Knowledge, Skill and Discipline: What I Actually Check

I first encountered this framework in Kellogg’s Mastering Sales program: a high-performing salesperson is built on knowledge, skill and discipline. Three words are easy to agree with. What follows is what each one has looked like when I was the one checking.

Knowledge: know what you are selling

In late 2021 a new salesperson at DMA was working through online courses on the services we sold: SEO, Google Ads and social media. When other courses were suggested alongside them, I agreed, but not as a substitute:

Let’s get these too; however knowing the intricacies of the deliverables are going to make them even more of a ninja.

Ten minutes later I asked how much longer before he was done with all three.

A salesperson does not have to be able to do the work. He has to understand it well enough that a buyer’s hard question does not end the conversation. In an agency, the hard questions are about the deliverables.

Skill: get the next step while you have them

Knowledge is wasted if the call ends without a next step.

In November 2022 a daily report said a new lead had to leave mid-call to take his kids to school, so the rep would follow up by email with a meeting link. My reply was one line:

Could we have scheduled a call while we were on the phone with him?

Sometimes the answer is no. In this case it was: he was walking out of the door. But the question has to be asked every time, because an emailed meeting link is a request the prospect can ignore, and a time agreed on the phone is a commitment.

The same note came up in a practice pitch in January 2023: one of three things a rep needed to fix was to book the next call before letting the prospect go. I wrote about that pitch here.

Skill is also preparation. In 2021 we adopted a set of ten discovery questions for DMA’s sales calls. My instruction was to put them everywhere the rep would need them: an online form he could fill in, a form a prospect could fill in, and

a laminated postcard [he] can keep next to his phone

Discipline: tell me what you did, and tell me the truth

In February 2024 a report said a partner was asking why discovery meetings were not happening. It did not say what had been done about it. I wrote back that the report needed to say how the situation had been handled:

that’s like advising me that the forest is burning.

A report that describes a problem without the action taken is not a report. It is a warning, and it passes the problem upwards.

The harder kind of discipline is honesty about a deal. In May 2024 a deal that had been reported at 80 percent confidence slipped away overnight. My reply:

Until 20 hours ago you were at 80 percent confidence. we should review how the %s are computed & how to ensure deals close. We can fix this so it doesnt happen again.

Deals are lost. The problem was the number: if 80 percent can disappear in a day, it was never 80 percent, and every plan built on that forecast was built on nothing.

What I still use

I still check the same three things. Does the salesperson understand what he is selling well enough to answer the hard question? Did he leave the call with a time on the calendar? And when he tells me where a deal stands, is it true?

Those three checks are the first thing I install when I take on someone else’s sales organization. Keeping my own standard current is why I still go back to school.