Continuous learning, training and development is essential for sales teams.
However, being able to identify opportunities for your sales team development plan is the best way to ensure all training offered is useful, engaging and adopted into the day-to-day roles of your people. But how do we do this? Here, we recap on the drivers of sales success and the tools you can use to focus your team’s training.
The 4 Drivers of Sales Effectiveness
As we have explained, there are four key drivers of sales professional and sales team performance, each with its own unique development needs and roles.
- Skillset
- Mindset
- Toolset
- Sales Leadership & Management
If you want or need to raise the performance of your sales team, these are the key levers that you can and will need to use.
Unfortunately, whilst this sounds relatively straight forward, there are many elements within each of these drivers, many of which overlap, making it more difficult to determine what capabilities or competencies should be prioritised.
After all, there are 52 competences in the skills profile of a world-class sales professional alone, 44 competences of a high-performing sales leader, 8 different aspects of sales mindset and hundreds of potential pieces of a best-in-class sales toolkit. The potential combinations are endless.
Regardless of the maturity of your business and the extent to which you have access to accurate data, there are things we can all do as sales leaders to work out where to focus our efforts.
Assessing Your Team’s Current Capabilities
There are at least six different ways that a sales leader can determine the major capability gaps within their team:
- Formal capability assessments
- Observation of your team members in live meetings and calls with prospective customers
- Sales performance data including lag indicators, win-loss ratios and share-of-wallet etc.
- Activity performance data including number of calls, meetings, proposals issued etc.
- Role plays
- Coaching discussions and conversations.
Let’s take each of these in turn and recognise the pro’s and con’s of each.
Formal Capability Assessments
A formal sales professional capability assessment typically involves both the individual and their manager rating the individual against a set of relevant sales competences in order to identify each team member’s strengths and development needs. Understanding where the sales managers see skill gaps and where team members feel they have capability gaps is an extremely effective way to assess current skill levels and the confident use of the sales toolkit.
When a dedicated sales leader capability assessment is also undertaken, the strengths and development needs of the sales leaders can also be understood.
Live Observation Of Team Members
One of the simplest and most reliable ways to identify the current strengths and capability gaps of your team members is to observe them working; making live sales and prospecting calls and in live sales meetings with prospective customers.
There are, however, a couple of best practices that are required in order to ensure that you get the most from your observations:
- Agree the focus for the observation and assessment beforehand. Will it be broad considerations such as establishing rapport and building credibility, or something more specific such as gaining progressive agreement or using sequence questioning?
- Discuss and agree on ‘what good looks like’ beforehand.
- Use a scorecard or checklist to align the sales professional’s goals with the rating criteria you will use to drive consistency overtime.
- Explain that you are there to observe and not as a safety net. You may need to let things go wrong to maximise the learning for the individual.
- Debrief as soon as possible after the observation, while it is fresh and easy to remember.
- Ask the individual what they think went well first, before asking them what could have gone better.
Effective live observation will help you to uncover skills gaps, competence gaps in using the established toolkit, attitude gaps holding them back, as well as where sales leader coaching and support will add real value.
Sales Performance Data
Actual sales data is an effective way to benchmark and compare team members in order to uncover strengths and development opportunities. This involves ranking all team members in terms of total sales closed, total value of issued proposals, average deal size, total value of sales pipeline, win-loss rates at each stage of the sales value chain. The stages of the sales value chain with the poorest win rate gives a strong indication of where the individuals have capability gaps either in terms of skills, use of tools, mindset and attitude, as well as where they might need coaching and support.
Activity Data
Activity data will ideally be captured in your CRM system and will typically include number of calls made, number of meetings scheduled, number of meetings held, number of proposals issued etc. Whilst activity levels are primarily an indicator of mindset and confidence, it can be useful to explore to what extent skills and competence with the toolkit are a contributing factor.
Role Plays
In our experience, role plays are one of the most effective and most underutilised methods to develop the skills and confidence of a sales team. When conducted effectively, with a focus on both fun and learning, they are without doubt the best way to practise a new skill once you understand the concept and theory. If you are not using role plays regularly with your team every week, it is highly likely that instead of practising a new skill safely within the team, they are practising in front of your live clients. Role plays will tell you if your team has the skills, attitude and understanding of how to apply them in a sales setting.
Coaching
There is extensive research to indicate that in an ideal world, sales leaders will spend around one hour coaching each of their team members each week, if they want to realise the best return on their investment in time. The highly personalised style of coaching conversations, particularly if you use a structured methodology, such as the GROW model, is one of the most effective ways to identify and agree the prioritised development needs of your team. The nature of the coaching conversation is such that it is standard to ask questions like “What would you like to focus on and develop?” or “What is getting in the way and holding you back?” or “Is there anything more that I can do to help you and support you?” The answers to questions like these will enable you to determine if you need to prioritise their skillset, toolset, mindset or the sales management guidance and support you are offering them.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking you need sophisticated tools and a lot of data to identify the development needs of your team. In reality, whilst these are the ideal, there are other simpler methods that can provide you as a sales leader with the insights you need to drive the development of your team where it will have the greatest impact.
How we can help
Get in touch with us to discuss how we can help you get the most out of your team’s development plans.
