Competencies?
Defining, developing and measuring sales competencies is essential for building and retaining high performance sales teams.
But where do most Sales Leaders spend their time?
What are the top competencies Sales Leaders focus on with their teams?
We looked at 2 sources of data and feedback:
The wonderful world of LinkedIn
The competency aligned activity data within e4enable across all of our customers.
Here’s what the LinkedIn Community had to say (in no particular order):
Prospecting, Qualification & Planning - Understanding the fit between both business 'personalities', product/service and a prospects need/want before you even start on anything else (Paula Williams)
Navigating the functions (Christoper Capon)
Engaging discovery sessions (Christoper Capon)
Setting next actions (Christoper Capon)
Discovery (Tim Knowles)
Active Listening (Mark Butcher)
Emotional Intelligence and Interpersonal Skills (Rob Moon)
A Robust Sales Structure (Rob Moon)
Questioning Skills (Rob Moon)
Engaging with the Buying Centre (Me)
Solution Understanding (Me)
Thank you to all those who gave their feedback 🙏.
It’s important to recognise the different competencies required for different roles and different organisations. If you are selling £1m+ ERP systems you may have a different set of focused competencies than say a commodity product sold by a more junior team. However, in all the feedback I received, Discovery related competencies were a common theme.
What I did like in the feedback was some of the often forgotten areas… Christoper Capon highlighted ‘Navigating the Functions’ - the importance of understanding the different internal departments in an organisation and how to get the best out of them. This is perhaps more relevant to larger organisations but important none-the-less.
So how did this compare against the anonymised data we analysed from our own sales competency coaching platform?
We looked at the spread of objectives and coaching activities completed across sales competencies for all users of our platform.
When we looked at competency areas, there was a reasonably healthy split across Skill based (54%), Will (or mindset) based (25%) and Process (21%) based competencies.
There is unsurprisingly a strong lean towards Skills versus Will and Process but the results are encouraging showing that there is a move towards coaching the ‘whole person’ rather than just against one particular area.
This widely correlates with the feedback above. If we classify each of these into areas:
Prospecting, Qualification & Planning - Skill
Navigating the functions - Skill
Engaging discovery sessions - Skill
Setting next actions - Skill
Discovery - Skill
Active Listening - Skill
Emotional Intelligence and Interpersonal Skills- Will
A Robust Sales Structure - Process
Questioning Skills - Skill
Engaging with the Buying Centre - Skill
Solution Understanding - Skill
Skills win out as perhaps they should…
In the LinkedIn feedback, the most highlighted skill was related to ‘Discovery’, whereas the most focused skill via our data was in fact ‘Solution Understanding’ - this could relate to the maturity of the organisations or sales teams at play. Onboarding new cohorts, for example, will skew the figures towards getting to grips with new propositions.
The top ‘Process’ based competency according to e4enable’s data was ‘Use of Qualification Process’ against the LinkedIn feedback where ‘A robust sales structure’ was highlighted. Of course, this could be open to interpretation and both could refer to the same thing!
And finally, the top ‘Will’ based competency was not a surprise to the team here - it was being ‘open to learning’ - a key foundation stone of any team looking to excel and improve and one that can be coached, encouraged and even measured!
If you’d like to see the full infographic showing the results of our analysis, you can find it here:
UPDATE:
In our webinar taking a deep dive into sales competencies, we asked Aaron Evans what his favourite sales competency is: