Chapter 7

A Call to Action

Nothing endures but change.

—Heraclitus

In chapter 2, we introduced the concept of balancing capacity with competence. Sales capacity can look and feel different in different organizations. Some organizations may develop specific go-to-market plans based on market research or innovation, while others gather their top sales executives to identify critical opportunities with customers in strategic markets or industries. Some organizations may implement specific process improvements designed to help salespeople sell more, while others invest in new technology to manage the buyer-seller relationship.

All of those efforts can improve or increase sales capacity and, while they are important, this book focuses on a critical and often overlooked contributor to excellence: sales competence.

The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model defines the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for sales competence. It provides a blueprint for successfully engineering the performance of sales professionals, showing them how to adapt and change in response to the challenges of global business without losing their focus on the customer. The model defines how sales professionals should operate, what responsibilities they should carry, and how they should interact to generate revenue and support the mission of the organization.

The new economy requires fresh thinking to meet the sophisticated demands of today’s customer. The “old school” method of gauging performance just by the numbers is no longer good enough. Today’s environment requires a more rigorous approach of identifying and measuring the competencies necessary to truly separate those who react to demand versus those who can create it.

—Jeff Del Rossa, Global Practice Leader. Sales Talent Optimization Practice, Development Dimensions International

To be more specific, sales professionals must fully understand the complexity of the system within which they operate. They must become better at solving problems, responding to market conditions, turning data into information, and assimilating it as knowledge. This requires advanced skills, and it is those skills that will allow sales professionals to continue to provide value to customers.

Assessing Your Organization’s Readiness for Change

The typical sales organization conducts activities across the spectrum of marketing, selling, and fulfillment. Sales teams are often given goals that are loosely defined and difficult to measure:

• Drive revenue for the selling organization.
• Create and maintain successful client relationships.
• Build trust and loyalty with every client interaction.
• Capture more market share for the selling organization.
• Align the functional areas of selling to the vision and strategy of the selling organization.
• Maximize sales process efficiency.
• Maintain visibility and accountability through technology.

A solid understanding of professional selling competencies and an intentional process for developing those competencies can help salespeople set, understand, and exceed these goals, thus driving revenue and improving performance in your world-class sales organization. But this is easier said than done. If your organization is like many others around the world, you have probably witnessed several shifts in how your organization approaches markets and buyers. These shifts make it more difficult to attain goals. For example, your organization’s selling efforts likely have shifted

• from an ad-hoc selling approach to a process-centric selling approach
• from a focus on a single-transaction decision to a focus on how buyers make specific decisions about value
• from product or service selling to solution-oriented or consultative selling
• from an understanding of the transaction experience to an understanding of the customer experience
• from hiring to fill a position to hiring for talent
• from opportunistic revenue results to strategic revenue generation.

All of these shifts require a balance between capacity and competence. While many managers strive for balance, success will depend on where your organization is and where it wants to go. So where should you start? The ASTD sales effectiveness levels can help you assess your organization’s critical work-related outputs and how well these outputs support your sales goals. Each of the five levels builds upon the previous ones and is critical to striking the right balance between competence and capacity. It is important to note that these levels are not completely hierarchical. In other words, you can start building the higher levels before completing the build out of the prior one.

The levels are sales science, sales process, sales relationships, sales technology, and sales competence. As your organization progresses through the five levels, your understanding of the keys to world-class sales effectiveness will become clearer and more sophisticated. Assessing your organization against the sales effectiveness levels (see figure 7-1) will help you understand how well your organization balances capacity and competence to achieve desired results.

This book is a tremendous resource for building an outstanding sales organization. It should be regularly referenced by everyone who works with sales organizations, particularly training and organizational development specialists. It provides an eminently comprehensive body of knowledge on all aspects of sales operations and sales force capabilities.

—Lance Cotton, Google Enterprise Sales Training

Level I: Sales Science

It all starts with sales science: what you are doing. Your organization has probably spent a great deal of time defining its approaches, methodologies, and processes for selling. Your team has probably worked hard at finding out what buyers want. You have tried to teach salespeople how to sell by making a sales presentation, utilizing negotiation techniques, or leaving a compelling voice mail. To be effective, you had to stay focused on the transaction itself. By isolating the transaction as a specific moment in time, and building the “science” necessary to control as many variables as possible, you could tell new salespeople and sales managers what happened during the sale, why it happened, and how to avoid any missteps in the future. No matter how simple the product or complex the solution, your sales team needs to explain, teach, and influence.

