In 25 years of leading and advising sales teams, my first instinct when somebody wasn’t performing was always to go looking for the missing skill. They weren’t qualifying properly, or they couldn’t get past the first contact, or their forecast was a work of fiction. So I’d find the training, book the course, sit in on a few calls afterwards and wait for something to change.
Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t, and when it didn’t I blamed the course, or I decided the person hadn’t applied themselves. It took me far too long to see the more likely explanation, which is that we’d taught a skill with nothing underneath it to hold it in place.
Every commercial role has its own set of skills, and they should be different, because the jobs are different. A business developer needs to prospect, get to the root of a need and build a value case the customer believes. An account manager needs to handle stakeholders across an organisation, lead people who don’t report to them and grow revenue in accounts they already have. A sales manager needs to coach, hold people to what they promised and run a forecast they’d be willing to defend. Those lists barely overlap.
But every one of those skills depends on the same ten capabilities, and those don’t change with the job title. We call them the core competencies. They’re the ones nobody puts on a CV, because they aren’t achievements. They’re closer to how a person operates when the job gets difficult.
The three that are yours alone
Three of the ten belong almost entirely to the individual. Not to their manager, their territory, their product or the market they sell into.
Growth mindset. I’d put this one above all the others. It isn’t optimism and it isn’t confidence. It’s a refusal to accept your current state as the finished version of you. Someone with it looks at the way they ran a meeting last week and wants to run it better next week, without anyone asking them to. Someone without it has settled on a version of themselves and spends their energy defending it. It’s also the hardest one to see in an interview, because everybody says they want to develop.
Taking responsibility. Owning the outcome, including the bad ones, without reaching first for the reason it wasn’t their fault. Every loss has a genuine external factor available: the price, the timing, the incumbent, procurement, a competitor who got there earlier. Some of those will be true. The question is whether the person reaches for them before they’ve looked at their own part in it.
Drive. The effort nobody asked for. The extra call, the research before a meeting that wasn’t strictly necessary, the follow-up on a Friday afternoon when it could have waited until Monday. It’s the difference between somebody who works hard when they’re watched and somebody who works hard.
The seven that show up in how you work with everyone else
The other seven are still the individual’s, but they only show themselves in company, with customers, with colleagues and with their manager. Which means the environment somebody works in can bring them out or hold them back.
- Team player. Supporting colleagues, sharing the credit, and handling a disagreement without it becoming personal.
- Customer centricity. Seeing the deal from the other side of the table, putting the customer’s position ahead of your own convenience, and building something that lasts longer than the order.
- Disciplined. Doing what you said you’d do, preparing properly and finishing things.
- Presence. Staying calm when a conversation gets uncomfortable, and being the expert in the room without needing to prove it.
- Innovator. The name undersells it, because most of this is listening. Hearing what somebody actually said, asking a better second question, and building something tailored rather than reaching for the standard answer.
- Adaptability. Taking change well, and recovering quickly when something doesn’t work.
- Coachable. Reflecting honestly, taking feedback and turning it into a different habit.
What each of them is holding up
Written out like that, it can read as a list of good qualities, the sort of thing that goes into a job advert and means very little. So it’s worth being specific about what happens to a role skill when the capability underneath it isn’t there.
- Value case building depends on customer centricity. Teach the financial modelling to somebody who hasn’t got it and you get a business case built from your product’s features, written in your language, that the customer doesn’t recognise as a description of their own business. The arithmetic is fine. It persuades nobody, because it was never really about them.
- Getting to the root of a need depends on that listening and questioning capability. Without it you get a requirements list rather than a root cause. The seller comes back with what the customer asked for, which is rarely the same as what the customer needs, and the solution gets priced against a symptom.
- Engaging senior decision makers depends on presence. Getting the meeting is the easy half. The hard half is the moment a director challenges the premise in front of two colleagues. Without presence, the meeting happens, the challenge arrives, and it ends politely with no next step and no reason to meet again.
- Managing deals and running a forecast depend on being disciplined. Without it the pipeline stops being a record of what’s moving and becomes a record of what everybody hopes will happen, and you find that out in the final fortnight of the quarter.
