Unlocking Sales Excellence: The Power of Knowledge Structures in High-Performance Sales Organizations

Change Management Programs for High-Performance Sales Organizations should involve regular assessments of sales strategies, sales processes, and sales resources to serve the customers effectively.

Increasing the salesforce effectiveness during a customer interactionis one of the major tasks in B2B sales management.

Effective selling requires the salespeople to have a precise understanding of what constitutes working smarter during their interactions with customers. The practice of adaptive selling enables salespeople to exploit the unique advantage of personal selling in B2B sales environment.

Academic studies on sales performance variance explained by salespeople attributes examined the effect of role, skills, motivation, personal factors, aptitude, and organizational factors on sales performance and introduced the concepts of salespeople’s knowledge structures.

Because sales managers seek to understand how to enhance sales performance, they should know which salesperson characteristics explain the largest proportion of sales variance.

Academic research has found that aptitude (salespeople’s mental abilities, personality) accounted for 2 percent in sales variance, selling skills (e.g., sales presentations) for 7.2 percent, personal characteristics (physical traits, background, and experience) for 3 percent, motivation for less than 4 percent, and role for 9 percent of sales variance.

Role | ▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌▌ 9.0%

Selling Skills | ▌▌▌▌▌▌7.2%

Motivation | ▌▌▌▌4.0%

Personal Characteristics | ▌▌▌3.0%

Aptitude | ▌▌2.0%

Knowledge structures refer to salespeople’s knowledge of their customers and the way in which the customer and selling knowledge is organized. Research indicates that in a sales environment, salespeople classify customers into self-developed categories and use a common strategy for each group. Salespeople’s knowledge includes information about the actions encountered in sales situations that salespeople can use to guide their behavior when selling to specific customer categories. If salespeople have more detailed knowledge of customers, it is expected that they will be better able to perform.

Some of the ways sales managers can help salespeople to constructively analyze their successes and failures are:

1. Ask “why” questions about selling situations that force salespeople to analyze the reasons for effective and ineffective performance.

2. If sales people provide external reasons probe further until a reason within the salesperson’s control emerge.

3. Actively suggest that salespeople often fail through using strategies that are inappropriate for particular customer types. Therefore, it is worthwhile for salespeople to think about the strategy they use to approach customers with and to see if they can come up with a strategy that seems more appropriate.

By mastering these knowledge structures, sales professionals can unlock unprecedented levels of performance.

Managerial Recommendations:

In this article, I have made some suggestions for improving selling effectiveness through increasing the adaptability of salespeople and their knowledge structures. Successful selling requires detailed knowledge about different types of sales situations and customers. In addition, salespeople need a repertoire of selling strategies and knowledge about which strategy is best suited for each specific sales situation.

Salespersons’ knowledge structures explain a large proportion of their performance, and therefore should be more closely examined by organizations. Sales managers should pay more attention to the development of their salespersons’ knowledge structures. Salespeople should be trained to develop better knowledge structures. These training programs should teach salespeople to develop richer knowledge structures by combining information from everyday selling experiences. Salespeople should practice recognizing different customer categories early in the selling process so they can categorize customers appropriately and utilize different selling strategies throughout the sales interaction.

Want to dive deeper into these strategies and learn how to implement them in your organization? I’m offering a free 30-minute consultation to the first 10 sales leaders who reach out. Let’s discuss how these insights can be tailored to your specific business challenges and drive real results. Connect with me on LinkedIn to stay updated on more sales excellence tips and to book your consultation.

For more information please contact:

Inna Hüessmanns, MBA

International Growth Solutions

E-Mail: ih@i-g-solutions.de