A large health insurance company identifies new sales competencies required and assesses the talent profile of incumbents to perform the new roles.
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Key results
- Establishing baselines related to new competencies
- Identifying each person’s capacity to develop skills in these areas
- Determining which competencies to focus on developing
- Providing an executive dashboard for at-a-glance tracking of data and performance
Challenge
As part of a comprehensive initiative to prepare their sales organization for impending changes in their industry, a large health insurance company completely redesigned the competencies for each of the different roles within their sales force. The challenge was determining if the current sales producers and leadership had the potential to achieve the new competency skill levels needed to grow the business in the future.
To do this, the client needed a way to assess individual contributors and their managers to establish baselines related to the new competencies as well as to identify their capacity to develop their skills in these areas through individual development plans. This would also help the company identify best-in-class competency skills that are successfully used by top performers and determine which competencies to focus on developing with emerging leaders and high performers.
Solution
Profitable Selling recommended 2 separate survey tools, one to collect the perceptions of the new competencies and the other to determine each person’s capacity to achieve the highest level of skills in these competency areas. These tools were used with more than 600 salespeople and sales managers.
In addition, Profitable Selling designed an executive dashboard that combined all of the data into an easy-to-read overview of each person’s overall results from each of the surveys, plus their performance results from the previous fiscal year.
To ensure that everyone understood how to interpret and apply the findings and recommendations, Profitable Selling conducted a workshop to discuss the key insights, answer questions ,and provide recommendations.
Impact
The company reported that the initiative exceeded their expectations in terms of the quality, accuracy, and relevance of the data and analytics. Executive and front-line sales leadership were impressed with quantity and quality of the insightful data on each person and were equally grateful for the learnings and recommendations they received from the survey tools and during the implementation process.
The sales managers spoke to every member of their team to discuss strengths and weaknesses, construct individual development plans and track the results.
In addition, Profitable Selling was able to identify key organizational blind spots regarding skill levels that were having a negative impact on growth and retention. Three areas were uncovered within the sales organization and two within sales leadership. Profitable Selling worked with the client to identify L&D solutions to be implemented company-wide to minimize these blind spots.
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