Seal Your Sales Performance Request With a SWAK
Before prescribing training, diagnose the real performance problem. The SWAK framework helps sales leaders and enablement practitioners identify whether a seller is facing a Skill, Will, Ability, or Knowledge gap, so they can provide the right support at the right time. And, of course, keep it super simple.
Long before texts, emojis, and DMs, people found creative ways to communicate affection across distance.
During World War I, soldiers popularized four letters on correspondence sent home to loved ones:
SWAK: Sealed With A Kiss.
The expression continued to appear in correspondence during World War II.
I've borrowed those four letters for something very different.
I have a genuine passion for professional salespeople. I've spent much of my career selling, leading sellers, coaching them, and building enablement programs designed to help them perform at their best.
When a seller or sales leader comes to me asking for help, I want the request to come with a SWAK:
Skills. Will. Ability. Knowledge.
And I want it sealed with a KISS:
Keep It Super Simple.
Because before we prescribe a solution to a performance problem, we need to understand what problem we're actually trying to solve.
Start With Skill Versus Will
One of the first questions I ask when someone requests coaching or enablement support is:
Do we have a skill problem or a will problem?
Those two problems can produce remarkably similar performance outcomes, but they require very different solutions.
A seller who wants to conduct better discovery but doesn't know how to ask effective follow-up questions has a different problem from a seller who knows exactly what to do but no longer sees a reason to do it.
Sending both sellers to the same training program doesn't make much sense.
Skill: Can They Execute It?
A skill gap exists when the seller understands the objective but cannot consistently execute the behavior effectively.
Perhaps they struggle with discovery.
Maybe their prospecting conversations aren't effective.
Perhaps they have difficulty handling objections, negotiating value, communicating with executives, or asking for the business.
These are learnable skills.
They can be demonstrated, practiced, coached, observed, measured, and improved.
But there is an important prerequisite:
The seller has to possess enough will to improve.
That's why diagnosing skill without examining will can lead us in the wrong direction.
Will: Do They Want to Do It?
A will problem is more complicated.
When motivation drops, I don't believe the first response should automatically be, "Coach them up or coach them out."
I want to know why.
What changed?
Does the seller still believe in what they're selling?
Do they believe in the company?
Do they believe the solution genuinely creates value for customers?
Have they lost confidence in leadership?
Or do they still believe in all of those things but simply feel exhausted?
Those distinctions matter.
When Belief Disappears
Earlier in my career, I sold digital advertising.
I was good at it.
More importantly, I believed I was helping businesses.
That belief fueled my performance.
Then I became aware of inaccuracies in some of the success metrics being reported.
My belief in what I was selling declined dramatically.
So did my performance.
My sales skills hadn't suddenly disappeared.
My knowledge hadn't disappeared.
My will had changed because my belief had changed.
Eventually, I recognized that I was no longer a good fit for that business.
That's an important distinction for sellers and leaders.
Sometimes declining motivation isn't a performance-management problem. Sometimes the seller no longer believes in the value proposition, the organization, or the work.
If that belief can't be authentically restored, a change may be healthier for everyone involved.
When Belief Exists, but Motivation Is Exhausted
There is another type of will problem.
The seller still believes.
They're just tired.
Selling can be emotionally demanding. Rejection, difficult prospects, complex deals, aggressive targets, long sales cycles, competitive losses, and deals that disappear at the finish line can take their toll.
In those situations, I have found it useful to reconnect sellers with something much more personal than quota.
Why are you doing this?
When I led sales and BDR teams, I encouraged my people to keep their personal goals visible.
We created mini vision boards and displayed them in their cubicles. Beside those goals were dollar amounts.
A vacation.
A house.
A car.
Debt they wanted to eliminate.
Something they wanted to provide for their children.
Whatever mattered to them.
Then we reverse-engineered those financial goals.
How much income would the goal require?
How much revenue would they need to generate?
How many sales would that require?
How many qualified opportunities?
How many conversations?
How many daily activities?
Eventually, we could bring the goal all the way down to the value of today's activity.
The psychological shift was important.
We weren't simply trying to fund the quota. We were funding the goal.
A prospect saying "no" didn't necessarily make an activity worthless. That conversation was one of the required activities in the mathematics of reaching the seller's personal objective.
We were giving the activity meaning.
That approach proved effective for me personally and for many of the sellers I've had the privilege of leading and coaching.
Ability: Can They Realistically Do It?
Ability and skill are related, but they aren't identical.
Skill asks:
How effectively can this person perform a particular behavior?
Ability asks a broader question:
Can this person perform what this role requires, at the necessary level, within a reasonable period of time?
This is where leaders have to examine not only the seller but also the environment we've created around the seller.
Have we given them enough practice?
Are our expectations realistic?
Is the sales motion unusually complex?
How much product, industry, competitive, technical, and commercial knowledge must someone integrate before they can perform independently?
And one of my favorite questions:
Is our ramp period actually realistic?
Sales organizations love talking about reducing ramp time. I've done it myself, and I highlight that accomplishment professionally.
But there is another question we should ask:
Should this particular ramp time be reduced?
A relatively simple transactional sale should probably have a shorter ramp than a complex enterprise sale involving multiple stakeholders, technical requirements, procurement, security reviews, and long buying cycles.
Experience can shorten the learning curve, but experience comes with its own consideration.
Are we hiring proven capability?
Or are we sometimes hiring someone else's habits along with it?
Speed matters.
Competency matters more.
Knowledge: Do They Know What to Do?
Knowledge should be the simplest part of the diagnosis.
Do they know it or not?
Do they understand the product?
Do they understand the sales process?
Do they know how to enter the opportunity correctly in the CRM?
Do they understand why accurate CRM data matters?
Do they know the competitive landscape?
Do they know where to find the information when they need it?
If they don't know something they need to know, teach them.
If they need a resource, give them one.
If the answer can be found in two minutes, however, don't force them through a 45-minute training course to get it.
This is one of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make.
They treat every performance problem like a knowledge problem.
Performance is low?
Training.
CRM compliance is poor?
Training.
Discovery isn't effective?
Training.
A new product isn't selling?
Training.
Training becomes the organizational aspirin prescribed for every performance headache.
But if someone already knows what to do, providing more information rarely solves the problem.
That's why diagnosis matters.
Don't Prescribe Before You Diagnose
Human performance will never fit perfectly into four boxes.
People are complicated.
A seller may simultaneously have a knowledge gap, an underdeveloped skill, declining motivation, and unrealistic performance expectations.
One can influence another.
That's precisely why enablement should begin with diagnosis rather than content creation.
Before building another course, scheduling another workshop, purchasing another tool, or deciding that a seller simply isn't capable, ask four questions:
Skill: Can they execute it effectively?
Will: Are they sufficiently motivated to do it, and why?
Ability: Can they realistically perform at the level the role requires?
Knowledge: Do they know what to do and why it matters?
Then determine the intervention.
Maybe it's training.
Maybe it's coaching.
Maybe it's practice.
Maybe it's better resources.
Maybe it's clearer expectations.
Maybe it's motivation.
Maybe it's more realistic ramp time.
And yes, sometimes it may reveal that the role and the individual simply aren't the right match.
But we shouldn't arrive at that conclusion before understanding the problem.
That's why when sellers and sales leaders come to me with a performance challenge, I want the request delivered with a SWAK:
Skills. Will. Ability. Knowledge.
And whatever we decide to do next, let's seal it with a KISS:
Keep It Super Simple.
Because the goal of enablement isn't to create more training.
The goal is to identify what stands between the seller and successful performance, then remove it.