Developing sales skills to match future needs

Innofactor Case Study

Innofactor is the leading promoter of modern digital organization in the Nordic countries. Innofactor helps its customers digitize their business, promotes a social way of working, and develops business processes through secure cloud services.

How to assess and develop team-level future skills needs in a sales team?

Innofactor seeks to develop sales competence levels proactively to meet the changing needs of the future. Innofactor has renewed its sales strategy and started to develop its own sales culture to be more market and customer oriented. As part of the sales reformation project, Innofactor wanted to create a clear common vision of the necessary sales skills, which will then be developed. The aim was to find a model that could also be easily updated in the future if necessary.

Future Skills service for participatory and systematic competence development

As part of other sales development projects, Innofactor implemented the Future Skills service, conceptualized by Intolead. The implementation began by identifying key competencies for the future through a discussion within the team. Next, the team evaluates the target status and the current level of competencies for the identified competencies. In this way, the concrete themes for competence development were made visible and it was possible to make both team-level and individual-level development plans for competence development. The five-point service was implemented as a workshop facilitated by Intolead.

Actions are guided by identification of competencies and making development areas visible

With the help of the implemented service, an operating model was created for Innofactor, through which it will be possible also in the future to assess the changing sales competence needs. The competence development model involves the members of the sales team in actively thinking about new competence needs arising from the customer base and the market. In this way, competence development becomes proactive. At the same time, the culture of continuous learning that is needed to build a successful sales team in the future is also strengthened.

“Intolead’s well-conceptualized service provided a good foundation for building a systematic and flexible process and model for competence development. The process will help us build within the team operations that are customer-oriented and the highest available quality on the market also in the future.”

Jarkko Lindroos,
Vice President,
Innofactor