Every sales leader has experienced this frustration: You’ve crafted a strong go-to-market strategy, secured executive buy-in, and allocated resources—yet your sales results fall short of projections.
The issue may not be the strategy itself, but whether your sales team can execute it. Understanding the true capabilities of your sales organization isn’t just a good idea—it’s the foundation for achieving your strategic goals.
Yet many sales leaders have an incomplete picture of their team’s strengths, gaps, and potential. The result is misaligned roles, ineffective training investments, and missed revenue targets.
This post walks you through a three-step plan to assess your sales talent and build a team that can actually deliver on your strategic vision.
Do You Have the Right Sales Talent to Execute Your Strategy?
Before diving into solutions, consider what’s at stake. When your sales talent doesn’t align with your strategy, the consequences ripple throughout your organization.
- Revenue targets remain out of reach as your team struggles with objectives they don’t have the skills for.
- Training budgets get wasted on programs that don’t address your specific capability gaps.
- Competitor threats intensify as rivals capture opportunities you should be winning.
The good news? A structured approach to sales talent assessment can transform these challenges into competitive advantages.
Step 1: Identify the Sales Skills That Matter Most
Not all sales skills carry equal weight. The capabilities that drive success in your organization depend entirely on your specific strategy, market position, and customer base. Begin by asking: What does our sales strategy actually demand from our sellers?
If you’re pursuing enterprise accounts with complex, consultative sales, your team needs strong business acumen, executive presence, and the ability to navigate buying committees.
If you’re focused on deals in the mid-market with shorter sales cycles, you need efficiency, qualification discipline, and the ability to run a tight sales process.
Remember, you can’t fix everything at once. Rank your skill gaps by their impact on revenue and strategic goals. Focus your assessment efforts on the 3-5 capabilities that will create the most value.
Step 2: Evaluate If You Have the Right People in the Right Roles
One of the most overlooked talent strategies is role optimization—positioning each team member to align natural strengths with role requirements.
Conduct Sales Assessments
Let systematic evaluation replace subjective manager impressions. Sales professional assessment tools that measure behavioral styles, motivators, and competencies provide objective data about how each team member naturally operates.
Map Talent to Role Requirements
Once you’ve assessed each team member, create a simple matrix with your key sales roles on one axis and critical capabilities on the other. Then assess the proficiency of each person. This will quickly reveal mismatches between what a role demands and what the person in that role can deliver.
Make Strategic Role Decisions
Sometimes the best move isn’t training; it’s reassignment. Rather than being a sign of failure, this is a change that benefits both the individual and the organization. You could:
- Move a relationship-focused seller struggling with new business into account management.
- Promote a top-performing hunter into a player-coach role that leverages their expertise.
- Transition someone with strong analytical skills but weaker interpersonal capabilities into sales operations or enablement.
Step 3: Pinpoint Development Opportunities That Matter
Generic training programs produce generic results. Development that’s tailored to specific skills gaps for specific individuals delivers measurable performance improvement.
Create Individual Development Plans
For each team member, identify one or two skills they need to develop based on your assessment. Be specific. For example, instead of: “Improve discovery skills,” try: “Develop the ability to uncover business impact and quantify the cost of status quo in initial discovery calls.”
Design Targeted Learning
Different skills require different development approaches. For knowledge gaps (industry insights, product features, competitive positioning), deploy structured learning, certification programs, and micro-learning modules.
For skill development (questioning techniques, presentation skills, negotiation tactics), offer role-play practice, skill-specific workshops, recorded call review, and coaching.
For behavioral change (account planning discipline, pipeline hygiene, follow-up consistency), work on habit formation, manager reinforcement, accountability mechanisms, and enablement tools that embed the behavior in workflow.
Measure Training ROI
Track whether your initiatives actually improve performance. Monitor changes in the specific metrics each skill should influence. For example, if discovery training doesn’t increase qualification rates or average deal sizes, it’s not working.
Turn Training into a Competitive Advantage
Your sales strategy is only as good as your team’s ability to execute it. By systematically assessing your sales talent—identifying skill gaps, optimizing roles, pinpointing development needs, and monitoring ROI—you transform talent from a constraint into a competitive advantage.
The question isn’t whether you have time to assess your sales capabilities; it’s whether you can afford not to. Every quarter you operate with misaligned talent is a quarter of missed revenue, frustrated team members, and wasted training investment.
About The Brooks Group
Unlocking sales team potential for over 45 years, The Brooks Group is the leading sales training and development company empowering sales teams to generate breakthrough results. Notable clients include Airbus, Avita Medical, Bobcat, Guaranty Bank, Hitachi Energy, Mack Trucks and Volvo Trucks, SANY Americas, Texas Instruments, and United States Air Force. To learn more about our suite of ROI-driven sales training and development programs, best-in-class assessments, and industry-leading reinforcement tools, visit BrooksGroup.com.
Michelle Richardson is the vice president for Sales Performance Research at The Brooks Group. She spearheads industry research initiatives, oversees consulting and diagnostic services, and facilitates ROI measurement processes with partnering organizations. Michelle brings over 25 years of experience in sales and sales effectiveness functions through previous roles in curriculum design, training implementation, and product development.
