Chapter 3

A Model of World-Class Sales Competency

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

—W. Edwards Deming

As the world of selling has become more complex, so have its demands on salespeople. Over the past 15 years, researchers have found that one of the key determinants of sales team member performance was role variability. For example, within the turbulent business environment, sales professionals fill multiple roles, both formally and informally, and are faced with making many decisions that drive the outcomes of their work. Sales team members who clearly understand their roles are those who are most successful in their work.

Conversely, a vaguely defined role can have a negative impact on a salesperson’s job satisfaction and performance. It can impair his or her ability to communicate with other salespeople and understand what is necessary for success. Sales trainers and sales managers often are tasked with helping salespeople who are struggling. Unfortunately, many of the approaches available to them do not really address the problem. Those outmoded approaches do not encompass the wide variety of processes, tools, or resources that world-class sales performance requires and fail to approach it as an integrated system. Effective sales training helps salespeople and their managers

• close more business deals
• decrease new-hire ramp-up times
• accelerate the development of high performers and sales leaders
• retain high performers and sales leaders
• implement robust coaching programs
• manage important customer-facing knowledge
• enable business growth-oriented change
• design and deliver relevant training.

A clear definition of world-class sales competencies can help organizations better prepare salespeople to tackle the increasingly complex challenges of selling in a global marketplace with collapsed timeframes and sophisticated solutions. It is time to evolve the way organizations view that preparation and to change to a more systematic competency mindset from the just-in-time, on-the-job skill acquisition that many companies have used. As part of that, the current focus must shift.

Developing an Externally-Focused, Market-Driven Model

It is critical that organizations adopt a market-oriented view when designing and developing sales training. Competency models based on internal systems, processes, and tools will miss the mark. An externally focused model, however, based on market changes and incorporating customer needs and industry trends, will help organizations drive more revenue.

This focus on the external market is proven to work. According to HR Chally, a consulting firm headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, competencies form the foundation for superior customer relationships (2008). In today’s buying and selling relationships, customers expect salespeople to change along with them. They expect salespeople to be professionals who can understand changes in the customer’s business and to identify and satisfy their needs.

In conducting the research for World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies, the ASTD research team convened a special session of advisory panelists to discuss changing buyer expectations and how those expectations create the need for new sales competencies. They suggested that buyers most want:

Business understanding and savvy. Salespeople must deeply understand the customer’s business. This means knowing the customers’ systems, strategies, challenges, and organizational culture. Intimate customer knowledge is now a prerequisite to being a value-added professional.

Creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. When buyers have a business problem and pursue outside assistance, it is frequently because they perceive their problem as unique and unsuited to conventional internal solutions. They want innovation and fresh ideas for solving their problems. This type of thinking is a major source of value in today’s salesperson.

Problem solving. Customers want salespeople to think beyond technical features and functions to the actual implementation of the product or service in the customer’s unique business environment. Customers want to know what the offering will do for them. The new sales professional must be a business consultant who can visualize a solution and ensure that it delivers results for the customer.

Accessibility. If anything has changed in the workplace in the past decade, it is the connectivity of today’s workforce. Desk phones, desktop computers, and pagers have been replaced by cell phones, laptops, and mobile communication devices, creating a customer expectation that sellers are available 24/7.

Personal accountability. Customers are tired of pass-the-buck sellers. They do not want a salesperson to close the deal and run; they want to work with a business partner who is personally committed to a successful outcome. Business-to-business customers are usually accountable for the results inside their organizations, and they want a partner in that accountability.

Loyalty and team spirit. Customers have little or no control over what happens inside the selling company, yet the inner workings of the sales function can have a dramatic impact on the buying experience. For this reason, buyers expect salespeople to be their internal advocates, adapting the selling company’s processes and practices to the customer’s benefit.

A solutions mindset. The word solution has been overused in the sales arena, but its prevalence does point to a major shift in customer expectations. Customers no longer buy products or services; they buy solutions to their business problems. They expect a professional salesperson to diagnose, prescribe, and resolve their issues, not just sell them products.

These seven needs are real customer expectations that have evolved in the past five to 10 years. They are not secret; they are demands that salespeople encounter every day. So the question becomes, “How does your sales training equip sales team members to meet these expectations?” Sales executives must put these demands in the context of their own sales force and create an organization of people who can meet these customer needs with the right skills and abilities. Adopting a competency-based model for sales training and development is the key.

This is how world-class sales organizations set themselves apart. Their sales forces have evolved with their customers, cultivating new and complementary capabilities. They have identified the organizational approach that drives success with their customers, and they provide their salespeople with the necessary knowledge, skills, and abilities to navigate that approach. This book reveals the results of ASTD’s research into the foundational competencies required to sell with success, and unveils an innovative new model that shows organizations how to leverage those competencies to move into new markets, capture market share, and excel at delivering value to customers.

