Preference, competence, capability
Preference is what you are drawn to. Competence is how good you are. Capability belongs to the organisation. Blur them and the assessment is worthless.
Three words that sound interchangeable and are not, and the Tri-Skills tool refuses to let them blur. Preference is what a person is drawn to: the instinct to reach for the strategy, the sale or the delivery when a problem lands. It is a lean, not a grade, and a KAM with a strong Operator preference is not a worse KAM, only a differently shaped one. Competence is how good a person actually is at a sub-skill, scored on the four rungs against evidence. That is what the tool measures and develops.
Capability is different in kind. It is an organisational property, made of people, structure, systems, culture and rewards, and no individual can be scored on it. A brilliant Silo-Buster in a business that punishes cross-functional work has high competence and no capability to use it. The distinction matters because most KAM programmes try to fix a capability problem by training competence, and wonder why nothing changes.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), chapter 11.
Related terms
The KAM Skills Tri-Stack
Strategist, Business Developer, Operator: three skill domains, four sub-skills each, mapped to the three stages of the cycle. Almost nobody is trained for all three.
The four rungs
Foundational, Established, Advanced, Master. Every sub-skill in the Tri-Stack is scored on the same ladder, and a rung is always backed by evidence.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.