Level II: Sales Process

Once you understand what you are trying to do as a sales organization, it is time to define how. Your organization worked hard on fully understanding what occurs between buyer and seller within an individual transaction and, as a result, has probably completed more transactions. You then defined a unique series of repeatable steps that culminate in a transaction. By analyzing how sales work is accomplished, sales managers and salespeople are able to train better; facilitate transactions better; and, most important, understand what it takes to sell effectively. As products and solutions continue to become more complicated, the sales process must be in place to cope with the higher level of complexity.

Level III: Sales Relationships

Once you have a sales process, it is time to focus on the relationship. Your organization probably has helped its salespeople shift from a transaction focus to a relationship focus. That change has had a dramatic effect on the salesperson’s role, transforming it from simple order taker to strategic partner.

Once that relationship was established, buyers broadened their focus beyond limited issues and needs. They began looking for solutions to business problems, as opposed to purchasing products and services and managing their own implementation. Organizations began requiring more sophisticated back-office tracking of vendors as well as protecting shareholder value. As a result, salespeople began helping the buyer facilitate a buying decision—consultative selling. Salespeople were taught to become stronger problem solvers and to engage multiple stakeholders so that they were not subject to the whims of one decision maker. Other members of the sales team were brought into the transaction to guide the various steps of the decision process.

Level IV: Sales Technology

Once you have solidly defined the science, standardized the process, and cultivated relationships for maximum influence, it is time to focus on technology. Your organization may have struggled to cope with the Internet boom and the increased use of technology to manage knowledge. Once sales processes were well defined and buyer behavior became well understood, organizations turned to technology to help speed up salesperson reaction times to market trends, keep them abreast of important industry news, and develop a more solid understanding of their buyers. Your sales team may have turned to personal computers and handheld devices to help them stay on top of the rapidly changing business world. You may have even rolled out a customer relationship management system or sales force automation tool in an attempt to understand and map the entire transaction experience of the buyer. Technology can help your organization understand the initial needs of the customer, help deliver and fulfill a product or service, or handle invoicing, all to create the best possible transaction experience.

Level V: Sales Competence

With the firm foundation of science, process, relationship, and technology properly laid, it becomes time for the ongoing improvement of competence. Despite the myriad forces of change driving business today, understanding and consulting with buyers in pursuit of mutually beneficial solutions is still a relevant approach. The need continues for sales professionals to build and renew customer relationships, monitor and understand buyers’ changing needs, and deliver ongoing value. This approach is difficult to implement consistently in a dynamic, constantly changing sales environment, but success comes with a holistic understanding of salesperson competence. Because buyers are increasingly demanding unique answers to their unique problems, salespeople must be able to customize and personalize their own selling approaches. This requires deep understanding and advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Attaining all five levels of effectiveness for world-class selling requires buy-in and effort by multiple stakeholders. Whether you are a workplace learning and performance professional or an academic, a sales manager or a consultant, you can apply the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model to improve sales performance in your organization. Here is how.

Sales Trainer Applications

Training managers oversee a staff of practitioners that includes instructional designers, human resource managers, sales consultants, subcontractors, and salespeople. Trainers will find the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model useful in helping them to

Plan for and execute continuous performance improvement. To follow best practices, your training department will require staffing by skilled people who can

• assess the competency levels of existing training staff, line managers, and others who can play a part in sales team performance improvement
• manage outsourcing opportunities
• hire vendors to assist with any facet of the sales function
• identify or clarify work expectations for sales team members
• design jobs, work, or tasks for sales team members
• oversee sales training solutions and provide feedback to sales trainers
• offer advice and consultation about career planning to sales team members
• identify the professional development needs of sales team members
• document the accomplishments of sales team members
• train people who work with sales team members.

The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model clearly shows the knowledge, skills, abilities, and areas of expertise that are necessary for sales team training and development.

Prepare for the future. Training managers bear responsibility for setting a direction for their departments or functions. The trends identified in the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provide valuable insight for designing sales strategies, processes, and tools to anticipate or react to those trends.

