Review and summary of sales talent analytics findings based on data from over 1,000 recent Sales Account Manager assessments.
This “hybrid role” is one that many organisations use as the bedrock of their sales strategy. To have a core of salespeople able to carry out a straightforward account management function, while also being able to fulfil a new-business sales role when required, is seen as fundamental within many of our client organisations; indeed, for many clients, this role and the Sales Manager role are all that their business model requires. Organisations with more complex sales or account management requirements will require more senior roles such as Solution Selling or Account Manager, or even Strategic Selling and the associated Key Account Manager role; but for many firms, Sales Account Manager is sufficient. Consequently, it probably comes as no surprise that we carry out thousands of Sales Account Manager assessments, and the purpose of this article is to dissect the findings from the latest 1,000 Sales Account Managers assessments to identify trends and observations relating to this role.
Understanding the Sales Performance Dashboard
The tool used to carry out this analysis is SalesAssessment.com’s Sales Performance Dashboard (SPD), and screen shots will be used throughout this article to highlight key points made. To clarify what we are looking at, we use a simple system of measures. Horizontal axis The horizontal axis of the SPD shows the level of skills each candidate has: “skill” being defined here as the “trainable knowledge” specific to the job (the skills construct is based on the UK National Occupational Standards for Sales). These skills could have been formally taught, or learned “on the job”. Low levels of skill are relatively easily rectified (assuming the candidate has the appropriate levels of behavioural competence and critical reasoning ability – see following paragraphs). The first block shows skills below the “global average”. The mid-block shows skills at or above the “global average”. The right-hand block shows skills at a level that would indicate the candidate is highly skilled for this specific role. Note: skills are not necessarily transferable job to job or sales role to sales role, so are only valid for this specific role.
Vertical axis
The SPD’s vertical axis shows the level of behavioural competence for each candidate, behavioural competence being derived from a great eight personality assessment with personalities mapped to specific behavioural competencies, each competency measured being relevant to the sales role being reviewed: that is, Sales Account Manager in this case. The role of the Sales Account Manager “The role of a Sales Account Manager is to proactively retain and develop business across a wide portfolio of typically smaller clients – while also identifying new clients as necessary – with a focus on maximizing the revenue from each client by developing appropriate relationships within the client, and finding new and innovative ways to continually enhance the clients’ preference to buy from them, rather than from any other source.” ... [download the full article here]