So what is an effective competency model?

Firstly, thank you for the feedback we received, please do keep contacting us as it is important that the work Fred and I put into this does not only reflect our personal experiences.

So what is an effective sales competency model?
I have a simple definition for you - a description of what a high performing sales person does in order to sell to your customers. There is a key phrase in this definition - sell to your customers. The sales competency should not be generic, it must reflect what is required to sell to your customers. Whilst there are some standard components, key for an effective competency model is to reflect the buying style of your customers.

Let me give you an example: There is no point in creating a competency model that is assessing sales people against a complex, consultative sales approach, when your customer base is transactional and is looking for the easiest buying process - differentiation is in the ease of placing orders, offering simple up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and providing a consistent and timely order fulfilment.

The reason I emphasise the need to reflect your environment is that it is this that differentiates between a sales competency model and an effective competency model. I feel I should apologise for stating the obvious, but if you are investing time, effort and money in building a sales competency model, it must add value, provide a structure for coaching your people to be better and ultimately drive sales.


So what should the components of this competency model be?
The ultimate sales competency model should show direct links to your sales engagement model. It can be broken down into the following parts:

1. People attributes - We all know that there are specific attributes we look for in a successful sales person; resilience, challenging, self motivated, success focussed, etc. The mix of these attributes will vary between the roles within your sales organisation and the complexity of the sale. Please do not forget your organisation's culture, you should be looking for people who "fit" and as such there are certain attributes that you should be identifying that makes for a good fit. Remember, the occasional maverick sales person who achieves their number may be fine, but you cannot have a team of them.
2. Specific skills - This is not just the obvious sales skills, but should include areas such as numeracy, literacy and also some less obvious such as collaboration skills, speaking skills, and management skills
3. Knowledge - Clearly sales people need to know stuff - but what is that stuff?
1. Product knowledge - The key features and advantages of the portfolio
2. Market knowledge - What is driving customers, what problems do they face and how does the portfolio help them solve these problems?
3. Sales process knowledge - There are key processes that the sales person should know about, either linked to a specific sales methodology or to the way in which you operate.
4. The ability to do - If you just measure Knowledge, Skills and Attributes, you have successfully identified people who have the potential to be an effective sales person. However I would suggest you should go beyond potential and find out what they really do. Therefore we recommend that your competency model should include measurements of how the sales people actually behave. Think it as the difference between the driving theory test, the driving test and then actually driving. As a parent, like many others, the minute my sons passed their driving test I wanted to go on a long drive with them to see how they drove once they had passed the test. Of course it was different, but key was to ensure that the differences reflected the needs of driving in the local areas as opposed to the driving test route.

But whose Competency Model should you use?

There are a lot of external competency models that are based on extensive research of sales people in many continents and they are especially effective in identifying specific attributes of successful sales people along with benchmarking specific skills against a wide population of sales people.

These are very helpful as they provide a level of external validation of "what good may look like". But as I pointed out earlier, an effective competency model needs to be personalised to your environment and the requirements of your customers. A purely external model, whilst useful will not deliver the increase in sales that a tailored model will give you.

It is also worthwhile learning the lesson of many organisations who buy in a competency model without the support of sales management is that these all ultimately fail to deliver the desired results. Why? Because they do not reflect the sales management style that exists within the organisation. The result is that sales management undermine the competency model as they drive alternative behaviours.

So in answer to the question "whose competency model?" - Yours, a combination of external (off the shelf) and tailored to reflect your "uniqueness".

A request - Don't forget to link the competency model to coaching

• Having a competency model does not improve sales performance in itself
• Knowing what your people look like against the competency does not improve sales performance
• To improve sales performance you have to get people to do what the sales competency is driving towards.

Too many people think that benchmarking against a competency model will automatically mean people improve. They won't!

The only way to get the return on your investment in defining the competency model is once you have benchmarked your people you have to be prepared to coach people to behave in the required manner. To make this easy you need to identify how you move people along the competency model as you are defining the model.

Before you run off scared that this means an expensive training programme, it does not. Your sales managers should be able to coach their people, you just have to provide the tools.

We want to hear from you

Please share your experiences of building a competency model. If you are a sales manager, a sales rep, or a sales director, we would like to understand what lessons you have learnt.

We do not want anything complicated, just the answer to 3 questions

1. What did you measure?
2. How did you measure it?
3. What did you do with the information?

As we are only talking to sales people we know you will want something in return.

We will put the names of all those who respond into a "virtual hat" and then provide them and up to 8 colleagues with a free assessment and coaching on their approach to selling.

Send us your responses now!

Either add a comment to the blog and share it with others, or send us your thoughtsdirectly by email to either mark.savinson@sales-accredit.com or fred.nelson@sales-accredit.com.

Next week we will look at how you how to measure people against the competency model