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日本語 (Japanese)
Knowledge Signs has helped our customer, Qualica Inc. create a new sales skill system, the Sales Skill Standard, to visualize the skills of salespeople and develop career paths for them. The company has built a systematic skill development framework.
Knowledge Sign has supported Qualica in this effort for 4 years since 2020 in terms of designing the specific contents of the system and its operation.
In talent development for IT companies, there are skill standards for IT technicians such as ITSS and UISS, but there are few systematized skills for sales people. In general, performance evaluation is almost always linked to skill evaluation.
Lack of strategic skill development for sales people has been an issue.
Therefore, we have systematized the skills to be acquired as a sales person into 10 items.
The QSS (QUALICA Sales skills Standard), a unique skill standard, has been developed to clarify the following questions
-What are the skills?
-What are the performance levels of these skills?
-How should skills be developed?
We have also created a survey to diagnose the performance level of each item, and have adopted an operational policy whereby management supports skill development targeting the improvement of any skill item in the QSS, in addition to conducting annual skill assessment.
QSS (QUALICA Sales skills Standard)
The QSS defines the following 10 skills that are required for a sales person.
Rather than focusing on the act of “selling,” we position the job of sales as one of helping customers achieve their business outcomes and defines the skills needed to do so from multiple perspectives.
The underlying idea is to enable salespeople to find their own strength to demonstrate the high performance in accordance with their individual personalities, not require to enhance in all of the above 10 areas,
The future of sales requires a system in which each person performs a different role in a team while improving performance. Ideally, each individual should have different strengths and be able to develop a career tailored to his or her own uniqueness.
Systematic Skill Development Support Structure
For each QSS item, the specific skills to be acquired are defined, and also performance levels are defined at five levels in a manner that matches the job grade to some extent.
Twice a year, each sales staff’s current skill level would be scored by a scoring survey. This involves 25 questions for each of the 10 QSS items, which are answered in a self-assessment, and the score is determined by matching the answers to the questions with those of the supervisor.
The scoring is scheduled to begin in FY2024, and will basically be used as a guideline for future skill development, and in the future will be used in conjunction with the talent management system for appropriate human resource deployment.
E-Learning curriculum has been launched to support skill development
To support skill development, we also offer a full range of educational programs via e-learning. Based on Knowledge Signs’s own materials, we have created new basic and advanced video courses for each QSS item in cooperation with Qualica. And all employees can learn through the video courses anytime on-demand.
Furthermore, the content of this video course is highly common in IT sales. A generic version is available to the general public, so anyone can take the course.
※Please visit this e-learning site
Such a systematic training system for salespeople is rarely seen elsewhere, and we believe it will become an in-demand measure in the future, especially for the IT industry, in terms of human resource development and reskilling.
KnowledgeSign will continue to be actively involved in the establishment of such a systematic skill development system for salespeople.
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