Reinvent the role of the training department. Many organizations are taking stock of what they expect from a training department and reinventing it to focus on improving sales team performance. However, transitioning from a traditional training function to a workplace learning and performance approach is a major change that requires careful planning, clear goals and expectations, involvement by key stakeholders, and continuous evaluation. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can offer an externally validated benchmark of what a reinvented training department and its staff should be doing.

Workplace Learning and Performance Applications

Workplace learning and performance (WLP) professionals manage employee learning and development, measure its impact on performance, and demonstrate business results based on the performance change. WLP professionals hold the same goals as sales leaders across the globe, which include

• improving human performance
• balancing individual and organizational needs
• building knowledge capital within the organization
• improving financial return.

By leveraging the specific skills and expertise of workplace learning and performance to prepare salespeople to meet the current challenges of their jobs, organizations adopt a solutions-based, performance-oriented approach that generates results.

WLP builds on a systematic process for analyzing and responding to individual, group, and organizational needs. WLP professionals can help organizations develop and hone competence through a variety of interventions, such as designing and delivering sales training or providing sales coaching. Figure 7-2 shows some of the techniques WLP professionals might apply.

WLP professionals should focus their efforts on developing sales team member knowledge, skills, and abilities based on the roles that the team members play. The goals must remain clear—attain business outcomes and achieve sales results. Adapting the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model for use in sales training, sales team member development, and organizational performance can align processes, tools, and activities. More important, the model can help sales team members learn, from basic skills to high technology and management, practices that are immediately applicable to their jobs, duties, and roles.

The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can help you to do the following:

Achieve alignment between learning efforts and the sales process. The model clearly shows which competencies and areas of expertise are necessary for multiple roles within the sales organization. By adapting the sales process to leverage and maximize those competencies, organizations can improve their execution without sacrificing revenue generation. Further, the clear link between process and capability will make decision making about learning priorities and resources much easier.

Identify professional development needs. By using the model as a template for competency assessment, sales trainers can identify team members’ professional development needs based on the roles that they play and can develop training classes or other learning programs specifically to meet those needs.

Prompt coaching on performance. Use the model to direct and improve the coaching that sales team members receive. By using the roles, competencies, and outputs described here as a reference point, sales team members can solicit concrete and timely feedback from customers and other stakeholders about their performance, which enables continuous individual improvement.

Design jobs or tasks. By understanding what sales team members know and can do and then aligning the sales process with those competencies, it becomes far easier for organizations to design jobs or tasks. Always with the desired outputs in mind, the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provides a framework for maximizing salesperson capability and productivity.

Set work expectations and competency levels. By adopting the model and applying it to every role within the sales organization, you can set consistent expectations. For sales team members who want to transition from traditional selling into other roles, the model shows where to begin and what competencies they should seek to develop. They can assess, through various tools, their competence level in their desired role, then create a development plan to maximize strengths and minimize weaknesses.

Implement talent management practices. Sales team members who want to progress in their careers can clearly see and pursue the path to advancement. Further, the model is equally applicable for sales team members interested in moving to other functions such as sales training or operations.

Speak the same language. This book and the model it describes provide the basis for a common language across teams, departments, and organizations. By documenting work accomplishments in terms of the roles, competencies, and outputs described here, sales team members can show their contributions more easily and communicate across organizational boundaries more effectively.

Provide internal performance consulting. When sales trainers work to identify and address performance gaps that can drive revenue generation, they adopt a new focus for their work—that of internal performance consulting. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provides a useful and flexible framework to guide consulting engagements and assess learning and performance needs.

Prepare for the future. By questioning experts about their competency needs both now and three years into the future, ASTD has taken a future-focused approach to developing this competency model. The model takes current and future business trends into account as it describes how sales team members can prepare themselves for the future. As the sales profession heads toward an increased emphasis on results and performance, sales team members can adopt the model to anticipate and address the moving target that those results represent.

Maintain ethical standards. In the 2008 ASTD market research study referenced in chapter 2, sales team members clearly identified “making ethical decisions” as one of the top five skills necessary for success in their jobs (ASTD, 2008). Applying the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model consistently across the sales organization and across buyer-seller relationships provides clear conduct expectations and relieves salespeople of much of the stress that accompanies ethical dilemmas. Setting out clear performance expectations, even within the context of high revenue expectations, allows salespeople to remain focused on the buyer’s best interests and balance them with individual and organizational needs.

