Appendix A
Competency Dictionary
Contents
The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model
The ASTD World-Class Sales Competency Model (figure A-1) is the only widely available occupation-specific model for sales team members. It considers those who are directly responsible for revenue generation, as well as those who consult with, train, develop, and support them. Highly customizable to any kind of sales organization, the model provides structure while leaving room for unique characteristics or unusual requirements. This occupation-based model, focused intensely on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of all people within the sales organization, embraces consultants as well as inside and outside sales representatives based on the roles that they play. The model incorporates the basic tenets of workplace learning and performance, and can be used by WLP professionals and those for whom sales training is only one part of a demanding job.
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. It is represented as a pyramid and 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 take off one hat and put on 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 incorporates multiple competencies.
- Competencies are focused, narrow 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, solution, and effectiveness.
The blend of competencies, areas of expertise, and roles adds power and utility to the model. Any one part, viewed in isolation, would narrow the definition of world-class sales competencies. Taken as a whole, the model can be used in a variety of ways within a variety of circumstances, industries, markets, and geographies.
A clear definition of world-class sales competency 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 change the way organizations view that preparation and to change from the just-in-time, on-the-job skills training that many companies use to a more systematic, competency-based approach.
Sales Roles
As we listened to our study respondents describing their current responsibilities and competency requirements, a set of sales roles emerged. Roles are not the same as job titles; they are much more fluid, depending on the application or activity. While a loose formal association may exist between roles and job titles, roles are the “hats” that people wear within the sales profession, despite specific job titles, and a single job title may involve multiple roles.
These are the sales roles:
- Consultant. Leverages expertise and resources to build strong advisory relationships. Suggests best courses of action and helps with rational decision making. Guides the decision making of others, including internal or external customers. Recognizes product, service, or solution opportunities for bringing parties together to actualize a mutually beneficial relationship. Acts as the point person in negotiating transactions, fulfilling documented agreements, and building the relationships that are essential to long-term partnering.
- Strategist. In response to challenges or opportunities, envisions ways of operating or achieving goals that do not currently exist. Articulates the vision in a way that facilitates its transformation to an operational reality. Applies or leads the application of innovative ideas and systems to create a business or organizational advantage.
- Developer. Creates business, organizational, or operational solutions or performance improvement initiatives by designing, developing, and delivering specific processes, systems, tools, events, or products intended to add value. Creates or contributes to plans, specifications, or designs that guide individual, product, or process development activities.
- Manager. Exercises direction and supervision of an organization or department. Controls and allocates resources and budgetary expenditures, and ensures accountabilities and compliance with work-related policies and procedures.
- Analyst. Collects, synthesizes, deconstructs, and reconfigures information (for example, ideas, facts, and raw data) to provide insight to others. Works with end users to determine and document business needs. Documents requirements, processes, or methods in the most appropriate manner. Understands technology, systems, and tools for use within the sales environment.
- Administrator. Performs procedure-based activities that are often scheduled on a regular basis or require documentation. Typically gets involved with activities that require compliance with established processes, practices, or operational rules.
These are examples of titles loosely associated with these sales roles:
Consultant titles
- Sales recruiter
- Account executive
- Solution architect
- Pre-sales technical consultant
- Account manager
- Sales specialist
- Client account manager
Strategist titles
- Sales strategy manager
- Operations strategy and development manager
- Business planning strategist
- Chief learning officer
- Vice president of sales
Developer titles
- Product specialist
- Instructional developer
- Knowledge engineer
- Compensation application engineer
- Sales coach
Manager titles
- Sales district manager
- Sales operations manager
- Sales training and development manager
Analyst titles
- Sales researcher
- Policy analyst
- Productivity and process analyst
- Sales analyst
- Sales incentive analyst
- Training needs analyst
Administrator titles
- Sales coordinator
- Sales configuration and quote specialist
- Operations specialist
- Order entry specialist
- Training coordinator.
| Table A-1. Examples of Relationships Between Roles and AOEs |
| Sales Areas of Expertise | Consultant | Strategist | Developer | Manager | Analyst | Admin. |
| Creating and Closing Opportunities | X | X | ||||
| Managing Accounts | X | X | ||||
| Defining and Positioning Solutions | X | |||||
| Supporting Indirect Selling | X | X | X | |||
| Setting Sales Strategy | X | X | ||||
| Managing within the Sales Ecosystem | X | X | ||||
| Developing Sales Force Capability | X | X | X | |||
| Delivering Sales Training | X | X | ||||
| Coaching for Sales Results | X | X | X | |||
| Building Sales Infrastructure | X | X | ||||
| Designing Compensation | X | X | X | |||
| Maintaining Accounts | X | X | X | |||
| Recruiting Sales Talent | X | X | X |
The areas of expertise and roles identified in this model are derived from the competency model research process; however, the variations and interactions of the areas of expertise and roles will vary with each organization. Table A-1 provides an illustrative example of how areas of expertise and roles could play out. Sales professionals may customize these examples for their own company or situation. Further research is required to confirm the suggested links, but this is beyond the scope of this report.
Foundational Competencies
Four clusters comprise the foundational competencies:
- Partnering competencies
- Insight competencies
- Solution competencies
- Effectiveness competencies.
Partnering Competencies
All individuals in the sales ecosystem work interdependently with others and rely on the following competencies to facilitate these interactions:
- Spanning boundaries
- Communicating effectively
- Aligning to customers’ needs
- Setting expectations
- Negotiating positions
- Building relationships.
| Spanning Boundaries |
Definition: Understands how interpersonal or organizational boundaries can affect success and manages them.
Key Actions:
- Advances collaboration and positive relationships across organizational boundaries—Sets expectations governing collaboration to minimize conflict and ensure a common focus among all internal and external stakeholders affected by the initiative.
- Recognizes and addresses gaps among personal, team, or organizational responsibilities—Identifies gaps between individual responsibilities and what needs to be accomplished to achieve success and takes personal accountability for positive impacts within these areas.
| Communicating Effectively |
Definition: Ensures that all communications are clear, focused, and based on a solid understanding of needs, using whatever medium is most appropriate
Key Actions:
- Demonstrates active listening—Pays close attention to what is being said and uses questioning techniques effectively to probe and clarify in pursuit of accurate understanding.
- Achieves communication objectives—Ensures that verbal and written communications and group presentations are well-prepared, clear, concise, accurate, and persuasive.
- Ensures responsive communication—Makes sure that inquiries are addressed and expedited to facilitate the needs of others.
- Attains persuasive communication—Successfully influences perceptions to achieve desired outcomes.
| Aligning to Customers |
Definition: Aligns perspective to the customer’s to ensure that the concerns of the customer are understood and addressed and overall customer satisfaction is achieved.
Key Actions:
- Contributes to customer satisfaction—Understands how trust and responsiveness to customer needs builds enduring business relationships.
- Advocates for the customer—Represents the interests of the customer and ensures that a customer-oriented perspective is the touchstone for decision making.
| Setting Expectations |
Definition: Establishes shared expectations to minimize surprises and align stakeholders within a common understanding.
Key Actions:
- Communicates expectations to all stakeholders—Exercises personal initiative to ensure that all stakeholders understand what is required for successful implementation of a solution.
- Ensures clear understanding of responsibilities—Communicates roles and responsibilities in a way that clearly identifies who is accountable for what, when, and to what standard.
- Understands and addresses potential obstacles to proposed solutions—Identifies potential threats to a solution to avoid or manage problems in advance of their occurrence.
| Negotiating Positions |
Definition: Seeks to align the interests of all relevant stakeholders to create mutually beneficial agreements.
Key Actions:
- Determines optimum negotiation positions—Identifies optimum and fall-back positions prior to actual negotiations and incorporates these as strategies.
- Addresses objections accordingly—Ensures understanding of a solution and its benefits or involves the appropriate experts to help address stakeholder questions and communicates information that addresses those needs persuasively if necessary.
- Builds consensus and commitment—Leverages points of agreement and addresses points of conflict in a way that develops buy-in and commitment for moving forward.
| Building Relationships |
Definition: Builds and nurtures solid relationships to advance stakeholder satisfaction and professional influence in the stakeholder’s organization.
Key Actions:
- Actively nurtures positive relationships—Develops and maintains positive professional relationships among stakeholders at all levels based on personal integrity and trust.
- Protects and develops relationships to higher levels of trust and confidence—Leverages professional relationships to protect partnerships and advance collaboration.
| Insight Competencies |
All sales professionals must develop robust information analysis and synthesis skills to use information effectively on the job. The following insight competencies are identified within the model:
- Analyzing capacity
- Understanding the customer’s business
- Evaluating customer experiences
- Gathering intelligence
- Prioritizing stakeholder needs
- Identifying options
- Building a business case.
| Analyzing Organizational Capacity |
Definition: Assesses and weighs competing requirements against available resources to minimize risk, ensure quality deliverables, and balance capabilities with capacity.
Key Actions:
- Assesses resources accurately—Ensures accurate understanding of the type, quality, and quantity of resources required to achieve desired results.
- Balances risk with goal achievement when determining next steps—Weighs desired outcome against potential risk to prioritize options and identify an optimum path forward while protecting the interests of the company.
| Understanding the Business Context |
Definition: Develops a sound understanding of the business operations and priorities that serve as the context for work.
Key Actions:
- Situates work meaningfully in terms of its relationship to other functions—Understands an organization’s divisions and the upstream, downstream, and cross-stream collaboration in which one’s work is situated. Understands how the work one is engaged in contributes to the larger enterprise.
- Contributes to the organization’s success—Understands the organization’s products, services, and solutions at a level appropriate to position and sells them.
| Evaluating Customer Experiences |
Definition: Assesses the effectiveness and positive impact of solutions and communicates the results to the stakeholders.
