Sales competency gaps are the reason many training initiatives get chosen before anyone knows what the team needs. A sales leader sees uneven results, someone suggests a program, and the budget moves. The results that follow depend on whether the guess was right.
Most leaders are not guessing because they are careless. They are guessing because the data they have tells them who is performing and not why. Here’s how to close that gap before you invest in a sales training initiative.
Before You Choose the Sales Training, Diagnose the Gap
Across all the salespeople who have taken our Sales Competency Assessment, roughly eight in ten had at least one competency rated as Needs Attention or Critical Need. That’s an objective data point that every sales team has somewhere specific to improve, but where exactly is rarely obvious from the outside.
Revenue and quota attainment show who is performing, but they don’t explain why. A salesperson at 85% of goal could be struggling with discovery, with handling objections, with managing a book of accounts, or with time. Each of those calls for a different fix, and a sales training initiative chosen without knowing which one is in play is an expensive way to find out.
What Assessment Data Suggests About Sales Capability
When we look across the aggregate results, two patterns stand out.
#1: How uncommon across-the-board strength is.
Only about one in twenty-two salespeople rated strong across all fifteen sales competencies the assessment measures. Most people, including most top performers, have a mix of strengths and gaps. That matters because it means a sales team’s training need is almost never “everything.” It focuses on a handful of specific competencies, and the job is to find out which ones.
#2: Where the skills gaps cluster.
In our data, Managing Accounts and People was the weakest competency across the group, with 31% of salespeople rating strong. For sales teams whose revenue depends on growing existing relationships, that is a finding worth acting on. For a team of pure hunters, it may matter less, which is exactly why role relevance has to be part of the read.
A dataset like this describes patterns, not your sales team. The point of these numbers is not that you should buy account management training. It’s that until you measure, you don’t know whether you should.
Skill Gaps and Competency Gaps Are Not the Same
Sales leaders use the two words interchangeably, and the difference changes what you buy.
A skill is a specific ability someone can perform. Asking a good discovery question is a sales skill. A competency is broader. It combines the skills, knowledge, and behaviors that produce effective sales performance in the role.
Take sales negotiation. The skill is trading concessions instead of giving them away. The competency includes that skill, plus knowing when a conversation has moved from objection to negotiation, understanding the economics on the other side of the table, and having the composure to hold value when price comes up. A salesperson can have the skill and still lack the competency, and a workshop on the skill alone will not close the gap.
A sales competency assessment is designed to reveal the second thing. Ours measures more than 30 competencies across traits and personal characteristics, general business competencies, and sales competencies, weighted by role rather than scored against a single standard.
Team-Level Data Should Shape Sales Training Priorities
A sales competency assessment produces two levels of data, and each one answers a different question.
#1: Sales Team-level results rank competencies from strongest to weakest across the sales force.
That ranking is the training plan. It shows where capability is thin before the organization commits budget, and it lets you build a program around the two or three competencies that will move results rather than a generic curriculum that touches everything lightly.
#2: Sales Team-level results also tells you what not to spend on.
A sales team that rates strong in questioning and delivery does not need a discovery refresher, no matter how popular the course is. The money goes where the gap is.
Individual Results Should Shape Sales Coaching
Individual assessment results give managers a specific starting point for every one-on-one. Instead of coaching to the quota miss, the manager coaches to the competency behind it, with a named behavior and a development plan that fits the person.
That is the connection between sales training and sales coaching that most organizations miss. Training builds the competency across the team. Coaching holds it in place for each salesperson, on a cadence, in live deals. Our State of Sales Performance research found that 57% of salespeople understand their organization’s sales methodology while 29% execute it consistently, and the gap between those numbers is what individual coaching is for.
How to Turn Assessment Findings into a Sales Training Initiative
The sequence is simple, and the order matters.
Assess the sales team first, so the plan starts from evidence. Identify the two or three team-level patterns that account for most of the gap. Confirm role relevance, so you are not training inside salespeople on a competency that belongs to the field team. Select or tailor the training to those competencies rather than buying a program and hoping it fits. Equip managers to coach the same competencies in their one-on-ones, because training without that layer fades. Then reinforce and reassess, so you can see whether the investment moved the number it was meant to move.
Invest Where the Data Says Performance Can Improve
Knowing what your salespeople can do today and what they need next is the difference between a training budget and a training strategy. Sales training works. But it works best when it is pointed at the right gap, and the assessment is how you find it.
If you are planning a sales training initiative, contact Tyson Group to find out where your sales team stands.
