3 Steps to Operationalize Your Sales Capability Framework

When it comes to sales capability frameworks, organizations usually fall into one of the following categories:

1. They are thinking about creating a sales capability framework because it feels like the right thing to do, but they don’t know much information about it.
2. They have a sales capability framework, but it is languishing, untouched in a dusty filing system after an initial flurry of activity.
3. They developed a prosperous sales capability framework. It sits at the heart of everything they do but is extremely difficult to maintain.

If you find yourself in any of these categories and are not currently satisfied with your status quo, we have your solution.

We’ve provided a few tips to avoid your sales capability framework a) becoming unloved and gathering dust and b) causing you a headache of admin to maintain.

Step 1: Align it to your Sales KPIs

Right now, your sales teams are driven and reviewed predominantly by hard metrics and dashboards from your CRM.  These include lagging indicators, like quota achieved, and leading indicators, like conversions of meetings to opps.

Most sales teams live and breathe by these metrics.  They are understood, they are adopted, and they are tracked.  Importantly, they form part of the natural evaluation and operating rhythm of sales.

To place a whole new framework on top of your sales team and sales leaders without articulating how it relates to their own internal measures is a path to an unused framework. By aligning each of your capabilites to the indicators it most impacts, you make it relevant to the target audience.

You also set yourself, and the sales teams, up to be able to use the framework and measure it more easily.

Step 2: Ownership

People who fall into category 3 will be familiar with this one. You are tracking sales capabilities that requires you to:

1. Periodically send out spreadsheets to your sales leaders, asking them to update their sales reps’ ratings
2. Chasing the sales leaders to complete them
3. Chasing the sales leaders again
4. Collating all that data into a meaningful single view/view by team to understand ongoing gaps
5. Repeat

This shows cracks in ownership and accountability.

Once again, the sales capability framework sits outside of sales. It is an additional ‘ask’ from the sales team, who are already handling competing pressures and an administrative load.

Instead, make your sales capability framework consumable for sales leaders and sales reps. Have them own it and align everything to it.

Instead, make your sales capability framework consumable for sales leaders and sales reps. Have them own it and align everything to it. Integrate it into their daily workflow by:

• Have it embedded into a 1-2-1 coaching template so sales leaders have a practical use of it and it can guide coaching conversations. Step 1 will help with that as it will show sales leaders how to align it to performance gaps.
• Align your learning and development content and resources around it. Make it easy to index and find content based on the capabilitgaps rather than any other naming convention. Only build new content based on the gaps you are seeing in team sales capabilities.
• Align career development and pay reviews to it.

• Talk about wins in the same language: "what capabilities impacted a particular win or great news item?" Sellers find peer learning and reinforcement as one of the most effective ways to adjust to a new system.

• Have it centralized so that updates out in the teams are immediately fed into your central view for actionable intelligence.

Step 3: Measure it

In fact, don’t just measure it, publicize the measurements and report it up and down the organization.

In step 1, you aligned your sales capability framework with the key indicators. In this step, take that information and show your dashboard and performance benchmarks by skill or behavior.

e.g. Those that score above expectation in sales capability ‘Problem Discovery’, see an average order value of x% higher.

After completing training courses associated with sales capability ‘Deal Control’ attendees saw deal cycles reduce from 90 days to 30 days.

By measuring the outcomes, publicizing the successes, and addressing the gaps, you will demonstrate the value of having the sales capability framework in the first place.