Key Actions:
- Develops and implements robust evaluations of solutions—Uses sound methodologies to demonstrate the effectiveness of a solution at key milestones or to identify critical obstacles affecting success.
- Communicates performance in terms of the organization’s key performance drivers—Identifies and uses key business or operational metrics that clearly express beneficial results that are understood and valued by solution stakeholders (for example, net promoter scores, total cost of ownership, return-on-investment, time to competence, and productivity ratios).
| Gathering Intelligence |
Definition: Systemically acquires needed information and data for effective decision making, planning, relationship building, and the well-informed execution of responsibilities.
Key Actions:
- Determines the range, type, and scope of information needed—Systematically assesses problems, challenges, and opportunities to ensure the right sources are utilized and critical information is collected.
- Applies the most appropriate tools and strategies to gather needed information—Understands which tools and strategies are best suited for fulfilling information requirements and uses these efficiently and effectively.
- Develops sources of ongoing information—Understands how information requirements or the quality of sources can change and creates multiple sources for collecting data and confirming its quality.
| Prioritizing Stakeholder Needs |
Definition: Assesses stakeholder needs in terms of their critical importance and uses this ranking to prioritize actions.
Key Actions:
- Thoroughly diagnoses needs to identify their true nature—Explores and identifies the root causes of needs to ensure an accurate understanding of their scope.
- Prioritizes the most critical causes as a basis for proceeding—Determines the most appropriate plan of action based on needs analysis and prioritizes actions, resources, and time accordingly.
| Identifying Options |
Definition: Determines the best course of action based on systematic assessment of what is possible in the situation.
Key Actions:
- Explores the scope of possible solutions—Assesses all feasible options that align with solving the challenge or need.
- Approaches option assessment creatively—Keeps options open ended to capture innovations perhaps not considered in conventional thinking.
- Surveys the impact of all alternatives for selecting and prioritizing the best option—Solicits and incorporates the input of all stakeholder experts and benefactors to ensure the best option is chosen.
- Commits to action—Weighs the needs, requirements, and opportunities involved before committing to the best possible option or course of action.
| Building a Business Case |
Definition: Builds the business case that is essential for rationalizing the investments required to advance a solution.
Key Actions:
- Identifies critical business metrics—Ensures valid measurements by collaborating with stakeholders to determine the most relevant business, financial, or operational metrics on which to focus.
- Builds the value justifications required to commit resources—Frames the input of experts in a way that ensures well-informed decision making.
- Clearly identifies the business or financial benefits to be realized by investments—Identifies the business and financial benefits of a solution in a way that clearly speaks to business impact.
Solution Competencies
All individuals in the sales ecosystem must develop strategies for generating support for the solutions they define, as well as strategies for making them happen. The following solution competencies are identified in the model:
- Facilitating change
- Formalizing commitment
- Resolving issues
- Managing projects
- Leveraging success
- Articulating value.
| Facilitating Change |
Definition: Retains an optimistic and adaptive perspective in the face of change and focuses on the positive innovations possible where change initiatives are implemented.
Key Actions:
- Advocates change and its benefits—Encourages others to embrace change as an opportunity rather than an obstacle to personal, operational, or business success.
- Manages change effectively—Ensures that work aligns with changing requirements to more accurately advance the desired change.
- Approaches work with a proactive attitude—Helps organizations and individuals actively engage in improving practices and attitudes by championing change, demonstrating the positive consequences of change, and exercising personal influence to encourage acceptance.
| Formalizing Commitment |
Definition: Ensures all commitments are formalized in sufficient detail to guide implementation of agreed-upon solutions.
Key Actions:
- Secures appropriate commitment—Fulfills requirements through all phases of solution design and development to build commitment and support.
- Appropriately communicates agreements—Ensures that verbal or written agreements are communicated in a timely fashion to stakeholders.
- Documents agreements—Documents and amends written agreements to accurately reflect the arrived-upon decisions in negotiation.
| Resolving Issues |
Definition: Works with others to quickly resolve or escalate solutions to problems.
Key Actions:
- Actively monitors situations for potential problems—Analyzes situations for potential challenges and develops associated contingency plans.
- Monitors implementation or deployment to ensure success—Takes an active interest in the success of a solution and monitors the milestones in the plan.
- Acts as a focal point of escalation to expedite problem resolution—Resolves problems directly where possible and acts as an escalation point where warranted to ensure problem resolution.
| Managing Projects |
Definition: Applies basic project management methods to ensure the successful progress of critical tasks.
Key Actions:
- Organizes and manages work systematically—Uses project management techniques to control scope, track and manage costs and time, determine requirements, set standards, establish communication processes, and so on.
- Organizes and manages resources effectively—Identifies and monitors people, funding, timing, and resources to ensure cost-effective and timely project or program results.
- Adaptively applies methods as needed to achieve goals—Modifies project components in the face of change or emerging requirements to better manage tasks, allocate resources, and cope with shifting work environments.
| Leveraging Success |
Definition: Leverages the positive impact of an action, solution, or outcome to advance or expand the level of partnership.
Key Actions:
- Leverages success through active promotion—Ensures that stakeholders appreciate both the value of the solution to the achievement of their goals and the underlying relationships as a basis for expanding a mutually beneficial collaboration.
- Documents and communicates best practices—Ensures that lessons learned are not lost, but instead captured and leveraged to realize additional opportunities.
| Articulating Value |
Definition: Clearly links solutions to the challenges they are meant to solve or the opportunities they are meant to actualize and confirms the validity of the solution with stakeholders.
Key Actions:
- Ensures that criteria for decision making are shared and addressed—Frames the benefits of a solution in a way that accurately addresses the key points and priorities of stakeholders.
- Adapts and tailors messages as required—Ensures that value propositions clearly speak to the needs and perspectives of all stakeholder types and levels.
- Confirms validity of the proposed solution—Gains stakeholder consensus on the value of the proposed solution and its efficacy in meeting the needs identified.
Effectiveness Competencies
Besides reliance on processes, methodologies, and relationships, all sales ecosystem individuals must demonstrate personal effectiveness and responsibility. These are the personal effectiveness competencies identified in the model:
- Building business skill
- Solving problems
- Embracing diversity
- Making ethical decisions
- Managing knowledge
- Using technology
- Accelerating learning
- Executing plans
- Maximizing personal time
- Aligning to sales processes.
| Building Business Skill |
Definition: Demonstrates business understanding to develop solutions relevant to business success.
Key Actions:
- Incorporates business and industry acumen into work—Understands business terminology and key processes and incorporates these accurately in conceptualizing what must be done when communicating effectively with stakeholders.
- Exhibits business-oriented perspective in assessing needs—Understands how businesses work to achieve profitability and uses business insight to better assess the value and priorities of work-related contributions.
- Incorporates legal and contractual requirements into work—Understands the purpose of standard contracts and statements of work and their role in articulating requirements and setting expectations.
- Incorporates financial understanding into work—Understands the role that costs and financial returns play in determining business value and incorporates this perspective into the way resources are used and solutions positioned.
| Solving Problems |
Definition: Creatively brings new or alternative perspectives forward to overcome difficulty or uncertainty.
Key Actions:
- Approaches challenges creatively—Approaches problems from a fresh perspective.
- Crosses disciplines to frame or address challenges—Draws from multiple disciplines or models to synthesize new approaches to problem solving.
| Embracing Diversity |
Definition: Values diversity (gender, ethnic, racial, cultural) and effectively leverages the insights and experiences of others to achieve goals and establish a stimulating, productive work environment.
Key Actions:
- Demonstrates respect for others—Respects the innate human dignity of every individual.
- Acclimates to diverse work settings—Demonstrates an appreciation of diverse perspectives and approaches to work and actively seeks to listen, learn, and integrate different ways of accomplishing tasks.
- Harnesses diversity to create workplace synergies—Leverages the experiences and worldviews of others to drive innovations and stimulate creativity.
| Making Ethical Decisions |
Definition: Adheres to ethical standards of personal conduct and business rules when making decisions or executing tasks.
Key Actions:
- Demonstrates personal integrity—Takes personal responsibility for ensuring that actions and decisions protect the integrity of the company and understands and demonstrates the values most important to the work environment.
- Incorporates quality considerations into decision making—Determines the best course of action in compliance with established quality processes, business rules, or optimum workplace practices.
| Managing Knowledge |
Definition: Actively captures and communicates essential information with the goal of advancing objectives or sharing best practices.
Key Actions:
- Provides proactive knowledge transfer—Understands the value of information to stakeholders and circulates it openly to improve overall performance and productivity.
- Ensures that communication tools and processes advance information storage and transfer— Recognizes and acts on obstacles to the effective storage, retrieval, or communication of information.
| Using Technology |
Definition: Demonstrates comfort with technology and uses technical innovations to advance the efficiency and effectiveness of work processes, procedures, and outputs.
Key Actions:
- Maintains understanding of technical innovations—Incorporates an up-to-date understanding of technical innovations and trends as well as their implications.
- Uses information technology to align and expedite work—Uses tools and systems appropriately to ensure that communications and work are delivered in a timely way and are usable by customers, colleagues, and managers.
- Improves personal productivity technology—Takes the initiative to learn new technology and incorporate its benefits into the workplace (for example, customer relationship management [CRM] systems, virtual classroom, and mobile communication devices).
| Accelerating Learning |
Definition: Uses conventional and innovative approaches to quickly gain and maintain the knowledge and skills necessary for effective job performance.
Key Actions:
- Takes personal responsibility for development—Monitors and addresses skill and knowledge gaps by actively soliciting performance feedback and developmental planning assistance and selects appropriate development options.
