An uncomfortable realization

Over the last four years, our sales organization has seen three Chief Revenue Officers.  While each brought their own strategy, priorities, and style - they all had one thing in common.  

Each wanted to know how enablement defined what great looks like for our sales reps.  

We had the typical answers to these questions:

“Great looks like So-and-So High Performing Rep.”
  • Anecdotal. 
“Great looks like higher-than-average win rates.”
  • Obvious.
“Great looks like We-Just-Know-It-When-See-It.”
  • Unhelpful. 

It would have been uncomfortable, but I should have simply said we don’t have a definition of what good looks like. 

Because these answers - while typical - don’t help the new hire know exactly what to do to be successful.  They also don’t help sales managers coach up their teams. And they certainly don’t help enablement scale its programs or initiatives.   

So we undertook a process to provide a real answer: we built a competency model. Such models define the skills and knowledge needed to be successful in a particular role.

This meant:

  • Studying the behaviors of So-and-So High Performers. 
  • Understanding why certain reps had higher than average win rates. 
  • Doing a lot of interviews to get in the heads of those who “just know it when they see it.”  

This work was not related to an OKR, nor was it a strategic directive from our CRO.  It was simply a quiet project we chipped away at over the course of a year and a half because we knew it was the only way to truly answer the question of what great looks like. 

When we were done, the model turned out to be more impactful than we originally thought. 

How we built it

Our process of creating a competency model shaped up in five phases: 

1. Educate the team on what competency models are and why they're important.

2. Study both sales and non-sales competency models.

3. Gather the content that will serve as the "meat" of the model.

4. Determine a format that will make the model readable and easy to use.

5. Roll it out and start using it.

Step 1: Educate the team

First, I had to educate the team on what competency models are and why they are important. 

I had experience with competency models in previous roles - both creating them and using them - so I was sold. 

But the team was going to be doing the actual writing, so I needed them on board. 

Step 2: Study competency models

Second, we studied a variety of sample competency models. 

This helped to not only start narrow the format we wanted to use, but it further served the purpose above: the team became very familiar with a wide variety of approaches to competency models in a multitude of industries. 

Step 3: Gather content

Third - and most time-consuming - we gathered the content that would eventually make up the model. 

This involved interviewing sales managers and directors, analyzing metrics of high performers, dissecting behaviors of successful reps, and then rounding all that out with the gaps that we see from our enablement perspective.  

Step 4: Determine a format

Fourth, we had to determine how to organize all this incredible information into a format that would be digestible for our end users: managers and reps.

We settled on grouping like-competencies by what we called “dimensions” and then breaking down each competency into four to seven job behaviors. The model simply lives in a Google spreadsheet. 

Here’s an snapshot of our competency “Market and Industry Knowledge” which falls under the Business Acumen dimension: 

Market and Industry Knowledge competency

Most of the dimensions (big categories like Business Acumen) and competencies (skills/knowledge like Product Knowledge) spanned all of our customer facing roles. 

Then we simply asked: "What specific skills and knowledge does a BDR need? Or an Account Manager?"

We narrowed in five to six competencies that were role-specific, then defined the job behaviors associated with those competencies.  

Voilà. 

Before we knew it, we had a competency model for every customer-facing role, not just sales.

In reality, this took quite a long time. Over the year and a half we worked on this project, we put it down several times when other priorities demanded our attention.  But slower quarters allowed us to pick it back up. 

And right around the time we finished, our CRO rolled out a priority around manager coaching.  Our timing couldn’t have been better.  

Step 5: Roll out the model

Lastly, we rolled out the model to managers at an offsite in a fun sorting activity that challenged them to group the competencies by dimension. 

More importantly, we just started using it. 

  • We redesigned Gong scorecards to align to the model. 
  • We begin all trainings with objectives that are based on the job behaviors.  
  • We reference the competencies throughout our onboarding program. 
  • When a sales director comes to us with a concern she’s seeing, we use the model to do deep discovery that hones in on exactly the behavior from the model she’s looking to change. 

In this way, the competency model has become our common language.  

There are many competency models out there, so you may be wondering why we built one from scratch.  (My direct reports wondered this particularly loudly!).

But it was important to me that our enablement team knew this model inside and out; I felt that would be key to it actually taking hold in our sales org.  And to build it is to know it.

So we made the tradeoff - depth of knowledge over speed to execution.  

Not all competencies are equal

We still have work to do.  The next phase of our work is determining which competencies and job behaviors have the biggest impact on our key metrics: conversation rates, velocity, win rate, and more. 

Over the next year, we plan to again study our high performers but this time through the lens of these competencies.  We want to understand which job behaviors are most impactful and when in the sales cycle they matter most. 

We have some theories, but once again we need to move from anecdotal to evidence-based. 

Because this, perhaps, the most important competency for enablement professionals. 

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