The 2 Types of Sales Effectiveness Functions

We recently had a member come to us hoping to better understand what the “typical” responsibilities of a sales force effectiveness function are. Her team has been in place for several years and is doing well, but this member wanted to make sure that her team’s model was up-to-date. We thought this was an interesting question and decided to ask for your input.

As you can see from the survey results, the data doesn’t point to one particular activity that is a “must do” for every sales force effectiveness function. Among survey respondents, analytics was the most commonly selected responsibility; however, when we spoke with five member companies, training and development and performance management were the most popular choices.

During these five conversations, though, something did begin to stand out: all of the companies’ sales force effectiveness functions seemed to fall into one of two camps: competency builders or new product incubators.

Competency Builders – These sales force effectiveness functions start off with a clear objective: define the top drivers of sales effectiveness and the requisite competencies for the sales force (several of the member companies use our Anatomy of a World Class Sales Operations Organization as a guide). Once these drivers and competencies are defined, the sales force effectiveness functions focus on two activities: training and development (e.g., building competencies) and performance management (e.g., measuring reps’ progress against said competencies).
New Product Incubators – These sales force effectiveness functions do not have static responsibilities but assist the sales organization by pilot-testing new initiatives and projects as needed. Sales Force Effectiveness will develop processes for a new initiative, pilot-test them with local sales teams, then work to integrate the initiative across the sales force. Once the new initiative becomes established, the sales force effectiveness team will typically cede control and oversight of the project to another team. For example one of the sales force effectiveness leaders we spoke with was implementing a new onboarding platform for the sales force. His team was responsible for rolling the new platform out to different sales teams, but once the platform is integrated across the entire sales force, the member executive will hand responsibility for the platform over to the individual sales teams.

In our conversations with the member executives, there was agreement that there is no one metric that perfectly encapsulates Sales Force Effectiveness’ performance. The members we spoke with have, instead, broken down their performance into major responsibilities and then measure success within each of these areas.

CEB Sales members, read the full brief on Sales Force Effectiveness Functions to learn more about the five member companies’ approaches to Sales Force Effectiveness and visit our Anatomy of a World Class Sales Operations Organization to see the 20 attributes of a World-Class Sales Operations Organization.