- Demonstrates agility in addressing development needs—Leverages a range of learning options and delivery media to maximize time in the acquisition of critical skills, knowledge, or values.
- Leverages information to change behavior—Accesses and incorporates essential information for the ongoing development of personal effectiveness.
| Executing Plans |
Definition: Organizes tasks and resources in a manner that coordinates resources efficiently, maximizes productivity, and communicates expectations and results to stakeholders.
Key Actions:
- Develops plans that clearly actualize strategy—Articulates strategies in a way that aligns activities, deliverables, and milestones.
- Builds commitment to plan—Exercises influence to ensure enthusiastic commitment and buy-in to a plan’s strategy and implementation requirements.
- Executes to plan, yet adapts to emergent circumstances—Uses plans to guide activities, demonstrates responsiveness to change, and adapts plans to emerging requirements.
- Delivers to plan—Attains the goals sufficient to generate interest in continuing or expanding the organizational or business relationship into new areas of collaboration.
| Maximizing Personal Time |
Definition: Ensures time and effort align with priorities and provides for the most efficient use of resources.
Key Actions:
- Incorporates a strategic perspective in activity planning—Distinguishes the tactical from the strategic and the urgent from the critical as a guide to prioritizing activities.
- Practices time management—Applies appropriate time management techniques to focus, prioritize, and track tasks.
| Aligning to Sales Processes |
Definition: Understands the key phases of selling and how personal responsibilities affect effective execution.
Key Actions:
- Aligns and relates work to sales success—Understands how work products contribute to effective selling and ensures their solid contribution to sales success.
- Incorporates selling sensibilities into work execution—Appreciates how the term “customer” establishes an important dynamic in both internal and external business relationships, calling for consultative partnering based on mutual benefits.
- Demonstrates a systemic understanding of sales—Understands buying-selling relationships and uses this understanding to focus work in a flexible, adaptive manner that contributes to the larger network of sales relationships and facilitates the personalization and customization of sales solutions.
- Ensures that work helps to advance sales—Acts as a facilitator to sales, sales processing, or sales readiness when performing work.
Sales Areas of Expertise
Sales areas of expertise (AOEs) contain the specific technical and professional skills and knowledge required for success within professional selling. Think of sales AOEs as the knowledge and skills an individual must have and demonstrate above and beyond the foundational competencies. To function effectively in a given AOE, a person must demonstrate a blend of the appropriate foundational competencies and unique technical and professional skills and knowledge found in the AOEs. An individual may have expertise in one or more of these areas of expertise:
- Creating and closing opportunities
- Protecting accounts
- Defining and positioning solutions
- Supporting indirect selling
- Setting sales strategy
- Managing within the sales ecosystem
- Developing sales force capability
- Delivering sales training
- Coaching for sales results
- Building sales infrastructure
- Designing compensation
- Maintaining accounts
- Recruiting sales talent.
| Creating and Closing Opportunities |
Definition: Continuously scans for prospects to achieve new sales, expands account control, and populates account pipeline; leverages customer referrals and targets new leads; follows up on leads and assesses prospect readiness to buy; performs interest-building calls as necessary; builds and drives opportunities by generating and nurturing internal and external stakeholder interest; manages sales cycle progress; conducts or orchestrates business or technical qualifications; acquires the technical expertise required for well-targeted solution design, business case justification, and subsequent negotiations; drives or manages the resources necessary for effective negotiations, including the alignment of expert input within the negotiation strategy; and asks for the business, effectively addresses any objections or concerns, closes unique transactions, and achieves a mutually beneficial win for the buyer and seller.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Product or service features, benefits, and value propositions
- Sales collateral resources
- Cold-calling sales techniques
- Customer-related vertical market or industry information resources
- Sales negotiation and closing methods
- Formal and ad hoc research strategies (for example, systematic exploration, personal networking, and web site scanning)
- Lead management procedures
- Cost-estimation and sizing techniques
- Personal engagement and interest-generation strategies
- Business alliance building skills (for example, client, third party, and so forth)
- Business analysis metrics and procedures (for example, health ratios and balance sheet analysis)
- Return-on-investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO) techniques
- Business workshop facilitation and management skills
- Sales cycle management skills
- Proposal development, component integration, and management practices
- Formal sales negotiation and closing methods or strategies
- Objection handling techniques
- Opportunity qualification skills
- Resource knowledge (technical, pricing, legal, and delivery and fulfillment).
Ability to
- Create compelling sales presentations
- Interpret and synthesize information from multiple sources (for example, databases, online resources, and colleagues)
- Compellingly communicate product or service benefits and features
- Determine buyer readiness from verbal and nonverbal cues
- Identify influencers, buyers, and detractors in the sales process
- Manage multiple or interrelated sales calls
- Implement environmental scanning to ensure well-targeted sales messages
- Manage leads and ensure follow-up and follow-through
- Accurately estimate costs and size solutions
- Calculate business metrics and translate product or service features meaningfully into value propositions
- Leverage vertical market and industry knowledge in product or service positioning
- Align sales activities with their respective point in the sales process
- Lead business analysis discussions.
Key Actions:
- Researches and targets prospects—Actively researches available sources to identify likely prospects based on alignment with product or service market, known business needs, typical customer profiles, business activities, competitive market position, customer challenges, product or service spend, and competitive presence in account; reviews prospects and determines where or how to allocate effort and resources; and develops approach strategy tailored to the most appropriate individuals who have decision-making authority.
- Conducts interest-building calls (cold calls) when applicable—Appropriately manages customer prospecting to connect directly with future customers while not alienating them; generates immediate, compelling customer interest in the selling organization, ensuring its product or service offers sufficient value to generate a willingness to continue the sales dialogue; and initiates exploratory discussions to schedule solid and specific follow-up sales calls in an effort to continue facilitating buying processes.
- Identifies, follows up on, and manages sales leads—Builds reciprocal lead-sharing networks to build the sales funnel with prospective clients and acts on any new lead in a timely manner to capitalize on interest and compelling needs.
- Gains interest—Leverages marketing materials to stimulate client interest; explores client curiosity from various perspectives—business, financial, and market—to capture key variables and contingencies to nurture opportunities; generates customer interest through discussion of potential benefits; and actively shapes components of each opportunity to reflect client priorities and adequately address client needs.
- Qualifies opportunities—Assesses client operations and business position for potential partnering opportunities, assesses client balance sheet and business health to determine feasibility of partnering, identifies and aligns required resources for pursuit and future solution deployment, determines scope and nature of risk as a necessary input to developing appropriate pricing and risk management strategies, and determines or orchestrates identification of opportunities and assesses requirements for third-party involvement.
- Develops winning proposals—Develops compelling value propositions aligned with customer needs, business priorities, and/or technical and operational requirements; orchestrates and aligns the technical or functional contributions of functional and technical experts; communicates key competitive advantages; works with others to ensure appropriate pricing; and manages the milestones essential for timely proposal delivery.
- Builds business justification cases—Collaborates with financial, legal, and technical experts to develop a business justification for each specific opportunity to ensure internal buy-in; enlists champions within both buyer and seller organizations; works with internal stakeholders to customize the opportunity to internal requirements while avoiding compromises that might threaten client acceptance or solution integrity; and identifies and communicates all risks associated with the opportunity and addresses these challenges with solution contingencies or fall-back positions.
- Orchestrates support for negotiations—Where warranted, coordinates the input of legal, technical, and financial experts seamlessly into the development of a negotiation strategy; ensures that stakeholders understand their role in negotiation; focuses efforts of others on achieving the business outcome; continuously checks with experts to ensure commitments are valid and can be delivered; and drives to close and asks for the business at the appropriate time.
- Maintains opportunity momentum to expand sales—Capitalizes on early wins and customer satisfaction to expand business wider and deeper into the account.
Sample Outputs:
- Prioritized prospect list
- Target prospect business or operations profile
- Sales plan or strategy
- Capture plan
- Prospect entry into sales system tracking tool
- Lead management strategies
- Follow-up activities
- Opportunity pursuit strategy
- Business health analysis
- Letters of understanding
- Sales proposals
- Responses to requests for information
- Negotiation strategy
- Business case justification
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Protecting Accounts |
Definition: Gathers account intelligence and maintains current understanding of customer’s business; develops and monitors sales plans; monitors and communicates sales forecasts and pipeline activities to ensure accuracy; develops expanded relationships with customers to achieve trusted advisor status and entry into business planning activities; screens account activities and protects customers from unnecessary sales or marketing activities; monitors competitive growth in accounts and builds strategies for countering competitive messages; where warranted, determines account transition readiness to sales farming and maintains customer trust during and following this transition; and ensures customer satisfaction as well as delivery or deployment alignment with contractual terms and conditions.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Customer business and operations (for example, reporting structures and decision makers)
- Account history (prior investments and account relationships)
- Account farming procedures and practices (for example, check-ins and sponsoring marketing initiatives)
- Transition to farming practices
- Business analysis methods
- Industry research engines and resources (for example, Dun and Bradstreet and analysts reports)
- Customer organizational communication resources (websites, annual reports, press releases, and position and white papers)
- Customer business health indictors (for example, ratios)
- Account planning tools, templates, and procedures
- Account-related marketing plans
- Supply chain knowledge (lead times, response rates, and fulfillment processes)
- Funnel management practices, tools, metrics, and policies
- Deployment practices and back-office administrative or order-entry procedures
- Competitive information resources
- Contract administration and renewal processes
- Standard contractual and service level agreement (SLA) terms, conditions, and milestone metrics
- Resource management strategies.
