Driving sustainable sales performance uplift:

Lifting sales performance is challenging: our understanding of the key capabilities that underpin success is often based on intuition/opinion rather than facts, and it’s unclear whether the right people are in place to deliver medium- and long-term goals. Traditional approaches – generic capability, “one size fits all”, one-off programmes – rarely deliver the desired outcomes.

The right capabilities

• Without a data-led approach, you can’t pick out the capabilities that systematically drive successful performance.
• Attempting to improve all capabilities is inevitably dilutive.

Understanding potential

• Without understanding potential, you don’t know which people have the headroom to significantly improve.
• Generic programmes for the whole population are costly and counter-productive.

Future state

• Without building capability and potential assessment into the hiring process, you risk replicating existing poor performance.
• Need to focus on continuous uplift rather than a single capability boost.

There is a better way. We now live in a data-rich environment where we no longer have to make educated guesses:

• CRM systems give us a granular picture of individual performance
• Behavioural science enables us to rigorously assess potential
• AI and other tools help us to build a multifactorial picture of individual capability

By combining these intelligently and integrating the resulting insights with focused intervention, SBR can help both drive short-term performance and build a cycle of continuous GTM improvement.

1. The conventional approach

Historically, SBR (like many others) have talked to top performers, captured their successful behaviours, codified them into a process and methodology, filled in any missing elements and then rolled out cookie-cutter programmes to the GTM organisation as a whole.

But this approach has some serious flaws:

• It’s not clear which of the sales capabilities really move the needle for a specific client in their unique environment – so skills uplift tends to be generic. Without a focus on the most important capabilities, there is a tendency to try and cover too much ground without making a sustained impact.
• It’s not clear which people really have the potential to grow – so everyone gets the same investment. This is not only costly, it fails to align interventions with capability and potential, over-stretching some and under-stretching others.
• It’s a one-off exercise that doesn’t address hiring and onboarding – so it doesn’t raise the capability and potential of the salesforce for the long term. With turnover in sales teams typically running at 10%+, it doesn’t take long for any initial impacts to be diluted.

2. Assembling the data

Deploying scalable and rigorous tools, SBR draw on:

• CRM systems to capture a granular picture of individual performance.
• Behavioural science to rigorously assess potential.
• AI and other tools to build a multifactorial picture of individual capability.

By correlating capability and performance we pinpoint the capabilities that have the biggest impact for specific roles, reflecting individual client context and markets.

Sales-specific psychometric tools then enable us to identify the individuals who have the highest potential to develop those capabilities, based on their underlying traits and motivators.

3. Delivering actionable insight

This multifactorial analysis provides actionable insight at every level of the GTM organisation: a talent map for executive oversight, hiring and development pathways for the HR team, enablement for first-line GTM leaders and coaching for individual contributors.

Current State: Mapping the Team

We use Potential and Capability to create a talent map.

Potential:

• Reflects underlying traits and preferences.
• Is relatively fixed over time.
• Can be identified through psychometrics.

Capability

• Reflects skill and proficiency.
• Can be improved over time – especially for people with high potential.
• Can be assessed through Manager and Self-Assessment, AI Role Plays, Behavioural Observation etc.
• Is key to driving performance.

In effect, it’s much easier to move people from left to right than from bottom to top, based on the right interventions.

Typical field sales organisations can be broken down into four cohorts:

• The stars: highly capable, consistent high achievers with potential for further development. Although only 10% of the team, they may drive 30 to 40% of the results, sometimes more.
• The strugglers: low capability, low potential, low attainment individuals, often the result of mis-hiring and poor onboarding. Again, about 10% of the base but costly and chewing up a lot of management time.
• The remaining 80% of the base (the core), split between those with medium to high potential, and those with lower potential to develop. The key is to focus the right intervention investment in the right place.

The key is to focus the right intervention investment in the right place.

Unique Target Capability Profile

4. Driving transformation

With a clear picture of current state and well-defined target capability profiles, we can design and execute pragmatic interventions to lift capability. Using the correlation between capability and performance we can also estimate the impact of each intervention quantitatively.

The Interventions

• Retain: The Stars Create “twin tracks” (future leader/sales specialist), minimise churn.
• Develop: High Potential Core Maximise use of potential, focus on highest impact skills.
• Support: Lower Potential Core Provide self-serve options, measure performance, combat “drift”
• Decide: The Strugglers Run structured, time-bound process, check for role fit, enable success.

Inspire, Coach, Measure, Report, AI Enable first line leaders to execute the sprints, sustain/embed changes with AI.

The Impact

The cohort-focused interventions need to be supported by the right investment in GTM infrastructure – not just tools, metrics and dashboards but also first line GTM leadership capability.

5. Sustaining Change: the GTM Academy

In the medium term, these interventions should be codified into a set of clear development pathways, and extended to include hiring, onboarding and ramping new team members.

Summary

Raising sales performance inevitably requires a sustained improvement in sales capability:

• Focusing on the right skills development with the right people can deliver dramatic performance improvements.
• Building a continuous improvement cycle enables tracking of performance improvement, capability and potential of the whole field sales team.
• Creating a GTM Academy that includes hiring, development pathways and sales leadership future-proofs the business and provides a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
• With SBR’s GTM Capability Accelerator™ you get more than just data, you get actionable insight that integrates directly into capability and performance uplift.

The era of guesswork is over: data-driven enablement is your edge for the next five years and beyond.