Spencer Wixom talks about driving change via methodologies and tools

Published: Sept. 15, 2020, 8 p.m.

Spencer Wixom is the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Challenger.  He stops in to share his thoughts on the importance of methodologies and how you can drive adoption to drive results.

While Spencer and The Collaborator covered a great deal of ground, one area that stood out was the discussion around skills and competencies.  Spencer noted that a year or so back he did research with a large data set of seller characteristics (as evaluated by their managers). The set was sufficiently large (26,000 data points) that we could get a good understanding how related these characteristics were to one another. 

While he initially assumed that all of the 40+ characteristics could be classified as skills, or things sellers should do "well", he realized something as he dug into the data. 

1️⃣ There is a set of things sellers should be expected to do consistently "well", these are skills. They are important to buyers and will differentiate you from others. 

2️⃣There are also things you should expect all sellers to do naturally (like curiosity, or be motivated by incentives). It's hard to train people to do these things well.So you should hire for what I call "gifts". 

3️⃣Also, how sellers behave in front of customers (being generous with their time, for example) is more a product of corporate culture than individual skill. We need to set up a culture that promotes social "graces".

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