Ability to
- Manage total customer satisfaction to optimize relationships
- Coordinate and align all account activities with overarching plan
- Determine how customers are organized and how they make purchasing decisions
- Leverage marketing programs to advance sales
- Summarize salient content from customer communication sources (for example, websites, annual reports, press releases, and position and white papers)
- Determine business health and viability using key business ratios
- Apply relevant account planning tools, templates, and procedures
- Apply funnel management practices, tools, metrics, and policies effectively to prioritize and manage selling
- Translate competitive knowledge into relevant sales practices
- Leverage contract administration and renewal into up- or cross-selling opportunities
- Monitor and manage contractual and service level agreement terms, conditions, and milestone metrics
- Set accurate customer expectations for order fulfillment (for example, lead times, response rates, and fulfillment processes).
Key Actions:
- Gathers and monitors account intelligence—Maintains account business direction in a manner consistent with client needs, establishes networks in customer business to stay abreast of current or emerging requirements, and scans relevant external publications or websites for account-related business information.
- Documents account plans and sales forecasts—Develops strategies and plans for managing account pursuit activities; assesses activities to plan; prioritizes and coordinates opportunity pursuit across multiple accounts to maintain a healthy sales funnel; and develops, communicates, and monitors sales forecasts to ensure accuracy.
- Builds client executive business relationships—Widens the breadth and depth of account penetration to achieve exposure to business planning, uses professional presence to frame selling messages in terms of client’s business (rather than operational or technical) benefits, incorporates key business and financial metrics into sales positioning messages, demonstrates comfort at various business levels and possesses the social skills necessary for interacting effectively with senior level executives, and positions the company represented and the benefits of partnering as the essential components of the business relationship desired as opposed to focusing on a more purely transactional relationship.
- Cultivates and develops trusted advisor status—Ensures that product or service value propositions align and resonate with customer needs, provides on-demand consultative advice, checks the accuracy and utility of recommendations prior to their communication and avoids making inaccurate claims, conducts self professionally in all customer communications and interactions with discreteness and confidentiality when required, and credits competitive claims where warranted to maintain credibility and trust.
- Protects and expands accounts—Ensures that all contractual deployment or fulfillment obligations are met and customer satisfaction is achieved, monitors account activity to minimize rogue selling and disruptive marketing, generally maintains overall account focal point leadership, and monitors competitive activities in accounts and appropriately counters competitive messages while blocking future competitor inroads.
- Manages deployment readiness and resource alignment—Ensures accurate understanding of requirements derived from closed opportunities (for example, terms and conditions and service level agreements) and ensures knowledge is dispersed among personnel engaged in post-sale activity (for example, fulfillment and delivery); where warranted, acts as the focal point for deal education and preparation within individual geographies; and where required, facilitates the resource troubleshooting essential for successfully launching complex initiatives.
Sample Outputs:
- Strategic account plan
- Sales funnel
- Customer check-ups
- Forecast updates
- Sales forecasts
- Marketing feedback
- Executive-level communications
- Portfolio and client reviews
- Account profiles
- Service level agreements
- Legal documentation
- Management and team member updates
- Industry and competitive position papers
- Competitive analyses
- Transition plans
- Company-specific paperwork
- Solution roadmap
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Defining and Positioning Solutions |
Definition: Drives the technical and technical components of opportunity qualification; translates business requirements to solution requirements; shapes solutions to capitalize on seller or partner solution advantage; coordinates the additional technical expertise required for building complex solutions; creates solutions that clearly address and align with customer business needs; conducts effective technical presentations at all appropriate levels within the client’s organization; supports the sizing, scoping, and identification of delivery or deployment resources essential for accurate costing; ensures the accuracy and feasibility of all proposals and solution-oriented communications to the customer; and supports internal acceptance of proposed solutions and monitors post-sale customer satisfaction.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Product, service, or solution technology (for example, concepts and uses)
- Solution technical foundation
- Solution configuration frameworks or templates
- Requirements analysis and management techniques
- Solution design procedures and communication conventions (written and graphical)
- Solution design methodologies, best practices, and trends
- Oral and written communication skills (sufficient for ensuring that technical concepts are meaningful to nontechnical audiences)
- Customer-facing skills
- Technical trust building and selling
- Business context of technical solution knowledge
- Solution sizing criteria
- Technical team leadership
- Vertical industry solutions
- Solution deployment or delivery practices (expectation setting and quality checking).
Ability to
- Counter competitor product or service feature and benefit messages
- Communicate features and benefits of solution-related tools or packages
- Accurately map customer’s product or service operating environment
- Effectively communicate technical solutions
- Translate solution designs into meaningful customer benefits and differentiate these by stakeholder needs
- Develop trusted advisor status with customers based on technical and business acumen
- Ensure cost-effective solution deployment and delivery practices
- Manage teams and integrate their contributions.
Key Actions:
- Performs technical qualifications—Gathers the information required for technical solution creation based on customer’s specific needs, builds technical credibility with clients to counter competitive arguments and advance the sale with the technical decision maker(s), and reviews opportunities based on technical feasibility or competitive presence within the client relationship for each individual opportunity.
- Designs solutions—Creates the technical design necessary to clearly identify solution components, their interrelationships with each other, and how they work together to solve the customer’s business challenges; identifies solution components appropriate for solving a customer’s unique business challenges; and validates solution ideas with customers, peers, and account teams to ensure solution integrity and feasibility.
- Customizes standard products or services—Designs solutions that are necessary to truly accommodate a customer’s business needs; enlists in-house support or appropriate subject matter expertise necessary to create tailored solutions; and ensures all stakeholders (for example, sales negotiators, contract experts, and deployment or delivery personnel) understand unique solution components and/or their requirements).
- Conducts technical demonstrations and benchmarks—Demonstrates the features, benefits, value, and competitive advantage of a solution by addressing customer needs within the context of the customer’s business setting; generates proof-of-concept data to create a compelling business case for selecting a specific solution; leverages benchmark data as required to technically position the beneficial results of the solution advocated; and presents performance output in a way that resonates with customers and addresses their concerns.
- Contributes to solution sizing and modification—Collaborates with functional experts (for example, colleagues in pricing, deployment, legal, and so forth) to accurately size a proposed solution and works with account teams to adapt solutions in response to new customer requirements, funding restrictions, the desire for a phased approach, and other important factors.
- Articulates solution designs—Facilitates solution positioning in a manner that effectively demonstrates understanding of the communications and positions the strategy to both technical and business stakeholders; reviews all communications and proposals for accurate solution definition and identification of benefits; and, where warranted, conducts technical presentations to ensure understanding or enlist the support of technical stakeholders within the customer’s environment.
Sample Outputs:
- Technical demonstrations or proof-of-concept demonstrations
- Technical components of proposals and positioning communications
- Technical requirements and input to statements of work (SOWs) and delivery or deployment strategies
- Goals and objectives statements
- Technical proposals
- Definition of technical problems
- Prototypes and models
- Work flow or work breakdown structures
- Forcefield and/or root cause analyses
- Logical or conceptual and technical solution designs
- Solution presentations
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Supporting Indirect Selling |
Definition: Conducts joint planning and marketing activities at all levels within partner organizations; conducts appropriate opportunity targeting, inventory clearance, and sales pursuit activities; builds partner business relationships essential to the maintenance of partner trust and preference; collaborates effectively with partners to present a unified position to customers; protects partner interests and ensures internal compliance with partner obligations; educates partners on products or services and motivates partner interest selling; and, where warranted, participates as a team selling member in building customer confidence in partner.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Partner types and functions (distributors and resellers)
- Company indirect sales team focus, strategy, and direction
- Marketing promotional programs and initiatives
- Partner incentive programs
- Partner business model and financial health
- Partner market niche and product or service alignment model
- Partner loyalty and commitment-building techniques
- Partner issues escalation and resolution procedures
- Sell-with, sell-through, and sell-for techniques
- Business planning
- Business or influencing methods
- Product or service information resources
- Partner sales crediting processes and tools
- Partner scorecard metrics
- Sales forecasting and metrics management skills
- Knowledge transfer and communication skills
- Vendor requirements and certification processes.
Ability to
- Build personal relationships with partners to advance mind-share
- Leverage marketing programs and initiatives to advance partner selling
- Influence operations to ensure timely and accurate payout to partners
- Ensure timely and accurate product or service updates to partners based on the most appropriate communication method (for example, web portals and telecommunications)
- Implement partner performance assessments and evaluations impartially
- Ensure partner compliance with product or service certification requirements.
Key Actions:
- Assesses and helps develop partner’s sales force—When appropriate, assesses the talent of the partner’s sales force to leverage strengths, identify weaknesses, and address gaps.
- Drives partner sales planning or forecasting—Identifies likely sales prospects as well as market clusters where opportunity may exist; assesses inventory push strategies for adequacy and determines use of market-promotion funding; articulates sales goals, aligns sales metrics, and sets joint expectations with partners; tailors planning to local market requirements and conditions; gains partner commitment and establishes a strategy for monitoring the partner’s selling progress; monitors partner activities for compliance with plan; and where warranted, suggests mid-course corrections to plan.
- Motivates and educates partners—Leverages marketing promotions and discounts to advance partner selling, elevates partner preference for products or services over the competition, ensures partners are adequately prepared for accurately discussing or positioning products or services, and clearly communicates certification requirements if any exist and facilitates partner enrollment in appropriate training and testing.
- Cultivates partner business relationships—Builds understanding of partner’s short- and long-term commitments; develops mutual understanding about what each stakeholder seeks to achieve in the partnership; extends partner planning and alliance-building activities to the highest levels of the partner’s organization; clearly articulates the business advantages of partnering to extend the range of selling; and where warranted, helps shift partner focus from transactional to consultative selling.