Sales Team Member Applications

Empowered and involved sales team members are willing and able to analyze their own performance gaps, choose appropriate improvement solutions, implement the solutions, and evaluate results. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provides guidelines for this process. All salespeople, not just quota-carrying specialists, have a key stake in development. According to the trends identified in the study, sales team members must take more accountability and responsibility for sales results, no matter how long they have been with your organization. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can help support a sense of ownership for personal development through:

Synchronizing to the customer’s buying process. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model suggests many competencies that help sales team members maintain proper emphasis on the crucial buyer-seller relationship. This helps them assess every buyer interaction and determine the most appropriate activity to help facilitate buyer decision making.

Employing improved time management skills. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps sales team members determine the most appropriate course of action when planning their daily, weekly, or monthly activities through more clearly defined role expectations. Armed with a more solid understanding of the roles they play, they can balance the demands placed on their time from multiple stakeholders who often have conflicting interests.

Practicing continuous personal improvement. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can help sales team members take a proactive, continuous-improvement approach to personal development and their ability to manage the sales process, leverage technology, and share knowledge internally and externally.

Increasing personal influence. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps sales team members identify the competencies required to create and build influence with their customers. Each of the foundational competencies provides a detailed breakdown of the critical elements for building the kind of influence they need to effectively manage, direct, and advise their customers.

Sales Manager Applications

Sales managers bear primary responsibility for serving customers, achieving team goals, dealing with suppliers, and meeting distributor needs. In many organizations, sales managers are positioned to enable and measure the execution of the sales process. Likewise, sales managers are positioned around direct service delivery. Sales managers can work with their training and operations colleagues to manage organizational resources more effectively in support of the sales function. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provides a useful tool for sales managers who wish to interact effectively with the service, fulfillment, delivery, training, operations, or manufacturing functions of the organization.

The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model also can provide a common language by which to facilitate communication across departmental boundaries. By referring to the roles, competencies, and outputs of the sales profession, managers across departments can share a common language and work together to effect change by

Selecting the right sales organization members. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can help the sales manager assess the sales organization against a definition of world class during the interview process. Because many organizations focus on cultural fit and an assessment of what is required to sell in their organization, the sales manager can determine fit by clearly understanding the organization’s support of the sales team (development, operations, management, and compensation) found within the model.

Analyzing and coaching performance. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model offers a simple model for troubleshooting performance problems in the sales system or for planning solutions to improve performance. When sales managers become familiar with the model, they can become an internal consultant and become more adept in identifying problems, approaching salespeople, and delivering coaching.

Choosing learning solutions, managing change, and evaluating results.The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model suggests many possible causes for sales team performance gaps and identifies many possible solutions for change. By becoming expert at understanding the model, sales managers will learn to choose appropriate training solutions, manage change, and evaluate results.

Clearly defining expectations. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps sales managers define what is expected of team members within the sales system. By focusing on the entire selling system and the key players within it, sales managers can ensure they provide clear guidance, make appropriate changes, and provide coaching that addresses any confusion within the system.

Coaching for improved performance. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps sales managers better understand their team members and offers a validated dictionary of competencies that can be honed through one-on-one discussions that help motivate, change behavior, and improve focus.

Consultant Applications

Internal or external consultants working in the sales profession are often brought in to strengthen the capability and performance of the overall sales group. Sales and nonsales executives alike often rely upon the consultant’s insights and past experiences when making recommendation to sales leadership. Consultants are often responsible for assessing the sales organization, recommending appropriate solutions, and guiding the implementation of those solutions. Often, the solutions center on people dynamics, like organizational structure, people processes, information flow, and behavioral alignment. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provides an externally validated benchmarking tool to use with clients to increase the capability and performance of the overall sales system, not just the sales transaction. It will help consultants to:

Assess the sales system. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps consultants see the big picture of the sales system’s roles and behavioral functions. By understanding what world class looks like, they can provide insight into how clients are delivering each of these elements. This will help client organizations to separate and accurately identify people-related gaps from nonpeople-related gaps.

Identify appropriate solutions. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps with defining and prioritizing what solutions to propose. Organizational performance is driven by organizational competence, which is driven by individual competence. Because the model breaks desired outputs into roles and competencies, it can serve as the starting point for engineering the results the system needs to achieve through its people.

