The top performers in any B2B sales team consistently outperform the bottom and core performers despite having access to the same resources, training, product and even territory.
However, if you ask five different sales leaders in these organisations what the top performers do differently from the rest of the team, you are likely to get five different answers. The unfortunate reality is that most sales leaders do not have access to accurate insights to inform their training and development. In this article, we explore the best way to identify development needs and the benefits of profile development and regression analysis.
Data-driven development
Through our years of conducting comprehensive sales capability assessments in B2B sales teams, we have identified patterns in the skills and competence profiles between the best and core performers. These insights can be used to confidently answer the four key questions a sales leader must ask when creating a development plan:
- “What skills and competences do our top performers possess that enable them to outperform the rest of the sales team so significantly?”
- “What sales skills and competences have no material impact on the performance of our sales team and would be a waste to invest in and develop?”
- “What are the most common capability gaps in the bottom 20% of B2B sales performers?”
- Which of our team’s capability gaps should we prioritise as a business to increase sales performance?
How Does A Capability Assessment Help?
A well-designed and comprehensive capability assessment will enable you to create two outputs that will answer all four of these questions with confidence:
- A skills and competence profile for the top 20%, core 60% and bottom 20% of your sales team.
- Regression analysis to confirm which skills and competences have the strongest correlation with impact on performance.
Let’s take a look at each of these outputs and identify how to interpret and answer these critical questions so you can confidently make decisions that will lead to the highest ROI in the training and development you provide to your team.
The Skills & Competence Profile For Your Team
With the right set-up and performance data, best-in-class capability assessments enable you to plot the skills profile of your top 20%, core 60% and bottom 20% of performers in your sales team.
In the example, below which includes data from more than 700 separate sales capability assessments, we have plotted the average capability rating for the top, core and bottom performers against the 52 competences of a world-class sales professional.
Key insights
- The gap in skill levels is far greater between bottom performers and core performers, than it is between core and top performers. Bottom performers have few, if any, sales skills developed to the fully competent level.
- The top and core performers have a number of core skills rated at the same level; Team Player, CRM Utilisation, Quoting and Pricing and Proposal Development. These do not explain the difference in performance between the top and core and are not a priority for development.
- The biggest gaps in capability rating exist in the following competences: Territory Coverage Planning, Qualification, Prospecting and Closing. These should be prioritised to see a material uplift in performance.
- Because the difference in capability rating is relatively low between the core and top performers, it suggests that once they have developed a fully competent level of skill, factors like discipline, activity levels and drive play an important role.
Regression Analysis Of The Capability Gaps
It is one thing to look at the skills profiles of your team in order to identify your key capability gaps, but it is another to be able to confidently determine the competences to develop in order to get the best return on your investment.
To do this, you need to take the output from your capability assessment and test each competence in turn, using something called regression analysis, in order to determine which has the strongest relationship with higher performance.
Regression analysis simply plots performance on one axis and capability rating on the other, in order to determine which capabilities are most consistently aligned with performance.
Imagine, you had just completed a capability assessment for your sales team and had identified the 12 biggest capability gaps. This is too many skills to focus on at one time so you must be able to confidently determine which competencies are most closely aligned to performance. This is where regression charts come in.
The higher the percentage value, the stronger the relationship between that competence and performance within your team. You would simply select the 4-5 capabilities with the highest value to begin your development.
Key Take-Away
Sales training is expensive, particularly when you include the opportunity cost of taking your people out of the field. When the impact is disappointing, which it often is with generic training, this places sales leaders in a difficult situation. When you can answer the four simple but challenging questions posed above, your decisions around team development are confident, and result in real results.
How we can help
To conduct a thorough capability assessment of your team, and explore our customised learning pathways for sales professionals and sales leaders, simply get in touch with us today.