- Facilitates inventory balancing or clearance—Monitors distributor warehouse flow-through for optimum efficiency, collaborates with distributors in developing strategies and making the marketing investments needed to advance or accelerate end-point selling, and troubleshoots product supply or logistics issues affecting distributor performance.
- Tracks investments in partner selling to determine business impact—Implements event-driven or quarterly tracking methods to monitor partner selling improvements; uses partner self-reports or independent data to assess return-on-investment for funds expended; and collaborates with other stakeholders to revise sales strategies or marketing events to ensure optimum yield or achievement of investment objectives (for example, sales, leads, interest generation, and market penetration).
- Facilitates partner transformation—Introduces effective selling strategies to partner organization to increase its market penetration, identifies new or expanded market opportunities, and encourages close business collaboration in business planning and investments to ensure that partners maintain their presence in the face of market trends.
- Monitors and manages contract fulfillment—Ensures that contracts serve as a frame of reference for setting expectations and guiding partner activities and ensures that contractual requirements are fulfilled.
- Troubleshoots partner sales crediting—Actively works with operations team members to correct inaccuracies and to ensure timely crediting of partner sales, collaborates with operations and other stakeholders to build or maintain optimum partner-associated processes, and helps expedite sale or order fulfillment processes.
- Collaborates on team selling and positioning—Assists partner at critical sales cycle junctions (for example, positioning, closing, and negotiation) where required; works internally to acquire optimum pricing or exemptions when appropriate; and minimizes discord with partner and presents a unified team approach to the customer.
Sample Outputs:
- Partner business plans
- Partner account plans
- Transformation plans
- Partner reviews and assessments
- Inventory management and turnover metrics
- Investment assessments and reports
- Market investment funding proposals
- Sell through or demand generation tracking results
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Setting Sales Strategy |
Definition: Engineers world-class selling performance by helping the organization expand its understanding of a professional selling systems view; establishes long-term sales pursuit and business partnering philosophies with team and colleagues; balances short-term requirements with long-term results; recognizes and advances innovative sales practices and sales team configuration strategies; promotes integrated sales automation tools and processes; develops sales territory and organizational alignments; establishes interface processes and working relationships with key business stakeholders at the executive level to build mind-share across all functions (for example, marketing, engineering, and supply chain peers); and leads and evaluates change management programs that continuously improve sales performance.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Emerging market and sales trend knowledge
- Company business plans, strategic direction, and goals
- Company sales and competitive policies
- Company market position and market performance information
- Cultural and market segment diversity
- Market dynamics (general and product- or service-specific trends)
- Risk management and mitigation strategies
- Competitive knowledge and best practices
- Situational leadership methods
- Sales best practice and industry sales benchmarking resources
- Companywide organizational and value-chain information
- Systemic change, diffusion, and management methods
- Program management and measurement methods
- Sales metrics and measurement methods
- Sales system, tool, or process automation information
- Workforce planning concepts
- Regulatory environment resources (global)
- Executive relationship-building strategies.
Ability to
- Synthesize industry or market knowledge toward the creation of sales force requirements
- Identify areas of risk and their probability and develop appropriate contingency plans
- Leverage and diffuse best practices in selling within the organization (industry and competitive)
- Manage complex change or transformation programs (for example, design, develop, implement, and evaluate) to preserve innovation while ensuring compliance with company policy
- Divide and allocate sales territories for maximum impact on company growth objectives
- Build executive sponsorship at the highest levels of the company.
Key Actions:
- Identifies and articulates innovative sales practices—Works internally to synthesize the overall business plan with market trends and data; identifies both key themes of and obstacles to sales effectiveness; solicits and validates insights from the field; develops scalable sales structure and process models that optimize current sales activities and go-to-market realities; introduces new sales practices that help deliver value; and collaborates with business management and company functions as well as sales team members to assess feasibility, costs, and benefits associated with innovative strategies.
- Creates strategic plans that guide organizational, technical, process, or practice planning and implementation—Creates development plans to set the direction and agenda for tactical sales planning, collaborates with appropriate sales management colleagues to ensure alignment with plans, works with technical personnel or vendors to provide customer-based inputs into the tools and systems support envisioned, and monitors implementation to assess success and adjusts strategy as needed.
- Builds business and partner alliances to increase sales—Forges business alliances with those who possess a shared vision of desired future state (for example, business development, product or service development, supply chain, marketing, and sales management) and enlists third-party alliances where warranted to close gaps or advance implementation toward the vision.
- Provides leadership to accelerate strategy diffusion—Develops communication and readiness strategies to generate enthusiasm for strategy and motivate the effort needed for success and leverages technology and uses events to personally champion strategy.
- Configures and aligns sales territories for maximum effectiveness—Develops or reconfigures territories to maximize sales effectiveness or technical and functional resource allocation and collaborates with regional, territory, and local sales team members to delineate responsibilities and manage territories.
Sample Outputs:
- Strategic plans
- Business models
- Territory alignment plans
- Change management strategies
- Organization-specific plans
- Annual meeting materials
- Sales team meeting agendas
- Executive summaries and briefings
- Territory planning spreadsheets
- Change management presentations
- Motivational materials
- Communication to key partners
- Best practice briefings
- Knowledge-sharing documents
- Leadership strategies
- Leadership assessments
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Managing within the Sales Ecosystem |
Definition: Synthesizes team data for reporting purposes (for example, sales forecasts, team progress, delivery, and project results); monitors individual metrics achievement (for example, project completion, progress against goal, quota performance, technical coverage, and margin); monitors budgets and controls expenditures; ensures activity meets demand (for example, sales funnel activity, project management activity, technology, and margin protection); determines functional or organizational structure (for example, territory alignment, work group alignment, and team organization); conducts recruitment, hiring, promotion, termination, and career development activities; conducts performance reviews, facilitates individual development planning, and offers career development guidance; manages expectations and individual team member responsibilities; ensures optimum collaboration links among functional areas; works with peers and upper management to optimally align workload, divide labor, and allocate resources; sponsors sales force capability assessments and incorporates findings into development planning; leverages technology to improve results and operations; conducts business analysis to align business goals with team performance; and drives and manages sales-specific actions related to product or service launch and roll-out.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Company business or sales targets and metrics
- Performance measurement and management processes and tools
- Human resources policies and procedures
- Financial concepts and spreadsheet tools
- Forecasting and aggregation methods or tools
- Funnel management and aggregation methods or tools
- Supply chain and order fulfillment processes and procedures
- Competitive sales management tactics
- Workforce planning methods
- Capability gap analysis methods
- Career counseling methods
- Behavioral interview methods
- Business organizational culture
- Organization and operations
- High-performance and team-building methods
- Risk-assessment and -management methods
- Business development methods
- Contract administration and vendor management methods
- Legal and regulatory requirements
- Profit-and-loss (P&L) management methods
- Cost-center management methods
- Business standards of conduct and ethical guidelines.
Ability to
- Convert company targets and metrics into action
- Assess individual or team strengths and weaknesses
- Ensure compliance with applicable local, national, and international laws
- Manage operations to ensure cost-effectiveness
- Manage business forecasts to ensure accuracy
- Build strategies for counteracting competitive tactics
- Identify and address workforce gaps (for example, training and hiring)
- Manage operations to minimize costs or maximize profits
- Ensure workforce compliance with standards of conduct, ethical guidelines, and specific human resources policies.
Key Actions:
- Aligns tactical activities to support strategic sales plans—Provides input to organizational planning while assessing goals in light of unique requirements and opportunities; aligns planning with organizational goals—sets priorities and expectations and identifies and addresses opportunity or resource gaps; adjusts plans to local requirements to ensure progress to established plan; and ensures alignment of all activities with upper management strategies, corporate direction, and goals.
- Establishes, monitors, and controls costs that affect sales margins—Identifies spend parameters and establishes operating budgets; tracks spending and complies with associated reporting requirements (for example, reimbursement for customer meetings and travel expenses); manages sales-related allowances and discounts to ensure appropriate margin; reallocates funding to address cost overruns; prepares and communicates quarterly and annual sales reports; manages associated sales expenditures; and drives cost-control and operational efficiencies to ensure optimum targeting of resources on most appropriate opportunities.
- Aligns resources with opportunities—Collaborates with colleagues to ensure optimum opportunity coverage using available technology and expert sales resources; balances key factors determining resource allocation to establish pursuit priorities in area of control (for example, account importance, win probability, opportunity size, and alignment to strategy); and, where necessary, troubleshoots with colleagues to ensure timely access to needed resources.
- Screens administrative demands and troubleshoots back-office operations to minimize sales disruptions—Acts as the escalation point to screen sales personnel from administrative disruptions that might otherwise dilute their focus on selling activities; screens and prioritizes incoming organizational communications for key announcements; troubleshoots operational issues around order fulfillment to ensure delivery or deployment; troubleshoots operational challenges that affect sales credit or payout to maintain positive sales morale; and collaborates with operations management to improve processes, systems, or tools for ease of use.
- Ensures accurate forecasting while monitoring performance to metrics—Ensures contributor use of planning and reporting tools or systems to establish consistency, promote accuracy, and advance real-time management assessment; conducts regularly scheduled check-ins and meetings to assess and/or troubleshoot progress to pre-determined plans; tracks account contributor performance against established metrics (for example, funnel movement, account plans, program goals, established performance objectives, and customer satisfaction); and develops and rolls up aggregate forecast as required.
