The 21 New Sales Core Competencies for Modern Selling

Image Copyright Kheng Guan Toh via Shutterstock.com

[Note – While you may still wish to read this, the 10 Competencies were updated again in 2020 and this article has the latest lists as well as a link that allows you to see the data behind those competencies.]

Can you name 10 Core Competencies of a great salesperson?  Let’s see, there’s prospecting, qualifying and closing, and then there’s….wow, this is difficult!

For the past 20 years, every Objective Management Group (OMG) sales force evaluation and sales candidate assessment has been tied to 21 Sales Core Competencies.  We constantly improve, update, enhance and perfect the science of evaluating sales forces and candidates.  For all that we do though, I found it disheartening that we had not updated the Core Competencies to reflect the changes that have taken place in selling over the past 8 years.

Today, I’m relieved to report that this summer, for the first time in 20 years, OMG will integrate my revised and updated, new and improved, better than ever, much more relevant, 21 Sales Core Competencies.

Here you go:

Each competency is populated by several or more attributes.  The biggest changes, since our original set of 21 Core Competencies in 1994, are the addition of categories that compliment our dashboards as well as the inclusion of Sales Posturing and Social Selling.

It’s worth noting that social selling skills are one of the attributes of Hunting – the ability to find new opportunities – but mastery of the various social selling tools themselves is now a competency.  I’m sure this will cause outrage and debate from those who so strongly promote social selling, but when you look at an entire sales cycle, social selling takes place PRIOR to a first call or meeting, before we can consider whether or not to enter an opportunity into the funnel or pipeline.

My next statement will cause even more outrage.  In its essence, social selling is really a component of marketing for which many more salespeople are now taking individual responsibility.  They are marketing themselves.

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[Note: this article is from 2014 and the 21 Sales Core Competencies were updated again in March of 2017]