Articles

The Process
By Paul Eccher

Imagine that you are newly appointed Director of Training. Your new vice-president of sales proclaims, "We will have a world-class sales force. Our team will be the envy of the industry. Your job is to identify the gaps between where our reps are now and where we need them to be. Then, do what you need to do to close these gaps quickly." Enthused, energized yet somewhat petrified, you leave the meeting with the assignment of your life. Your mind races with a host of questions:

• Where should I start?
• At what level of skill are our current reps?
• How will I learn what the force will need to do to succeed over the next 2-5 years?
• What are the critical gaps between our top performers and our average performers?
• And, what do I need to do to close these gaps?
• How can I establish a clear financial return on investment for my efforts?
• Why did I accept this job, I thought that my mother didn't raise any fools?

Well, except for the last question, you are definitely asking yourself the right questions. What follows is a description of a process I have found quite effective for answering these questions. This process serves as a useful template for assessing and developing a high calier sales force. It also provides an impactful method for capturing financial return on investment data for your business.

Step 1 - Define the Playing Field

Before recommending any training actions, it is important to gather some data. To do this most effectively, it is critical to include the perspectives of all the key stakeholder groups. For most sales organizations, this means that you need to be talking to job incuments, sales managers, knowledgeable executives, human resources and a cross-section of customers. Once you have identified the right audience of stakeholders, the question becomes "What do I need to learn from them?" In a 30-45 minute interview protocol and a couple of focus groups with incumbents, a lot of ground can be covered. Utilize the following list of topics as a general guide:

• Current culture of the sales organization
• Job roles, duties, tasks
• Future needs and requirements of the customers
• Future needs, challenges and changes for the position
• Critical to success current and future skills and competencies
• Current sale force effectiveness on tasks and competencies
• Common performance derailers in those who struggle
• Common competencies of top performers
• Critical job situations that often make the difference between successful performance and failure on the job
• Perceived training needs and priorities

Typically, an interview pool of the properly selected 12-16 key stakeholders will provide an abundance of new knowledge regarding the current and future needs of the sales position. Beyond providing a clear roadmap of the competencies and skills need for the sales positions, this type of rich, qualitative data typically surfaces a number of organizational (non-training) issues that need to be addressed in order to satisfy the emerging needs of the stakeholder groups.

Step 2 - Identify Success Factors

With the learnings from Step 1 in hand, a clear picture of the job emerges. This picture includes:

• A mission statement of job purpose
• An understanding of current and future job roles, and the gaps between the two
• An exhaustive list of job tasks, as well as ratings of task importance and percieved current sales force skill level on each task
• A strategic competency model that defines the 12-15 critical to success behavioral competencies and sales skills necessary for superior performance in the job, and perceived current sales force skill level for each competency
• The critical work situations that a sales rep will need to handle effectively in order to succeed in the position

By including all stakeholder perspectives and following a well-designed protocol for data gathering, the first two steps of the process provide a useful training needs analysis for the sales force. These steps organize the training needs around tasks and behavioral competencies. However, the next steps can be extremely beneficial for identifying the critical gaps between top performers and average performers and establishing a legitimate ROI for competency development and training.

Step 3 - Assess The Critical Gaps

Once the model for successful performance has been developed, it is time to empirically and objectively assess how effectively the current sales reps demonstrate these competencies. Rather than assessing each and every sales rep, ask the senior sales management team to identify a representative sample of top performers and average performers to include in the research study. This allows for the gap analysis that provide insight into how top performers differ from typical performers. This becomes invaluable in determining how to select and train sales reps.

How should the assessments be conducted? Two primary methods exist for assessing the reps. The first is to use a 360-degree assessment tool customized around the competency model. This allows for input from the rep's manager, customers and peers. The downside is that often times the most critical to success competentcies are difficult for 360-degree observers to see. Competencies such as competetive drive and conceptual thinking are often critical to sales sucess, but these are hard to observe for the average rater. A second method that I have found to be very useful in assessing sales competencies is structured, behaviorally-based interviewing. This type of assessment provides a clear measure of the level of capability a sales rep has in each of the key competencies. In my research, I have consistently found that a 1-2 hour, structured interview built around the critical work situations of a job yields a reliable and valid assessment of a sales rep's capabilities.

Once all of the study participants have been assessed, we are in an excellent position to answer a number of the critical questions. We can look at the gap between our top performers and our average performers. This tells us which competencies most differentiate our best reps from our typical reps. We can also look at the gap between our top reps and our desired future state. This provides us with insights into training areas that apply to even our best people. By analyzing the results received from our average performer group, we get a clear indication of the current skill level of the entire saels organization. After this step of the process, we know specifically which competencies require the most training and we know which critical work situations are most difficult for our reps to successfully handle. This allows us to take a pinpointed, job relevant approach to investing training dollars.

Step 4 - Establish Financial ROI

How do we establish ROI? What we have found to have a major impact on the senior executives within the company is to link the competency results to bottom-line revenue generation. To do this, you need access to the recent performance results of each of the study participants. By analyzing competency assessment results along with financial performance results, you will be able to identify which behavioral competencies are most associated with success. For example, in one recent research study I found that just two competency scores (Self-starter and Strategic Thinking) accounted for over 50% of the difference in revenue generation between top and average performers in a healthcare services sales force. With this type of information in hand, you are able to demonstrate the financial (dollars and cents) impact of developing a particular competency within the sales force.

Step 5 - Become a Value-Added Consultant

Many of the Training Managers that I get a chance to talk to these days openly discuss the pressures that they are facing. Often times the scenario they paint is one of decreasing budgets and increasing demands for financial returns. The importance of being able to speak in terms of financial impact, outcome measures, and value-added benefits to the corporation has never been more important. The steps outlined in this article not only provide a method for establishing the financial impact of sales competencies and training, they also provide a strong foundation for the positioning the training professional as a value-added consultant to the organization on a number of other significant issues. These include:

1. Helping to develop the strategic direction of the sales force in order to meet the separate needs of each of the key stakeholder groups
2. Recognizing which competencies should be more carefully assessed during the hiring process because they are more difficult to train
3. Identifying organizational issues that must be confronted in order to create a success-based culture within the sales force, and to increase the outcomes reached through training
4. In conclusion, the next time you are faced with the challenge of radically upgrading the skills and competencies of a sales force, feel armed with a process that will help you define the playing field, identify success factors, assess the critical gaps, establish financial ROI, and position yourself as a value-added consultant to the organization.