- Hires, promotes, and terminates to improve sales performance and address capability gaps—Leverages management experience and knowledge of capability gaps to build well-targeted hiring criteria or conduct appropriate terminations, reviews candidate’s qualification for linkage to defined competencies, supports candidate selection processes, facilitates on-boarding, clearly sets expectations for new hire performance, acts as performance resource during trial employment period, situates performance in the wider context of business goals, clearly communicates criteria for promotion and exercises this responsibility objectively, counsels contributors to address and remediate performance concerns or to resolve issues, and creates required documentation to terminate employees in a manner that minimizes challenges to this decision while protecting company assets.
- Aligns reward and recognition strategies with performance goals—Leverages company or establishes local rewards or recognition programs to advance overall sales performance, continuously assesses rewards for their motivational power and revises where necessary, administers recognition and reward selection criteria fairly to maintain morale, ensures communication of recognition or awards to leverage impact on group performance, and balances acknowledgement of individuals with the need for group solidarity to create a climate of continuous performance improvement that facilitates peer-to-peer best practices sharing.
Sample Outputs:
- Forecasts (synthesized or rolled up)
- Budgets and expenditure control plans
- Progress reports
- Responses to data requests
- Technical and functional resource plans or requests
- Workforce plans
- Hiring, termination, and promotion input and justification documents
- Hiring interview instruments and methods
- New hire training plan inputs
- New hire competency model(s) inputs
- Meetings with internal stakeholders
- Documentation for employee termination
- Talent management inputs
- Reward and recognition program plans
- Vendor selection criteria
- Flowcharts, mind maps, or other system maps
- Performance reviews
- Incentive plans
- Team-building events
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Developing Sales Force Capability |
Definition: Assesses capability gaps and identifies strategies and solutions to overcome them; determines new sales performance requirements associated with business strategies; identifies learning solutions required for new product or service launch, or new sales force requirements; creates and updates sales competency profiles by meeting with relevant sales stakeholders, increasing awareness of sales context and following sound competency-based approaches to planning and development of capability; drives a competency-based approach to planning and developing capability based on a solid understanding of critical levers that will most likely increase sales results; designs and develops learning solutions essential for skill and knowledge acquisition within unique sales cultures (for example, courses, curricula, mentoring, coaching, and on-the-job resources); utilizes rapid design delivery methods where appropriate (for example, virtual, collaborative, platform, and standalone); manages program roll-outs in the most effective manner; and measures and evaluates the impact of learning solutions.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Rapid instructional design methods
- Sales operations and fulfillment processes
- Audience learning style and preferences (individual and cultural)
- Test development (item construction and validation)
- Learning delivery systems and media
- Learning program evaluation methods (formative, summative, transfer, business impact, and ROI)
- Human performance improvement concepts
- Performance analysis methods
- Business direction and goals
- Sales cycle components and stage-specific milestones
- Blended learning techniques
- Experiential learning methods (work-based learning and on-the-job development techniques such as mentoring, job rotation, and sabbaticals)
- Learning management systems.
Ability to
- Translate business requirements or performance gaps into relevant learning improvements
- Apply approaches to learning to best meet the needs of target audiences
- Apply rapid instructional design methods to ensure responsiveness to performance challenges
- Build learning solutions sensitive to learning styles or cultural norms
- Leverage workplace opportunities to advance experiential learning (for example, mentoring, cognitive apprenticeship, and peer-to-peer tutoring)
- Construct valid and reliable tests
- Balance cost, target audience requirements, and content demands to select the most appropriate learning delivery systems and media
- Implement learning program evaluation systematically to establish a value chain that clearly connects programs to business results (for example, formative and summative).
Key Actions:
- Determines competencies required to achieve sales strategy—Understands how to align the strategic customer’s needs to increased capability through the improvement of individual competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes); ties organization’s sales strategies and business functions to competencies needed now and in the future; assesses current competencies of the team (from entry-level workers to senior executives) in relation to the requirements of the future state; and determines the priority of competencies needed.
- Conducts sales-related needs assessments—Identifies sales skill and environmental challenges, identifies required resources, analyzes and incorporates findings in a set of training solutions or support recommendations, and articulates information necessary for implementing future learning solutions while supporting organization’s goals.
- Designs and develops sales development programs, curricula, or learning solutions—Partners with subject matter experts to quickly and adequately develop content; analyzes, synthesizes, and organizes content modules; develops and validates learning outcomes and/or curricula progress path; collaborates with stakeholders in determining appropriate delivery strategy and media; generates the design specifications necessary for development; implements and monitors development to plan; leverages project-based approach to learning roll-outs and solutions; selects appropriate delivery modes for learning opportunities— instructor-led classroom, online instruction, guided on-the-job experience, informal learning, or a combination of methods; proposes opportunities to drive self-directed learning (for example, job rotation, tuition reimbursement, personal development reimbursement, and professional association memberships); creates development maps for every sales team member (leaders, catalysts, developers, and enablers); and ensures development maps are meaningful to sales team leaders by tying competencies to job function within the sales team, area of expertise, or job role.
- Uses learning management systems—Provides or updates information in learning management systems to ensure accurate and timely communication of events offered; tracks participants through learning programs and, where warranted, satisfactory completion of requirements (for example, certification course and testing completion); builds usable report templates based on stakeholder needs and generates reports as needed to profile target audience progress or requirements completion; enforces data access and confidentiality norms while ensuring that participants and their management have appropriate exposure to information based on access privileges; uses data to identify program challenges as these relate to attendance or completion requirements; and uses data to inform development planning and data integration involving interfacing with other systems.
- Ties learning strategy to organizational capacity—Creates a sales-wide learning plan to address competency gaps, manage resource deployment, and measure outcomes for sales catalysts, developers, and enablers; helps the organization decide between hiring for an already developed competency, developing the competency internally, managing the skill gaps through outsourcing, or blending approaches to achieve organizational capacity; sets baseline measures by documenting every member’s current competencies via assessment; identifies targets for closing the gap between current competency sets and those needed to support the future goals of the team as well as the overall organization; sets goals for internal communication and change management plans that will accompany the comprehensive action plan to address the team’s skills gap; develops a separate communication and change management strategy for sales managers; and includes sales managers in the strategy.
- Evaluates learning program or solution effectiveness—Designs evaluation strategy that ties training solutions to business impact; conducts formative evaluation to ensure the integrity of learning collateral and events; ensures contribution of learning solutions to the achievement of learning objectives; aligns evaluation with appropriate indicators and measurements strategies; develops evaluation instruments; implements summative evaluation to assess learner receptivity, skill and knowledge acquisition, learning transfer to work, and business impact; mines results for lessons learned and continuous improvement of sales learning; and measures progress before and after learning takes place, including the impact on leading inputs (for example, the length of the sales cycle and closing rate), lagging outputs (for example, sales results by channel, product, and team), behavior change (for example, observable increases or decreases in targeted areas), knowledge transfer (for example, measured retention of knowledge pre-, post-, and 90 days later), and customer satisfaction.
- Reports results to organizational stakeholders—Communicates the results of learning program measurements to demonstrate accountability, ensure quality, justify investments, ensure the business impact of programs, and identify program retirement criteria; identifies implementation challenges or emerging requirements that suggest revisions; and engages in continuous improvement to ensure program effectiveness.
Sample Outputs:
- Learning needs assessment plans, results, and support
- Learning design plans and specifications
- Competency models
- Curriculum plans
- Lesson plans
- Mediated learning delivery or support content
- Learning measurement plans
- Learning evaluation reports
- Appropriately worded tests
- Company-specific certification management
- Sales or sales-related training content
- Evaluation instruments
- Training reports
- Training calendars
- Support materials for marketing initiatives
- Learning management system updates
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Delivering Sales Training |
Definition: Understands the challenges and demands of the selling environment and is able to leverage that insight in preparation of sales training events; seeks out nontraining-related issues and creates separation between what can be targeted through training initiatives and what cannot; prepares for instruction by reviewing materials; supplements training events with real-world examples and relevant experiences; reviews training sequencing and clarifies module organization and events or activities; sets expectations and defines expected learning outcomes; delivers instruction and stimulates discussion; orchestrates interactive events that transfer knowledge or skill (for example, break-out groups and small group discussions); develops and/or manages learning attendance and performance feedback systems; manages and controls training environment within specified parameters; matches training delivery to individual sales person learning styles; and tests and scores achievement of learning outcomes.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Platform training methods and strategies
- Sales cycle and challenges
- Rapport-building techniques
- Sales operations and fulfillment processes
- Audience learning style and preferences
- Test monitoring or proctoring methods
- Certification processes and requirements
- Learning delivery systems and media utilization strategies
- Instructor-led delivery techniques
- Learning management systems
- Online (virtual) delivery techniques
- Classroom management techniques
- Small group discussion techniques
- Questioning techniques.
Ability to
- Apply platform skills, methods, and tactics effectively to advance learning
- Adapt instructional methods to target audience requirements
- Use personal style and management techniques and media to optimize the conditions of learning
- Administer testing fairly and in a way that accurately assesses skill or knowledge acquisition
- Interpret attendance tracking and performance system data accurately
- Identify and recommend supplemental learning strategies that will reinforce and extend classroom learning
- Match experiential learning methods to appropriate content.
Key Actions:
- Reviews and supplements learning—Reviews and prepares for sales learning events, ensures relevance of activities and discussion to the style and interests of the target audience, supplements learning material with personal anecdotes and experiences that will bring the concepts and processes to life, links conceptual content to activities, explores varying ways that content can be applied to increase sales effectiveness, and drives toward actionable learning plans that can be implemented by participants on the job.
- Motivates participants—Generates compelling interest in course and its objectives; where relevant, bridges current with prior learning to establish continuity; relates the benefits of learning outcomes to participant interests and agendas; varies stimuli (for example, modulates voice, diversifies media, and incorporates questioning strategies) and monitors participant attention to ensure active processing of information; and ensures the relevance of activities and discussion to the style and interests of participants.
