How to Structure Your Sales Team’s Career Path

Competencies & Career Progression

Why should you be clear and structured about your sales team’s career path? To make it easier, take a look at these common examples you may have come across in your journey.

Annie was promoted to a manager last quarter as she smashed her target. She’s now struggling to cope with the differing demands of management.	Barnaby has a headcount in his Account Executive team, but there are no SDRs ready to take the leap. He’s looking to recruit externally.	Danny is a Sales Development Representative (SDR) who’s been with the business 12 months. He’s considering leaving as he has no vision or plan for what’s next.	Chloe got promoted because she’s close with her manager. The rest of the team are not happy as they don’t think it was fair.

Although the above scenarios are all too common, there are simple things you can do to avoid them in the first place.

If you are in a fast growth organization, or one who values talent, or both, having a clear career path is a no-brainer. But how do you go about creating it?

1 - Start with your Sales Competency Framework

Make sure you have a clear competency framework for each role in sales. That needs to be from entry-level SDR, right up to Sales Leaders. This needs to cover the skills, behaviors, and objectives that someone needs to have to excel at their current role. If you don’t currently have one, this handy article will get you started: Sales Capabilities Required to Compete Today.

Be clear on how you are going to rate your sales reps against each competency on the framework. We like a 1-5 rating scale with 1 being low and 5 being exceptional.

Remember, what you are looking for when managing a clear career progression plan is consistency and objectivity. Therefore, the more guidance you can provide to both your sales leaders and sales reps on how they should be rated and what this means, the better. Learn more about scoring in our blog post, "Sales Rep Scorecard Examples: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

With your competencies in place, you can clearly state the minimum expectations for promotion.

For example, to move from an SDR to an Account Executive, the minimum expectation for Prospect Qualification should be a ‘3’. In fact, to be considered for promotion, your rep should be operating at a minimum rating of 3 across all competencies. If they are not, this identifies a gap that focused coaching, learning, or development can fill.

2 - Existing vs. New Competencies

Remember, there will be new competencies to master for the next role, but there will also be new elements to learn against existing competencies.

An example of a new competency for an SDR may be “Negotiation.” You will need to decide how much preparation you want your SDRs to do before they are considered for promotion versus how much they will learn during their new role onboarding.

During the “pre-promotion” stage, you may want to give your SDR exposure to these skills through shadowing or learning exercises and assess their ability to assimilate and practice using this new knowledge. Be sure to include these in the journey (see 3 below).

However, there will also be existing competencies that they will need to take to a whole new level.

For example, “Solution Understanding & Positioning.” As an SDR, they will have focused on their high-level pitch and solution knowledge, however, moving to an Account Executive role may require them to formally present the solution or even be able to demo it.

Again, you’ll need to decide and be clear on how much preparation you want your SDR to do before they move roles and how much they will do in their onboarding.

The most important thing here is that you are clear on the expectations and prerequisites for being considered for, and preparing for that promotion.

3 - Mapping Out the Career Journey and Linking It Back to Competencies

We like to create clear pre-promotion and post-onboarding career pathways that will take your sales reps on a journey.

Once they have mastered the competencies for the current role and are performing consistently, they can enroll in their next career pathway which will guide them through the extended competency requirements and new competencies they’ll need to take on. It should also set out the minimum performance requirements to be considered for that next role. Transparency is important in this if you are to be as objective as possible.

Don’t forget to map out any actions or objectives they need to take at each stage of the journey to really get to grips with what the future role may look like. It also enables you to have milestone checks and capture manager feedback along the way.

Finally, understand and acknowledge the flexibility that is sometimes required in any given process and avoid being too rigid with timeframes. Where one SDR may gallop through the process within a few weeks, another may require longer to prepare for their next challenge. The example above keeps the next stage locked until key objectives and milestones have been met, allowing the rep to assimilate the information and evidence they can apply it.

In creating a career pathway and using your competency framework, you are creating an objective, consistent, and transparent career journey for your reps and are supporting your managers in implementing it at the front line.