How Do You Assess Skill Gaps in Sales Executives Without Relying on Self-Assessments?

Assessing Skill Gaps in Sales Executives

I am currently in the process of assessing the skill gap of sales executives in my organization. Are there any methodologies to assess their skill gap apart from self-assessment? Please suggest some methods to help me complete this assignment.

Regards

Self-assessment cannot be very helpful, assuming by self-assessment an assessment by the individual to be assessed.

Very critical for sales personnel is the understanding of the organization's strategy, which should drive the Job-Task-Analysis, in turn driving the required attributes at each level.

Such assessment requires input from all levels starting from the VP-HR (or whoever heads the HR function at the top) and the COO, coupled with managers at each level.

Dear Vaideki Krishnan,

This is what we do:

1) List skills required.
2) Define rating.
3) From immediate superior, take the rating of required versus actual.

For example, for Salesperson X at the AM level:
Required Actual
Convincing skills B C

For Salesperson Y at the Managerial level:
Required Actual
A B

A - Exceeds expectation
B - Good
C - Meets requirement
D - Need to improve

Hope this helps.

Darshana

Respected member, please refer to the job description of employees and extract their skills. Please note that you need two types of skills: core skills (competencies) that you require everyone to have and skills/competencies based on the jobs they do, such as sales/marketing, etc.

Once you have identified the skills required, you need to determine the level of these skills. After that, you should work with employees to identify the gap between their existing skills and the required skills by the organization. This process is called gap analysis. Please ensure that the rating is from 1-5.

Please find the attached document on Sales Management Competencies courtesy of http://www.jsasolutions.com/files/1_...mpetencies.pdf.

Also, please refer to another thread on Sales Core Competencies courtesy of Sales Core Competencies.

I hope the information I have provided is useful for you.

Regards