- Manages instructional delivery—Clearly explains the organization of the learning event and desired learning outcomes, organizes the facility and agenda to allow customer issues to be addressed without sacrificing the learning environment, creates a collaborative learning atmosphere through introductions or exercises, uses questioning techniques appropriately to probe and ensure understanding and broaden the utility of skills or concepts, uses set ups and summaries to maintain coherent delivery and underscore key ideas, creates interactive experiences to maximize both tacit and explicit learning, uses learning technologies effectively to support instruction and advance the achievement of objectives, and facilitates small group discussions.
- Administers tests—Reviews tests to gain familiarity with administration protocols and test construction conventions; explains and clarifies test directions; administers tests and maintains a conducive testing environment; answers participant questions appropriately, using suggested guidelines; monitors time and conducts time-checks to ensure efficient use of participant time; collects testing instruments and ensures their appropriate communication or archiving; and, where required, grades tests and reports individual and aggregate scores.
Sample Outputs:
- Lesson plan modifications and annotations
- Instructor notes or comments
- Participant guides and workbooks
- Training exercise materials
- Training presentation aids
- Participant surveys
- Individual and aggregate test scores
- Room set-up plans
- Management updates
- Training marketing materials
- Calendar updates
- Test administration and recording
- Company-specific certification updates
- Participation reports
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Coaching for Sales Results |
Definition: Engages sales personnel in individual or group coaching; draws out the best performance of the individual or group through observation, motivation, and developmental feedback; leverages best practices and selling standards as learning tools; provides on-the-job reinforcement and corrective feedback; models appropriate and expected behaviors; develops or encourages relationships to directly grow sales talent; develops or hones sales-related subject matter expertise; identifies areas of performer excellence and maximizes development in these areas; identifies areas for improvement and addresses related obstacles; develops coaching strategies for both individuals and teams; and ensures that the sales person’s best performance is linked to sales results.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Motivation methods
- Performance observation techniques
- Listening and feedback methods
- Coaching methodology and techniques
- Organization and business strategy
- Performance review instruments and administration methods
- Counseling methods
- Business standards of conduct and ethical guidelines.
Ability to
- Assess performance objectively
- Assume various roles as needed in role-play to maximize learning (for example, sales person, customer, sales manager, and technical support)
- Employ observation to gather the most accurate depiction of performance data
- Identify “teachable moments” and uses these as program points to improve performance
- Balance performance improvement objectives with a recipient’s need for a healthy self-concept.
Key Actions:
- Observes sales person behavior to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement—Utilizes joint selling experiences to observe and evaluate; looks for trends in performance, internal relationships, and customer interactions; identifies root causes of behavior; seeks corroborating evidence of both historical and predictive performance; tests ideas through repeated experiences to avoid focusing on anomalies; schedules noncritical experiences that allow for possible failure without jeopardizing significant sales effectiveness; and documents observations and conclusions.
- Balances corrective with positive feedback to ensure optimum guidance and performance improvement—Identifies teaching moments to ensure individual receptiveness to feedback, provides feedback in a way that protects the dignity of recipients while identifying key components to improve and ensuring clear understanding, clearly articulates what was done correctly and where there are challenges to ensure that recipients target their improvement activities appropriately, provides salient examples to guide recipient performance, and personally supports individuals through work-related challenges.
- Leverages motivation as a key enabler of sales performance—Seeks to identify the motivations of both individuals and teams; engages in dialogue to uncover and reinforce effective motivational keys; analyzes the alignment of personal motivations with organizational goals; delivers motivational communication; consistently recognizes and rewards improvements in sales behavior and selling skills; identifies and, whenever possible, removes obstacles to motivation; and matches internal and external motivational factors to create an optimum performance environment.
- Links expected behaviors to strategic outcomes—Ensures that individuals understand how their performance aligns with larger organizational or business goals, establishes consequences to show how tactical mistakes can derail strategic goals, and disabuses individuals of the idea that good performance is merely an empty ritual and shows its utility in achieving desired results in a way that can be readily understood.
- Demonstrates and mentors expected sales behaviors—Leverages sales experience to concretely demonstrate advocated sales tactics or methods; uses on-the-job opportunities or job shadowing to demonstrate best practices (for example, sales “ride-alongs,” listening in on remote sales calls, and tool or system demonstrations); and personally and continuously models the positive values, attitude, and perspective expected of sales professionals.
- Establishes support programs to expand and enrich new learning—Collaborates with experienced practitioners to establish peer coaching, mentoring, or job sharing; identifies supplementary training or other resources (publications and professional associations) of potential use in performance improvement; and monitors and communicates performance innovations or new techniques that will expand or enhance performance.
Sample Outputs:
- Coaching reports
- Pre-call plan sheets
- Employee communications (pre- and postcoaching experiences)
- Sales performance reviews
- Developmental objectives for customer calls
- Individual sales performance development plans
- Customized targets and goals
- Performance contracts
- Sales contests
- Sales mentoring program agreements
- Reward and recognition programs
- Maximum potential assessments
- Employee redeployment or exit strategies
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Building Sales Infrastructure |
Definition: Defines requirements essential for creating an efficient and unified sales environment, including necessary processes, procedures, tools, and systems; works with experts and stakeholders to design and implement appropriate solutions (for example, tool or system experts and organization development experts); tests systems against desired outcomes and resolves issues; maintains process, tool, or system usability and integrity; identifies and proposes innovations to advance sales force productivity; manages reporting and administrative support as required; creates and leads sales capacity planning efforts; and implements solutions with a minimal disruption to sales team productivity.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Sales operations-related tools and technologies
- Requirements definition techniques
- Technical prototyping testing strategies
- Strategic planning methods
- Data analysis methods
- Process analysis and planning methods
- Sales stakeholder requirements (for example, business planners, sales management, sales force, and partners)
- Sales operations functions and processes
- Sales operations best practices (order entry or fulfillment and value chain maintenance)
- ROI calculation methods
- Change management methodologies.
Ability to
- Establish valid requirement feeds from all key stakeholders
- Depict key value chain process inputs, milestones, and outputs
- Build comprehensive models depicting all stakeholder interfaces
- Assess current processes and tools for gaps or inefficiencies.
Key Actions:
- Monitors current business processes and sales productivity tools for adequacy—Assesses current processes, systems, and tools for obstacles to productivity or agile access to sales intelligence (interface issues, usability issues, system or tool responsiveness, and data validity, reliability, and utility); identifies gaps in information flow and understands how improvements to the infrastructure can help; monitors marketplace and vendor offerings for infrastructure innovations and appropriateness to company needs; and determines ROI or break-even points to trigger investment discussions or decision making.
- Develops and drives strategic infrastructure planning—Collaborates with business planners, functions, and sales management to identify goals, challenges, and opportunities for improving infrastructure support; harnesses the technical resources essential for determining accurate technical and functional tool or system requirements; creates plans to guide infrastructure design and investment decisions; circulates plans among stakeholders to ensure buy-in and alignment with business, operations, and sales productivity objectives; and ensures that impact assessment has been completed and results understood by all stakeholders.
- Manages infrastructure upkeep or revision—Manages pilot testing and/or revisions of infrastructure solutions prior to roll-out, implements roll-out in accordance with plan and adapts those plans as necessary to meet quarterly or regional performance measures, and ensures that hardware improvements and software patches or revisions are monitored and incorporated in a way that minimizes impact on the sales function.
- Drives or supports infrastructure change and alignment—Collaborates with sales and operational management to develop change management strategies and programs; develops and coordinates change programs, communications, and training essential for program readiness and roll-out; and personally champions and advocates adoption of new systems.
- Pilots and evaluates infrastructure programs—Uses sound strategies and methods to evaluate the impact of new programs or program improvements and pilots innovations and ensures optimum usability to end users.
Sample Outputs:
- Process improvement flow charts
- Internal communications
- Sales team diagnostic tools
- Tool or system investment plans
- Tool or system productivity reports
- Infrastructure needs assessments
- Change management plans
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Designing Compensation |
Definition: Researches industry sales compensation metrics and best practices; collaborates with others to ensure that the end-to-end compensation environment motivates and rewards the right sales behaviors and contributes to overall sales growth; ensures that the sales behaviors targeted for reward link to the overall sales and marketing strategy; ensures the company has required information and metrics necessary for accurate and on-time revenue credit and compensation pay-out; determines and proposes sales group or aggregate competitive compensation models; ensures compensation models balance the business interests of the company with the needs of a well-motivated sales force and the realities it faces; identifies areas of conflict between sales behaviors and compensation; introduces and explains new compensation processes or calculations to the sales force; and serves as the functional representative to the sales team for resolving compensation-related issues and processing exception requests.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Research methods
- Industry benchmarking sources
- Payout processes, key milestones, ratios, and formulas
- Sales force motivators
- Financial compensation vehicles and metrics
- Financial modeling methods
- Business analysis methods
- Program planning and management skills
- Change management requirements
- Sales culture
- Local, regional, and/or country-level regulatory requirements
- Business performance resources.
Ability to
- Synthesize data from a variety of sources and make valid inferences
- Determine competitive yet feasible compensation metrics
- Supplement base payout with innovative reward strategies
- Identify and incorporate market competitive practices in compensation
- Generate stakeholder buy-in
- Identify the impact of current and proposed compensation policies on company health and sales force retention or recruiting.
Key Actions:
- Assesses current compensation against best practices and innovative sales compensation options— Identifies compensation challenges unique to sales that could be contributing to the challenges the company currently faces (for example, poor performance, misaligned or unintended reinforcement of nonpreferred sales behaviors, and loss of sales personnel); orchestrates or researches industry compensation packages; identifies trends or innovations and assesses them for applicability; and makes sound business recommendations.
