Grappling with the challenge of quantifying your sales enablement efforts, seeking to validate initiatives, safeguard budgets and establish a lasting impact?

If so, you’re far from alone. According to Gartner, less than half of organizations have a formal document to guide sales enablement’s function. In addition, ValueSelling Associates and Training Industry research revealed that only 25% of sales organizations are directly measuring sales behaviors.

In many cases, the goals set for enablement tend to revolve around lagging indicators, such as increased revenue, margins, transaction size and number of deals won. This narrow focus on lagging indicators poses a challenge to enablement’s ability to demonstrate its accomplishments.

Sales training and enablement work best when woven into a bigger plan for change. It’s like fitting puzzle pieces together — everything clicks when part of a broader strategy for improvement. The best place to start is by ensuring your entire revenue engine is using the same sales methodology. After all, a sales methodology provides a common language, framework and toolset that facilitates a revenue team’s ability to understand the buyer’s needs and preferences and continuously improve its approach to outreach.

Capture Desired Results and Selling Behaviors

To highlight sales training and enablement’s impact, begin with the end in mind. What results do you want to achieve? Give thought to the selling behaviors or leading indicators that will drive those results. For instance, Perceptyx, a leading employee listening and people analytics company, wanted to grow their business profitability. They aimed do this by consistently and effectively demonstrating the value they bring to customers and how that helped them solve unique business issues. Their key performance indicators (KPIs) included increasing win rates, account contract value (ACV) and multi-year contracts.

They identified behaviors to accomplish these goals such as transitioning from a transactional mindset to value-based selling, engaging C-level executives and having more impactful business conversations, and using tailored resources to apply their new sales methodology. These resources include discovery call guides, sales pitch preparation forms, mutual plan letters, demo certification scorecards and a master list of “open-ended, probing and confirming” (OPC) questions.

Determine the Leading Indicators to Monitor

Once you’ve uncovered the behavioral change needed to hit revenue goals, map the sales issue to your enablement solution. Then, identify the leading indicators to track.

A sales issue for Perceptyx was engaging the C-suite in high-level business conversations. They mapped this issue to their enablement solution, which included training on financial literacy and business acumen and a review of best practices for identifying company financials. With this information in hand, sales reps were able to speak the language of business in pre-call planning and role plays, resulting in better business conversations.

If you’re dealing with a similar issue, here are the leading indicators you’d need to track and measure:

• Training and content engagement in the sales enablement platform.
• Number of C-level executive sales calls made and meetings conducted.
• Financial fields in pre-call planning inside of their customer relationship management (CRM).
• Mutual plan letters for each member of the buying group members who can impact the final decision.
• The number and distribution of O-P-C questions asked during sales calls using conversational intelligence tools, such as Gong or Chorus.ai.

Map Leading Indicators to Revenue Results

The magic happens by linking your leading indicators to the revenue results they will impact. This is how you can monitor and encourage the right selling behaviors while showcasing their effectiveness.

Perceptyx tracked leading indicators and charted them to their lagging indicators or KPIs.

In just one year, Perceptyx made impressive gains with this methodology:

• 56% increase in ACV
• 30% increase in multi-year contracts
• Closed the largest deal in company history

This example provides valuable insight on which sales behaviors matter most to meet their organization’s revenue goals.

Armed with this knowledge, you can determine where to focus future training efforts to produce the desired outcomes.

The Takeaway

Sales training and enablement is most successful when it is part of a change management initiative.

The best change management initiatives start with the end in mind and think through:

• What results do we want?
• What leading indicators do we want to monitor?
• What specific behaviors should sales reps exhibit to attain those leading indicator goals?

When this approach is implemented with specificity and granularity, incorporating feedback from across the revenue engine, sales enablement initiatives are much more likely to be successful.

To maximize the return on your sales training investment, actively take steps to measure the leading indicators or sales behaviors that matter most — this ensures your training program is working. Without effective measurement practices in place, you’ll lack insight into the performance of your organization’s salespeople and whether they are properly equipped with the skills they need to be successful.