At some point in the training project, we need to assess the skills, knowledge, competencies and behaviours of the current sales people. Without doing this, we cannot understand the starting point for the change and how big the change needs to be. We will also find out whether the whole sales force needs the same level of training.

For instance, we were told by a sales director that his sales people couldn't close and that the company was losing business because of this. So could we come in and do "closing" with them. When we looked at the issue, most of the sales team were closing all the time, at the most inappropriate times in the customer's buying cycle.

Further assessment showed a real lack of business focused questioning earlier in the buying cycle was leading to a mismatch between the customer's real needs and the solutions being proposed. Hence, the lack of orders. So the program we actually provided was around understanding of needs, questioning and building value propositions that reflect the customer's business needs.

The sales force assessment doesn't need to be complex, it can be web based or paper based. What it does need to do is gain information about where the sales force is today against the set of skills, knowledge, competencies and behaviours that the company requires to move forward.

The easiest, and often best way, of doing this is by using a three phase assessment. Phase 1 is where the individual sales person scores themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on each area identified as important. In phase 2 the sales manager, independent of the sales person, uses the same process to score the sales person. Phase 3 is a meeting between the two, to discuss any variances and agree (where possible) where the individual is on the scale for each area.

This gives tremendous information across the sales team as a whole, as well as highlighting areas an individual sales person needs to work on and these can become part of their development plan.