- Aligns compensation with business requirements and appropriate sales behaviors and metrics— Ensures that proposed compensation models balance the business strategies with business realities and are achievable by sales team members; ensures that compensation aligns with human resource policies, regulatory requirements, and any contractual obligations; ensures that compensation promotes and reinforces productive, high-yield sales behaviors; and identifies and addresses negative or unintended consequences of current compensation strategies.
- Develops and enlists support for sales compensation models and plans—Develops sales compensation models that optimize the overall salary, commission, and bonus structure to create a well-motivated sales force and enlists the review of compensation strategies by business and sales executives and accommodates segment or regional differences where warranted.
- Drives sales compensation acceptance—Collaborates with sales and operational management team members in developing change management strategies and programs; develops and coordinates programs, communications, and awareness training essential for compensation strategy acceptance and roll-out; and champions and advocates adoption of new compensation strategies.
Sample Outputs:
- Sales compensation research reports
- Sales compensation models
- Strategic compensation plans
- Compensation training programs
- Compensation plan updates
- Executive team briefings
- Coding specifications for human resource or payroll systems
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Maintaining Accounts |
Definition: Actively manages account and/or customer portfolio; conducts account performance data analysis; generates reports essential for determining account status (for example, credit analysis, account performance assessment, and contract renewal scheduling); focuses individual activities on selling priorities while determining best strategies for handling accounts (for example, renew, drop, and expand selling); fulfills and troubleshoots orders, including formalizing contracts, resolving fulfillment bottlenecks, troubleshooting off -shore fulfillment challenges, and ensuring compliance with service-level agreement terms; and provides contract administration and tracking centered on contract renewals, contract expansion opportunities, and contract terms requiring renegotiation.
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Sales system or tools
- Sales-related databases (for example, what they contain and how to access)
- Sales process
- Sales culture
- Pricing or costing formulas
- Account management processes
- Order entry and fulfillment processes
- Funnel management administration
- Contractual terms and conditions (standard)
- Report templates
- Supply chain (for example, components, strategy, processes, and key contacts)
- Customer satisfaction requirements
- Process improvement methods.
Ability to
- Collaborate effectively with account managers to meet customer needs
- Apply standard contractual terms and pricing appropriately and escalate for nonstandard conditions, where needed
- Identify account performance trends and key milestones
- Prioritize and fulfill customer requests with an appropriate sense of urgency.
Key Actions:
- Prepares standard and ad hoc reports on account status—Analyzes account performance and contractual status data; researches customer or account business health, credit worthiness, and other qualification variables that quantify risk; and generates reports profiling account or customer current state as scheduled or on demand.
- Provides agile task substitution assistance to facilitate sales—Accesses pricing information required for solution costing, including special or discount options; identifies part or component numbers required for costing solutions or providing replacements; acts in parallel with customer-facing sales in executing any back-office or operational tasks involved with aggregating data that will advance or formalize new deals; and enters order data using appropriate systems and order entry processes and tracks processing to completion.
- Crafts contracts and statements of work—Assembles standard contracts for use by others as boilerplates for noncomplex opportunities, works with legal experts to modify terms and conditions that reflect decisions reached during negotiation, communicates contracts or statements of work to stakeholders to ensure understanding of the opportunity and attendant responsibilities in execution, and ensures that contracts and statements of work move through sanctioned approval process and are archived appropriately upon signing.
- Troubleshoots customer operational issues—Acts as an important interface for resolving customer issues around order or service fulfillment; works with back-office, partner, or supply chain stakeholders to eliminate bottlenecks; revises inaccurate data entry, solicits and gains required approval, expedites customer involvement, or identifies supply chain issues for escalation; and ensures that issues are resolved to the customer’s satisfaction.
- Tracks and administers contracts—Uses systems and tools to monitor contract expiration or service plan milestones, alerts sales to pending events requiring customer contact and renewal negotiations, prepares the necessary documentation required for renewal, and acts on behalf of the company when interacting with difficult customers to ensure they fulfill payment or other contractual obligations.
Sample Outputs:
- Standard or nonstandard contracts
- Statements of work
- Trouble reports
- Scheduled or ad hoc reports
- Project plans
- Meeting agendas
- Metrics documents
- Contract administration updates
- Data-entry modifications or updates to company-specific database
- Standard or customized pricing quotes
- Legal review documentation
- Customer surveys
- Back-office actions
- Other outputs as appropriate.
| Recruiting Sales Talent |
Definition: Ensures job descriptions are accurate and include the information essential for recruiting the sales people with the right level of knowledge, skills, abilities, and other attributes for the position; sets and aligns performance and financial expectations with sales management as well as potential candidates to establish clear recruitment parameters; orchestrates individual and professional networks, agencies, and other resources and tools required for sourcing, identifying, and selecting the most appropriate matches; conducts interviews with sales candidates; knows sales compensation plan elements and relays appropriate levels of information regarding compensation to candidates at appropriate time; maintains sensitivity to individual personalities, negotiation styles, and worldviews unique to the sales or sales support environment; contributes to effective candidate interviewing through participation in sales simulation exercises and structured behavioral interviews or other methods; provides process oversight; negotiates effectively to bring key stakeholders together and achieve a win-win deal for both the sales organization and the candidate; and facilitates sales on-boarding to ensure the mutual benefit of all recruitment stakeholders (sales organization, new hire, and recruiter).
Key Skills and Knowledge:
Knowledge of
- Psychometric tests (uses and output)
- Industry recruitment practices
- Industry networking methods
- Sales organization or company compensation structure and practices
- Sales or organization culture and personality variables
- Sales interviewing methods
- Job or position analysis methods
- Human resources recruitment policies, compliance requirements, and procedures
- Human resources operational policies (including diversity and harassment policies)
- Product, services, and solutions (target markets and customers)
- Industry vertical selling requirements
- Candidate pipeline management tools
- Local, regional, and country-level labor laws
- Interviewing methods and strategies (behavioral based and probing techniques)
- Company mission, vision, and goals
- Negotiation methods.
Ability to
- Build and maintain professional industry and professional contacts
- Influence the definition of job and salary requirements to ensure logical alignment
- Accurately interpret psychometric test output
- Validate tacit impressions of a candidate through questioning techniques
- Establish candidate relationships based on trust
- Assess emerging information against prior information for consistency
- Protect the interests of company stakeholders during negotiations.
Key Actions:
- Aligns and modifies sales job profiles—Collaborates wiThend-point sales management and appropriate team members to enhance standard sales position descriptions with better business needs and performance expectations; highlights key performance indicators (KPIs) and their supporting skills, knowledge, and experience; identifies unique or specific company practices or norms that may affect candidate success; and revises job profiles, validates with end-point management, and sets overall expectations based on clear recruitment objectives and parameters.
- Ensures valid compensation package—Assesses compensation package offered for the sales position and job level against industry practices and metrics, negotiates with end-point management to bring packages into alignment with market value, and finalizes compensation range as a basis for later candidate negotiations.
- Monitors and maintains sales candidate pipeline—Establishes and monitors industry-specific conferences and professional associations where prospects congregate, develops reciprocal network of contacts with colleagues to share prospect leads and references, builds candidate lists categorized by descriptors such as industry verticals or market segments, continuously updates pipeline as a basis for sale candidate prospecting, and scans industry segments for volatility.
- Sources sales candidates—Engages all available strategies (personal networking and peer recruiter information sharing), technology (job boards, social networks, and web mining), and resources (industry and professional associations) to conduct candidate searches; identifies prospects’ contact information and incorporates these into solicitation strategy; and uses exploratory interviews with potential candidates to expand candidate pool with additional references.
- Solicits, screens, and profiles candidates and determines person-job fit—Conducts iterative interviews with potential candidates (for example, dialogues around KPIs), gauges interest, and assesses skill set and level of experience; evaluates prospect’s information with job profile requirements to determine active candidacy; develops profile of candidate to ensure consistency of information and identify issues requiring further investigation; and narrows candidates and communicates final list to end-point management.
- Facilitates sales peer team interviews and candidate testing—Prepares candidates for end-point management and sales team interviews; facilitates behavioral or sales simulation interview scenarios that emulate real-world requirements; co-interviews candidates to ensure all critical position requirements are addressed (for example, compensation package, base and commission payout formulas, and relocation expenses); where warranted, facilitates candidate testing; debriefs candidates and end-point sales interviewees to assess match, determine fit, and make recommendations; and advises interviewers on human resources, legal, and compliance requirements.
- Generates offers and conducts negotiations with sales stakeholders to closure—Develops and communicates offer letters to candidates; conducts negotiations with candidates and end-point management to close outstanding gaps (for example, raise benefits and modify requirements); identifies area of mutual hiring acceptance and brokers key compromises; monitors candidates’ bargaining behavior and claims to ensure veracity, integrity and overall fit; and resolves outstanding issues.
- Supports on-boarding—Develops appropriate on-boarding plan; briefs new hire on next steps and works with human resources to implement seamless hand-off to orientation; maintains contact with new hire to troubleshoot problems and ensure on-boarding success; and, where warranted by new hires that do not assimilate successfully, works with end-point management to refill position.
Sample Outputs:
- Job or position descriptions
- Network of industry resources and contacts
- Sales candidate pipeline of future prospects
- Psychometric test results
- Sales compensation data (amended) management meetings
- Candidate interview data
- Résumé filing and retrieval
- Coordinated candidate interviews
- Sales interview protocols (questions and strategies)
- Offer letters and cover letters
- On-boarding plan input
- Other outputs as appropriate.