The CEO of a UK B2B services business wanted to lift the performance of her small, experienced team. The conventional next step is familiar: pick a training provider, buy a programme, put everyone through it, hope it sticks. She did something different. Before spending anything on development, her sales director worked with us to answer a prior question: what does good actually look like here, and where does each person stand against it? Not in general, and not from a generic competency catalogue; for this team, selling this offer, to these customers.
That question is usually skipped, for an understandable reason: answering it properly looks slow and uncomfortable. But skipping it is why so much sales training washes over teams and changes nothing. In a McKinsey survey on corporate training, only a quarter of managers said their programmes measurably improved business performance; most companies did not track the return at all. Generic training aims at the average gap of the average team; your team’s gaps are specific. Until they are mapped, development budget is spent on faith.
Capability is three things, not one
Most development effort goes into skills: how to open, question, negotiate, close. But skills are only one of three dimensions that determine how a salesperson performs:
- Behaviours: what people consistently do; the habits, disciplines, and choices visible in everyday work.
- Knowledge: what they understand; the market, the offer, the customer’s business, the commercial mechanics.
- Skills: what they can execute; the craft of conversations, meetings, and deals.
Teams routinely train skills while the real constraint sits elsewhere. A salesperson who knows the proposition inside out but never plans their week will still be outsold by a disciplined rival who is simply in front of the right customers more often. Until you know which dimension is the constraint, for each person, development spend is a guess.
Generic training aims at the average gap of the average team. Your team’s gaps are specific.
Map it in the room, not from the outside
The orthodox way to assess a sales team is an external audit: consultants observe, interview, benchmark, and return weeks later with a report. The alternative is to build the capability picture with the business, through working sessions. The exact shape differs from one organisation to the next, but the principles hold, and each builds on the one before:
- Start with what leaders believe about the team, the gaps, and what good looks like; then treat it as a hypothesis, not a verdict. Sales leaders are well placed to articulate the behaviours, knowledge, and skills that distinguish strong performance in their business; the output should be a draft framework in their language, not a consultant’s.
- Let the team test it. The same questions, examined from the front line. Where the two perspectives diverge, you have found something: a gap in expectations, communication, or self-awareness that no external report would surface.
- Ground it in real work. Observing live selling, and talking to the people doing it, turns the emerging picture from opinion into evidence.
- Measure both views. Assessment works best completed twice over: each person on themselves, each manager on each person. The gaps between self-scores and manager-scores are frequently more informative than the scores themselves. The science here is blunt: a meta-analysis published in Personnel Psychology found self-ratings of job performance correlate with supervisors’ ratings at just 0.35 once corrected for measurement error, and closer to 0.22 before correction. Neither view alone is reliable, and the comparison is where the information lives.
- Synthesise together. The end point is a business-specific capability framework and an evidence-based view of where each development pound will do the most work.
Done this way, the arc runs in weeks, not months: brief, intense working sessions fitted around the day job, rather than a long parallel audit workstream.
Why the room beats the report
Three reasons this approach outperforms the external audit.
First, accuracy: perception gaps between leaders and team are among the most valuable findings, and they only surface when both groups build the picture together. A questionnaire has its place as one input among several, with the results explored and made sense of in the room; not as a verdict delivered from outside.
Second, ownership: a framework the leaders articulated in their own words gets used after the consultants leave, because it is theirs. An imported competency model, however elegant, gets filed.
Third, momentum: the diagnostic should end with the sales leader, not the consultant, presenting the findings and development priorities to their own board. In the engagement that prompted this article, that is exactly how it closed; and that distinction, small as it sounds, is the whole difference between a report and a change.
Three questions before you buy training
- Could you and your sales leaders write down, specifically for your business, the behaviours, knowledge, and skills that separate your best performer from the rest?
- Would your managers and your salespeople give the same answer about where the gaps are?
- When the assessment is done, who would present the conclusions to your board: you, or your consultant?
If the first two answers are no, training is premature. If the third answer is “the consultant”, ownership is going to be a problem long after the programme ends.
At Caminoro, we help B2B leadership teams map sales capability and build development plans their own people carry forward, drawing on decades of first-hand commercial leadership. If you’d like to talk about what this could look like in your business, get in touch.
Sources: Harris, M. M. and Schaubroeck, J. (1988), “A meta-analysis of self-supervisor, self-peer, and peer-supervisor ratings”, Personnel Psychology, 41(1), 43 to 62 · McKinsey, corporate training effectiveness survey.
