For More Information
+91 90045 35414
.svg){kind=small}
When a fast-scaling industrial engineering and infrastructure solutions company split its national sales function into four specialised verticals — Business Development, Project Sales, Service Sales, and Channel Sales — Sales Leadership faced the question every growing organisation eventually hits: who on the existing team actually fits where?
Rather than guess, they ran a structured Development Centre. Acumen assessed 41 sales professionals across four regions against five competencies, using three separate assessment tools, and converted the results into a fitment score for every participant against every vertical. What came back was not what anyone expected.
Leadership had already made the structural call to split the sales function into four verticals. What they didn't have was clarity on who, across a national team, was genuinely built for which one. Misaligned placements meant slower ramp-up, under-leveraged talent, and a leadership team making structural bets on tenure and familiarity rather than evidence.
Acumen was brought in to replace that instinct with a rigorous, evidence-based read of the existing bench — before a single person was moved.
We didn't start from an off-the-shelf competency framework. We started by understanding the four verticals themselves — working with HR and Sales Leadership to map the current and future-state sales structure, then working backward to identify what capability would actually predict success in each one. That process converged on five competencies, each with vertical-specific behavioural indicators reviewed and signed off before assessment began.
Every assessor — drawn from the client's own team — went through structured Assessor Training and worked from a shared observation booklet, so ratings stayed objective and comparable across two assessment locations. Each participant's tool-level observations were converted into a fitment percentage against each of the four verticals, giving Sales Leadership one comparable metric instead of four separate, subjective opinions.
Across all 41 participants, the overall picture was a wake-up call — not because talent was weak, but because roles, hiring, and development hadn't yet been calibrated to what the four new verticals actually demand.
Fitment scores weren't evenly spread across the country. South and West consistently outperformed North and East — a pattern that repeated across almost every competency measured.
The gap prompted a genuinely useful question for leadership: what is South and West doing differently in how they hire, coach, and manage — and can that be codified and shared with North and East, rather than left to regional variation?
Business Acumen, Engaging Stakeholders, and Customer Centricity all showed a healthy 22% "good fit" rate. Influencing & Negotiation and Value Messaging told a different story — fewer than 1 in 10 participants scored well on either.
Business Development, Project Sales, and Service Sales each had a credible bench of strong performers. Channel Sales told a strikingly different story — only 1 participant across the entire sample rated as a strong fit, with 80% showing a clear gap.
That wasn't a talent problem — it was a signal that Channel Sales, as a role, had never been clearly defined or hired for in the first place.
Managers vs. subordinates. A wide capability gap showed up between managers and the people reporting to them — raising the question of whether developing the team is actually measured as part of a manager's own performance.
Group Discussion silence. One in five participants failed to register a single observable score in the Group Discussion — a strong indicator of how comfortable people feel speaking up in open, one-to-many forums.
The comfort-zone effect. Participants were noticeably more fluent describing past experience in interviews than performing live in a Role Play or Group Discussion — a gap that could become a real constraint as the business pushes into new sectors and geographies.
A fitment score only earns its keep if it changes what leadership does next. For every participant, we paired the data with a clear, individual recommendation — best-fit vertical, a credible second option, and the scale of development investment required to get them there — then layered that onto a potential-vs-performance framework so Sales Leadership and HR could see not just who fits where, but who to stretch, who to coach, and who needs a frank, structured performance conversation.
For Sales Leadership, the engagement replaced four different regional opinions with a single, comparable fitment metric — hard evidence behind every vertical placement decision, and a clear, ranked view of where the bench was strong versus where hiring needed to plug a gap (Channel Sales, most visibly).
For the individuals assessed, it meant an actual development roadmap instead of a generic training calendar, a best-fit and credible second-option vertical so movement felt like a plan rather than a punishment, and behavioural evidence from a live simulation — a much harder thing to argue with than a manager's gut feel.
Find out in 3 minutes whether your newly promoted managers are set up to succeed. Free for HR and L&D leaders in India.
Fill the form or Send us an email
