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Our research is designed specifically to address particular needs of salespeople -- especially in the areas of attaining real-world results through a completely customizable framework. The key to this is understanding, supporting, and facilitating salesperson competency. To begin understanding sales competency, UPSA seeks to undertake a research agenda based on the following assumptions about professional selling.
Professional Selling is:
- Grounded to a buyer(s) behavior and decision process
- Focused on helping a transaction occur
- Bound by an ethical responsibility to do "what is right"
Based on these assumptions, UPSA has begun to dissect the sales profession step-by-step using a system's approach. The ultimate goal of the research agenda is to provide a framework for professional selling that can be utilized by purchasing, marketing, and even HR professionals. It is with this goal that the selling profession can then arrive at a common definition of "sales competency." Obviously, this is a long way away. Though UPSA has worked on the definition of “what” professional selling competency is since 1999, we still have work to do.
Sales competency is ultimately defined as a salesperson's knowledge, skill, abilities, and values. All four components must be in alignment to the customer in order for a sales professional to become competent. Because competence is defined as knowledge, skill, abilities, and values, sales professionals have a difficult job ahead of them if they wish to become better. Becoming better is not easy and most sales organizations do not provide adequate training to cover the breadth of competency.
Effective sales professionals are continuously learning and they have developed a framework and process for accessing their knowledge. They have a solid "knowledge foundation" and they understand their strengths and weaknesses. Because skill is determined by the knowledge a salesperson has gained plus their experience level, salespeople do get better over time. But it takes too long in almost everyone's opinion. Sales Management wishes that sales people would “ramp up” quicker. Sales people wish they could sell more, faster. The buyer wishes that all salespeople were “competent” and reliable.
Some of the most skilled sales professionals have stayed in one vertical market or industry for a longer period of time. They have also stayed in the same sales role for a longer length of time (such as outside sales). Why? They have followed a defined career path with increasing levels of responsibility and complexity of sale and they have been able to gain effectiveness, efficiency, and competency.
Ironically, a "truly" competent salesperson would have the ability to move into any organization and gain the trust of the buying decision-makers. They would be able to create a situation where buying can occur within an ethical environment at a fair price no matter who they worked for. They would have the knowledge to speak to a CEO, the front-line manager, or the newest employee about what issues and challenges they face almost immediately – no matter what vertical market they served.
Therefore, to help individual salespeople become even more competent, the UPSA research agenda for 2005-2008 has been developed to increase our understanding of required salesperson knowledge, skill, and ability so each individual salesperson can be the best at what they do.
To accomplish this, salespeople will need a framework. Since 1999, UPSA has interviewed hundreds of salespeople while reaching out the the UPSA community and "bag carrying/quota carrying salespeople" in a vigorous effort to study the components of salesperson competency. As part of a Ph.D. program, UPSA has commissioned a study to be conducted by an UPSA member to help ground our standards to more academic theory and underpinnings. The final Ph.D. publication will be on the area of individual selling competency and provide further understanding of these areas, especially as they pertain to the UPSA standards already published in the Compendium of Professional Selling.
The research will then be offered as an important framework that many salespeople will continue to leverage to succeed, gain more confidence, and attain their greatest accomplishments in selling.
For anyone in any profession, they usually seek to become better. To do this, they must first start with an objective analysis of where they currently are and where they want to be. They must objectively analyze their performance against existing benchmarks from their organization or from their professional trade association. They must understand what their current performance “situation” is and where they need to be. They need to understand who their performance is impacting.
For professional salespeople, they must objectively ascertain:
- What results are currently being achieved?
- What results are desired of me?
- How large is the gap between my current situation and the expectations?
- What is that impact of that gap? To myself, to my employer, to others?
The goal for salespeople, then is to understand what they can control and improve upon in order to close the performance gap. If there is a gap in performance, the goal then is to clearly understand why that gap exists. Perhaps the salesperson doesn't have the right information or support. Perhaps they don't have the time or ability to perform all the work that needs to be done. Maybe the rewards in place are not giving them the proper incentives. These are "external" causes of the performance gap that they may not be able to control (and are usually the purview of your management team).
Usually, a gap in performance that a salesperson can control stems from the absence of the right activities, beliefs, or competencies that will lead to the desired level of performance.
- Activities are visible outputs that you create as a salesperson. These outputs can take the form of something communicated, something thought, or something created.
- Beliefs are internal thought patterns that lead the salesperson to accept something as “true”, especially a particular tenet or a body of tenets accepted by a group of persons (i.e. that all salespeople are bad people, etc)
- Competencies are comprised of knowledge, ability, and skill
- Knowledge is acquisition of the right information necessary to perform.
- Abilities are defined as the quality of being able to do something, either physically or mentally (like drive a car).
- A skill is the proficiency, facility, or dexterity acquired or developed through training or experience (like driving a car very well).
Once the salesperson has defined why a certain gap exists and defined specifically, what they can control within that gap, they must understand what they can do about it. The salesperson should objectively and appropriately define specific ways to close your performance gap by addressing the root cause (activity, belief, or competency). To accomplish this, they may choose to read, attend training, interview others, listed to something, etc, etc. You may choose to accomplish this on your own or with others.
The key is to identify what they need to improve and learn it in the most appropriate manner. What this doesn't mean is reading a book on sales methodology and “swallowing it whole.” Most salespeople do not do this anyway. To become an expert salesperson, you have to develop expertise in selling. You must be able to think effectively about problems that come up within professional selling. Understanding expertise is important because it provides insights into the nature of thinking and problem solving. Research shows that it is not simply general abilities, such as memory or intelligence, nor the use of general strategies that differentiate experts from novices. Instead, experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notice and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment. This, in turn, affects their abilities to remember, reason, and solve problems.
With this accomplished, it will be time for each salesperson to implement the new activity, belief, or competency. This is easier said than done. Right now, salespeople make this choice in a “vacuum." Therefore, they probably haven't discussed why they chose to change a certain aspect, or they haven't been able to ground your thought process to anything solid. As an output of the UPSA research, our goal is to provide salespeople something tangible to serve as a checklist, framework, or scorecard. This will allow each person to stay focused on implementing their new behavior. This is different than just “staying motivated'. UPSA seeks to specifically help salespeople implement a lasting change based on an objective understanding of strengths and weaknesses. To do that, each salesperson needs to make changes in a planned and managed fashion. The aim of this process should be to more effectively implement new activities, beliefs, and competencies. The changes to be managed lie within and are controlled by each unique salesperson. They must have a plan, work the plan, and measure their progress. This process is not unlike the change or “version control” aspect of information system development projects. This process starts with understanding the end result, assessing where each person currently is and incrementally making the appropriate change until the desired result is accomplished.
Unfortunately, this is a “new way of thinking” for most salespeople. Why? Because to do this effectively, you have to understand “WHAT” professional selling is – this is very different than “doing professional selling.” If you try to engineer a change on the latter, you quickly end up in the area of subjective “here's what I think we should do” thinking. This is often counter-productive and not uniquely tailored to your specific needs. The best way for a salesperson to get where they need to go is – do this themselves. The UPSA research agenda seeks to support this autonomy.
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UPSA's Comprehensive Research Agenda