5 Competencies That Define High-Performing Sales Reps

So your sales team is doing great and hitting their sales numbers quite consistently. Congratulations, you’re in an enviable position as a sales leader. But it’s no time to sit on your laurels. 

Or maybe your sales team is struggling to hit their sales numbers consistently. No matter what you try to do, you cannot get them to measure up to expectations. It’s time for a change.

Regardless of your situation, a key part of your sales leadership strategy should be defining the core competencies you need from your sales reps. It is important to define individual competencies for two reasons:

1. You can identify the gaps causing issues in performers.
2. You can differentiate actual high performers from perceived high performers.

Here are 5 competencies that define high-performing sales reps in your team:

 

1. Prospecting

 

A good sales performer is great at prospecting. Finding the needs in the marketplace to maintain a healthy pipeline is always a sign of a good performer. A healthy sales pipeline

creates a consistent sales engine. A sales rep’s abilities to conduct industry research, uncover the main friction points, and define the ideal customer profile are critical components of prospecting. Identify who can understand various businesses and the related challenges of the sectors. 

 

2. Target Driven and Vigilance 

The best sales reps are vigilant about achieving their sales targets by focusing on daily, weekly, quarterly and annual goals. They make sure that they don’t fall off track and are always marching towards their core mission. You need to track how many of them are focused on doing productive activities and how many of them are losing pace by doing non-productive activities.  

Prodosocore can help you get all the data points in one place and gives you a score for an individual sales rep.

 

3. Ownership

Sales competency includes the concept of account ownership and ownership of actions taken while dealing with prospects. A great sales rep can foresee the prospects that are worth investing time and the ones that can be disqualified. Knowing the next action of the prospect is critical information to uncover during the initial phase of the sale process. 

A successful sales rep asks tough questions at the right times, is aware of when to push a deal that is dragging on and isn’t afraid to take an aggressive sales approach whenever needed. He or she knows the trick to get past the gatekeeper and reach the decision-maker. 

 

4. Lead-to-Sales Conversions

Very few sales reps are great at lead-to-sales conversion. This is an essential sales skill where you can identify the sales rep who can take control of conversions independently. Many sales reps are good at prospecting but fail to convert them into customers. They either take the help of peers or need support from their sales leaders to close the deal for them. You can track this performance using CRM data against each sales rep. 

 

5. Time Management

This is the most important competency parameter that may go unnoticed. Self-management is a factor influencing sales success. Think about how much of each day is actually spent selling, and how much is spent on tasks such as research, administration, meetings, travel, et cetera. These things play a vital role in closing a deal. Each buying stage should be given appropriate time to drive effective results. While it is hard to track the time spent by the sales reps on the activities, there are enterprise performance evaluation tools that give you data at the micro-level. 

Defining a Single Performance Score 

Sales leaders and managers often run on a tight schedule. While we previously discussed how sales leaders can coach their sales reps despite a tight schedule, today we will help you get all the data at one place required to define the productivity of your sales reps. Prodoscore takes employee activity spent working in all of your cloud business tools to build simple visualization of your productivity with a simple score. 

If you are one of those sales leaders or managers are finding it difficult to take out some time to track and analyze the performance of your team, get a FREE demo today!