We can never really change someone; people must change themselves. But we can help. We can be a resource. We can nurture, encourage, and support.

—Stephen R. Covey

How Sales Teams Define Competence

To understand competence, we must first understand that its building blocks are a person’s ability to process and make sense of information from the environment. This information is then turned into knowledge, skills, and abilities. Knowledge is what a person knows about a specific topic, such as information about market trends. Skills are the things that people have learned to do, such as performing a sales call. Abilities refer to the capacity to do something or perform a task, whether or not it is skillful. They are known in shorthand as KSAs. These three elements—knowledge, skills, and abilities—are the cornerstones of competence. Collectively, they form a competency.

Often, organizations strive to manage or change salesperson behavior to achieve a goal. Managers learn to measure important metrics of salesperson activity, such as the number of calls to make an appointment or the number of proposals to close a deal. Many managers determine whom to hire based on the past behavior of the salesperson—again, often measured by metrics. Because the sales profession is so quantifiable, it seems appropriate to use past metrics as a determinant of future success, because they seem to be reflective of a salesperson’s ability to get the job done.

But because selling is really about attaining business results, competencies can better help sales managers, sales trainers, and sales leaders understand and define the knowledge, skills, and abilities salespeople need to produce results. Competencies provide a far more effective way to predict future results and outputs.

Highly competent salespeople exhibit the right behavior at the right time, with the right level of skill. For many salespeople, this ability is developed naturally. New salespeople are expected to learn the most effective way to accomplish a task, and often learn it by trial and error.

This on-the-job approach to developing sales competency begs the question: “Why are some salespeople more effective than others?” Hypothetically speaking, if people can experience the same environmental dynamics, their results should be similar. Yet the role of sales professionals is more complex than their working environment or work processes.

Effectiveness derives from a person’s behavior. Goal setting, performance management, attention to detail, and teambuilding skills provide the foundation for effectiveness. Taking initiative, inspiring, setting an example, delegating, coaching, creating, learning, coordinating, and acting strategically are demonstrable results or outputs of effectiveness.

Because of the complexity of buyer-seller relationships, highly effective salespeople have their own internal frameworks for organizing knowledge and responding to needs. In other words, their hidden competencies become observable through their actions, in the form of an output. Then, based on customer response, salespeople reinforce their positive attributes and correct or remediate their negative ones. Yet this process of reinforcement and correction is often completely unconscious.

A results-based competency model highlights the competencies required to produce outputs or results. The key to improving performance lies in externally defining and organizing world-class sales competencies, which include knowledge, skills, and abilities. When those are made overt and integrated into the sales system, an organization can engage in world-class selling.

World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies is more than a book; it is a tool that any organization with a sales force must have. Shave years off aligning performance improvement initiatives with sales competencies through this validated, forward-thinking work that will help you transform from traditional training function to strategic business partner.

—Tina K. Busch, vice president, learning and performance, Pitney Bowes, Inc.

Premises of the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model

In conducting the research required for World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies, there were several premises that influenced the model design and research methodology. They include the following:

The profession of selling is a system. The research team did not focus on any one single job title, role, or skill area. Rather, the team set out to identify and define what it takes to become a world-class selling organization, encompassing not only the people responsible and accountable for generating revenue, but also the people who develop and directly support them.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The blend of competencies, skills, areas of expertise, and roles adds power and utility to the model. Any one part of the model, viewed in isolation, would narrow the definition of world-class sales competencies. Taken as a whole, however, the model can be used in a variety of ways within a variety of circumstances, industries, markets, and geographies.

The model provides a solid foundation. Because it is formed by understanding what sales professionals need to know and do to be successful, the final validated model provides a solid foundation for building talent management programs, training programs, coaching programs, and other organization-specific, competency-based deliverables through wholesale adoption of the model or licensing of the model for commercial purposes.

The model is applicable across all types of organizations. The model is worded in such a way that the foundational competencies, areas of expertise, and roles apply to as many different types of business-to-business selling organizations as possible, including those that sell to the public sector.

The model is relevant to multiple levels of the organization. The model can be aligned to support people at novice, intermediate, and expert levels within the sales organization as well as people with varying degrees of tenure.

The model is validated qualitatively and quantitatively. By following a standardized and well-documented approach and utilizing a third-party organization to validate results, ASTD has ensured that the World-Class Sales Competency Model is statistically valid. The qualitative information gathered through interviews and focus groups was reviewed and met face validity and content validity standards. The quantitative data collected contains enough responses to be applicable and generalizable to each population (see Appendix D for the research methodology employed).

The model is future oriented. By its design, competency modeling captures the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals at a specific time. By asking the advisory panel, interviewees, and focus group members to project themselves three years into the future, the research team took a forward-thinking approach and developed a model that will be relevant for years to come.