- Leading an account depends on being a team player. Nobody leads a bid team, a delivery team or anybody else who doesn’t report to them if they take the credit when it lands and go quiet when it doesn’t. The work carries on, but you stop being the person people want to do it for.
- Prospecting depends on drive and on taking responsibility, together. Very little about it is enjoyable, so it needs the effort nobody asked for. And when it isn’t working there’s always the list, the market, the marketing team and the time of year to reach for.
- Anything new depends on adaptability. A new methodology, a new product, a new territory, a new manager. Without it you get “the way I’ve always done it”, which was a perfectly good answer right up until it stopped working.
And the last of the ten is the one that pairs with where we started.
A growth mindset is wanting to be better than you were. Coachable is being able to hear that your current way isn’t working. They aren’t the same thing, and you need both, which is where a lot of well-meant development falls down.
Somebody with the desire but not the coachability will improve, but only in the direction they already believe in. They read, they practise, they put the hours in, and every year they get a little further from the feedback that would have helped them most. Somebody coachable without the desire will take your feedback politely, apply it, and then wait to be told the next thing. Neither of them closes the gap on their own.
Style and motivation build on top of this, not instead of it
Two other things matter here, and I don’t want to undersell either.
How somebody builds trust makes a real difference. The creative, energetic one and the careful, analytical one will both get to a good outcome, and they’ll get there by very different routes. So does what makes the effort feel worth it to them, whether that’s the money and the recognition or the work itself and being trusted with the difficult thing.
But neither of them makes up for a missing core capability. A brilliantly persuasive person who won’t take feedback is a persuasive person who repeats the same mistake for years. Someone highly motivated by the bonus who won’t own a loss will find a reason for every one of them, and the reasons will be good ones. Style and motivation shape how a person goes about the work. The ten are what any improvement in that work depends on.
You can’t see all of these in yourself
One warning before you go and score yourself out of ten on any of this. Three of them are about what you do when nobody’s watching, so you’ve a fair chance of judging those yourself, as long as you’re honest on a bad day.
The other seven are a different matter, because they only exist in how other people experience you. Presence isn’t how calm you feel, it’s how calm you look to a customer who has just challenged you in front of their boss. Being a team player isn’t your intention towards your colleagues, it’s what those colleagues would say about working with you on the last bid. Your own opinion is worth having on all ten, but on those seven it’s only ever half the answer, which is why our assessment asks the people around you as well. That’s a big enough subject on its own, so it’s next week’s post.
So what do you do with it?
If you’re trying to move out of a transactional role into something more consultative, the skills you’re chasing are the visible ones: building a case the customer can take to their own finance director, working several people across a buying team who don’t agree with each other, and putting a number on the value you’d be willing to be held to. They’re all worth having, and they’re all learnable.
What gets missed is that these ten are what makes them compound. Somebody who has them gets a little better at each of those skills every time they use one, because they notice what didn’t work, they own it, and they change it before the next meeting. Somebody who doesn’t will learn the same technique and still be running it the same way in three years. From the inside that feels like bad luck or a hard market. From the outside it looks like somebody who stopped getting better a long time ago and hasn’t noticed.
If you lead a team, that’s your training budget. You’ll spend it every year and most of the return will come from the people who were going to improve anyway. The rest goes on somebody who agreed with every word, did nothing differently, and will need the same course again next year. That isn’t a bad seller and it isn’t a bad course. It’s a skill that needed something from the person that isn’t there yet, and teaching the skill harder won’t change that.
Which leaves you both in the same position. Most of this can be found out by asking, and almost nobody asks, so it goes on being guessed at for entire careers.
So the useful question isn’t which of the ten you think you’re weakest on. It’s which one the people you work with would name, and whether you’d be willing to hear it.
That’s what the MyAcumen assessment was built to answer. Alongside the ten and the view of them from the people you work with, it measures the skills for your specific role, what motivates you and how you build trust: https://myacumen.online
Or if you lead a team and want a quicker place to start, the Team Scorecard takes about four minutes and points you at where the gaps most likely are.
