“Top performer analysis. Hardly ever talked about, almost never conducted”
In a recent poll of sales leaders and enablement professionals we asked “Do you know what attributes set your top performers apart from the rest?”. A staggering 45% had no defined or visible insight into this - based on the recent SalesForce news, Marc Benioff is also in this camp!
The most recent B2B Sales Benchmarks Report released from Pavilion and Ebsta concludes that “In 2023, we’ll all be expected to achieve more with less. For this to happen, we have to start with a better understanding of what is driving our success.” The report helpfully identifies the 4 key areas that it has found have the biggest impact on improving win rates and reducing sales cycles (relationships, engagement, sales qualification and time) and we have written extensively about driving improvements by setting goals in these areas, walking backwards to identify the lagging and then leading indicators that will show you are on the right path and then identifying and focusing the competencies that drive these.
But the other, often forgotten, way to identify the competencies that drive success in your sales team is by profiling your top performers. It sounds so simple but as Felix Kruger recently commented it is “Hardly talked about and almost never conducted.”
Let’s change that!
It sounds so obvious when you think about it - after all I’m sure many sales leaders have wondered how simple life be if they could just clone their top performers - well this really is the next best thing! But the fact that 28% of the respondents to our poll said that they “had an idea but it was based on ‘gut fee'l” suggests that not having the right metrics or data in place could be what is holding people back.
Having a competency framework at the heart of your enablement with consistent measurement is the key to making this possible. Take a look at the animation below for an example that maps competencies against closed revenue. It clearly identifies the positive attributes shared by the top performers in the top right quadrant as well as suggesting the skills gaps shared by those in the bottom left quadrant that you might want to focus on.
The other significant factor holding people back in this area is the longstanding disconnect between Enablement activity and Sales Performance measurement and the tools that they use. More often than not, Revenue Leaders won’t be able to connect their revenue goals with the attributes needed in their sales team to achieve them. Similarly, Enablement will not have visibility of the impact of their activity on revenue attainment - this disconnect is simply not good enough anymore!
Insight like this gives you the ability to align enablement with revenue goals and plan activity focused on the areas that you know are impacting performance. And in a world of doing more with less, this could be one of the biggest ways to impact performance.