Guide implementation. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can help consultants guide and strengthen the implementation of solutions. Using the same competencies that sales team members use in delivering their services, they can leverage the model for their own performance.

Effect continuous organizational improvement. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps consultants continuously assess clients for ongoing improvement by providing the critical anchor points for evaluating the organization. The roles, areas of expertise, and foundational competencies are universal in their application and can serve as the starting point for ensuring that the organization’s sales system is functioning as it was designed.

Become a trusted advisor. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model helps consultants analyze and improve their ability to become trusted advisors to their customers. Partnering competencies, insight competencies, solution competencies, and effectiveness competencies provide a roadmap for attaining this status.

Academic Applications

Administrators, faculty, and staff working in academic sales education programs can use the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model as a framework for assessing program needs, planning program enhancements and courses, assessing learners, formulating and implementing research, advising learners enrolled in the programs (or considering enrollment), developing faculty, and evaluating program processes and outcomes. It can be helpful in:

Assessing needs. What are the needs of sales learners and their prospective employers? The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model provides a framework for conducting academic program needs assessments based on the future roles those learners will play and the knowledge, skills, and abilities they will require for success.

Planning programs and courses. Professionals in academic sales education programs can use the model as a guide to establishing new courses or revising old courses in professional selling, within the context of the roles, competencies, outputs, and future trends identified, and benchmarking programs or courses against offerings at other academic institutions.

Assessing learners. The model can help in assessing differences among individual student competencies and the competencies required for success in professional selling, which can become the basis for individualized learning plans or courses of study.

Formulating and implementing a research agenda. Because the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model was based on an exploratory study and is intended to be an evolving process, it furnishes the basis for additional research. After all, not all important questions about professional selling have been answered here. The following questions warrant further investigation:

• How do the roles, competencies, outputs, and future trends identified by this study match the expectations of key sales-team stakeholders such as CEOs, senior executives, middle managers, and customers?
• What similarities and differences exist among the roles, competencies, and outputs identified in the United States and those in other nations or cultures?
• How does emerging technology affect the roles, competencies, and outputs of a sales professional’s work?
• What roles or competencies are the most important for specific industries?
• How do roles or competencies change depending upon the size of the organization or the markets served?

Advising learners. Students enrolled in academic programs on professional selling have individualized needs for advice about what courses to take, what career goals to pursue, and how to build the competencies they need to realize their career goals. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model is a useful tool for organizing such discussions. By using it, faculty and students can ensure that they are using common terminology.

Managing and developing faculty. Faculty members who teach in academic programs in marketing or selling must stay current if they are to teach effectively and provide appropriate guidance to students. Just as the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model is a useful tool for assessing individual student competencies and developing student plans of study, it also can be useful for assessing faculty competencies and suggesting professional development activities to build them.

Evaluating program processes and results. Just as sales team members are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that their efforts lead to payoffs for their learners and their organizations, academic programs are under pressure to demonstrate that they are delivering effective results. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model is a standard against which to evaluate academic program processes and results. External review teams called in to audit instructional processes and outcomes of academic selling programs may rely on the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model as a benchmark against which to assess what competencies students should be building and what outputs students should be capable of producing when finished with their programs.

Conclusion

The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model was created with the input of more than 2,000 thought leaders, experts, and practitioners in the sales profession. It was created by sales professionals for sales professionals. The model provides a common language and framework for selling competence that defines the field—for today and for years to come.

The lasting value of the model is ensured by its broad perspective: It defines the way that people operate within the sales system, whether they are directly responsible for revenue generation or support those who are, rather than speaking from a narrow, transaction-based approach. It assumes—and celebrates— the fact that anyone who works within the sales team is a part of its success and, as such, deserves intentional, focused professional development to ensure his or her own success.

“Sales” has long been about metrics, revenue, and processes. Salesperson training and development have been conducted with little regard for the holistic effort required for sustained sales excellence. Aligning business needs and revenue goals with sales training, situated in a context that values long-term relationships and ongoing employee development, can dramatically improve the return-on-investment that your company realizes for its sales training dollars.

Although many sales organizations include workplace learning and performance professionals, not all do. The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model can help the people in your organization responsible for sales training— whatever their job title—speak a common language, pursue the same goals, and realize a shared vision of excellence that is world class.