The ultimate goal is exemplary performance. The research team remained grounded in the premise that the model should not focus on adequate performance of each sales competency; rather, the focus should be on those individuals who model exemplary performance and provide many of an organization’s key outputs and results.

The model is focused on improving sales performance through learning.While there are many ways to approach competency modeling, the research team focused extensively on the ability and use of the model in a learning, training, and development context. This ensured that the model is relevant and appropriate to sales professionals who are skilled at developing competency statements, conducting job analysis, and modeling best practices.

The research methodology and approach outlined in Appendix D of this book were created to define world-class selling and uncover the requisite competencies for success in the sales field. More broadly, the methodology also allowed the research team to determine the competencies required of all people in the sales profession. Although not all organizations utilize all of the competencies, it helps to be aware of them and how they may be leveraged in competitor organizations.

The ASTD approach to competency modeling combines the visible attributes of knowledge and skill with behavior and actions to produce a clearer picture for success in a specific job: the expected results and outputs. Sales managers, trainers, coaches, and consultants can all use the competency model for multiple purposes—employee recruitment, selection, or assessment; curriculum and training material development; informing coaching, counseling, and mentoring relationships; and benchmarking.

The goal of the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model is to bring these traditional uses together to meet the specific needs of the sales organization.

A Model of World-Class Sales Competencies

The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model is represented as a pyramid. It includes three layers of increasingly specific ability:

Roles are broad areas of responsibility. Roles are not the same as job titles; they are much more fluid. Playing different roles is analogous to maintaining a collection of hats—when the situation requires, the sales professional can slip out of one hat and into another one. Different hats or roles require different areas of expertise and competencies to be successful.

Areas of expertise (AOEs) represent knowledge and skill in specific sales areas or specialties. A person may possess expertise in one or more of the AOEs, and each AOE will incorporate multiple competencies.

Competencies are focused, narrower areas of knowledge, skill, and ability. They are common to the sales profession regardless of specialty—and critical to all. Competencies are grouped into four major categories: partnering, insight, solutions, and effectiveness.

Each foundational competency and AOE includes a definition, a list of key skills and knowledge statements, a list of key actions, and sample outputs.

For a full listing of the definitions, key actions, and key knowledge areas, see Appendix A; for a full listing of every component in the model and its associated importance ratings, see Appendix E.

Hypothetically Speaking…

Let us drill down through a hypothetical sales organization—starting at the executive level—and look at a few examples of how the roles, AOEs, and competencies depicted in Figure 3-1 might come into play for a few specific positions.

Example: Chief Learning Officer

Because an organization’s chief learning officer (CLO) is responsible for the learning and development of sales team members, he or she needs expertise in these sales areas of expertise—developing sales force capability, delivering sales training, and coaching for sales results—but probably manages sales professionals who perform these functions. The CLO should have strong skills and knowledge in the foundational competencies that affect the sales organization, including

• Analyzing organizational capacity
• Understanding business context
• Building business skill
• Managing knowledge
• Accelerating learning
• Executing plans
• Aligning to sales processes.

Example: Vice President of Sales

A vice president of sales typically manages people at all points of the sales cycle—those who are directly responsible for revenue generation and those who directly support them. Their direct reports are pre-sales specialists, salespeople, sales managers, and sales executives, as well as those who work in sales operations. The VP of sales might also oversee salesperson development or the selection of training solutions if there is no CLO in the organization.

The VP of sales may focus on the manager and strategist roles. Because he or she is responsible for managing, motivating, and rewarding sales team members, expertise in setting sales strategy, managing within the sales ecosystem, and designing compensation are required. For this job title, foundational competencies in the partnering and solutions categories should be strong.

Example: External Consultant

Obviously, external consultants will focus on a consulting role. They will likely help in defining and positioning solutions and setting sales strategy. Their strongest foundational competencies are likely to fall in the partnering and insight categories.

Example: Sales Trainer

A sales trainer might report to the CLO, the head of human resources, the VP of sales, or the sales manager. He or she mostly plays a developer role, and focuses on the delivering sales training area of expertise. Strong foundational competencies in communicating effectively, building business skills, using technology, and accelerating learning are important for success in this job.

Example: Sales Manager

In most organizations, sales managers are likely to manage revenue-generating salespeople; their staffs might include a sales trainer. Their direct reports might also include those in market research or sales operations. Sales managers focus on playing the analyst and manager roles, but certainly will weigh in on strategy as well. He or she will be skilled in creating and closing opportunities, protecting accounts, supporting indirect selling, managing within the sales ecosystem, maintaining accounts, and recruiting sales talent. Sales managers should have strong foundational competencies across the four categories.

In the Next Chapter

This chapter provided an overview of the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model. The next chapter is the first of the in-depth descriptions of the model’s components. Chapter 4 explains the six roles—consultant, strategist, developer, manager, analyst, and administrator—and how they fit into the ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model. It also illustrates how the roles link to competencies.