How and Why to Clearly Define the Sales Role In Your Organization

I think it’s strange that the sales role inside a company is often poorly defined and that the skills and abilities necessary to succeed in that role are rarely formalized. It’s a symptom, in my mind, of the fact that the sales profession is not really treated as a profession.

Frequently, new salespeople come into a role, receive some basic training, and then are expected to just know how to do their jobs. If they don’t do well, then it’s assumed they aren’t cut out for the job, and they struggle until they fail out.

I made this mistake, too, early in my career. I was good at selling even without formal training, so I assumed the right people would also be good at it. When I started hiring a sales team for my first company, I entered into the all-too-common pattern of hiring and firing salespeople, looking for “the right one.” And in all that, I never took the time or effort to sit down and truly define what the role entailed, what the attributes were that a great fit salesperson would have, and the skills and abilities necessary to succeed in the role.

The sales profession is not really treated as a profession.

I learned the lesson the expensive way and, eventually, decided to create the platform that would make formalizing the sales process and roles easier in an effort to elevate the profession. That’s Membrain.

How To Define The Sales Role

In order to define the sales role inside your organization, you need to understand what kind of sales environment you operate in, and you need a high-level strategy as well as a proven sales process. Once you have those, you can build a picture of what a salesperson will need to know and the skills they will need to have to succeed.

If you’re operating in a complex B2B sales environment, a high-level list of skills might look something like this:

• Business Acumen
  • Business Value Quantification
  • Industry Insights
  • Positioning & Value Propositions
  • Risk Management Insights
  • Stakeholder Mobilization
• Mindset
  • Attitude & Beliefs
  • Building Rapport & Trust
  • Discussing Money
  • Handling Rejection
  • Motivation
  • Problem-Solving
• Process & Systems
  • Sales Content Management
  • Sales Process & Structure
  • Social Selling
  • Time & Calendar Management
  • Using CRM
• Product Knowledge
  • Company Vision, Mission, Values
  • Competitor Knowledge
  • Ideal Customer Profile Understanding
  • Product Capabilities
  • Product Presentation
• Selling Behaviors
  • Activity Levels
  • Closing & Negotiating
  • Consultative Selling
  • Listening Skills
  • Needs Analysis
  • Objection Handling
  • Qualification Discipline
  • Setting Next Steps

From the high-level list of categories and skills, you can also look at when a salesperson needs to know each item on the list and build a training and development program to support them. Additionally, your list can be used in coaching to identify where a salesperson’s biggest opportunities for growth lie.

How Membrain Elevate Makes This Easy

Inside Membrain’s coming release of Membrain Elevate, we’ve created a set of tools that make it substantially easier for leaders to define and track the necessary skills and abilities on their sales team. Elevate provides a templated set of ability categories that provides a starting point and are customizable to meet the needs of your sales environment.

Our self-assessment tools enable salespeople to evaluate themselves against the defined needs of the role, and a manager assessment tools enable the manager to do the same for each salesperson. A spider graph allows coaches and salespeople to see these evaluations overlaid on each other, and creates clarity around where the salesperson and their coach can focus for the biggest growth opportunities.

Focus Increases Time to Productivity

One of the benefits of defining the skills and abilities and tracking them in a tool like Elevate is faster time to productivity. Companies often get bogged down in trying to stuff new salespeople full of knowledge and skills before they even begin to sell.

When you have defined the critical skills and abilities, you can also define when each one is necessary in order to perform each aspect of the role. In one model, I’ve seen an organization set matters up so that the new salesperson has everything they need to start setting appointments, before they are done training.

This enables them to begin setting appointments almost from day one, and then by the time the appointments actually start happening, they have gained the skills they need to conduct those initial calls. Then by the time it is time for a follow-up, they have gained those skills.

This can vastly increase time to productivity, in addition to improving overall productivity of the sales team.

So, what do you think? Do the default categories in Membrain Elevate make sense? What categories would you set up in your sales environment?