President & CEO of ValueSelling Associates and a noted speaker, author and consultant.
Selling is hard right now. Every one of my clients realizes that fact. B2B sales professionals are having a difficult time because there are many external factors we can’t control—including economic headwinds and the markets. Sure, it’s easy to say, “The economy is tanking” and “People are holding back on investments,” but that mentality will only hold you back.
Reps are also in a tough spot because many sales orgs have seen significant layoffs, especially in tech. Now, those companies are downsizing their sales teams and wrestling with how to do more with less.
To accomplish this, as a sales leader, you must be very clear about what is going to lead to productivity increases. Focus on what you can control—specifically, effective selling behaviors, the leading indicators that are linked to them and how to map these indicators to revenue results. This often means a change in how your sales reps approach the marketplace and establishing sales enablement goals to provide direction.
Four Steps For Effective Sales Enablement Measurement
Sales enablement goals are often defined in terms of lagging indicators, metrics that can only be measured after a sale is completed. Although they are easy to measure, and it’s helpful to review what has already occurred, a sole focus on lagging indicators hinders enablement’s ability to showcase its efforts.
To successfully highlight sales enablement’s true impact, look at sales behaviors linked to leading indicators as well. Leading indicators, such as the number and types of questions asked during sales calls, measure the behaviors that lead to positive lagging indicators and give you an idea of where your business is headed. They can be more difficult to measure but can offer advanced insight into the future.
This four-step framework ties selling behaviors to leading indicators, effectively measuring sales enablement impact:
1. Identify the desired selling behaviors.
2. Determine the leading indicators to track.
3. Map leading indicators to revenue results.
4. Enable feedback loops across the revenue engine.
How To Implement This Approach
Surprisingly, only 25% of sales organizations directly measure the sales behaviors that deliver these outcomes, according to research by my company and Training Industry.
As an example of how to put this into practice, we’ll look at the desired selling behavior of multithreading, an important element in driving revenue growth. For the behavior of multithreading, we’ll determine leading indicators to track and see how those indicators map to revenue results.
Employ Multithreading
Multithreading, or building multiple relationships within an account, has become increasingly important in enterprise sales and leads to bigger and safer deals. Sales reps can triangulate the right contacts by doing research and asking questions to identify all individuals involved in the decision and purchasing process.
LinkedIn’s research found that “86% of reps said they’ve either lost or had a deal delayed because a champion changed roles”—something that multi-threading can help avoid. The more stakeholders you can bring into a deal, generally, the more budget they have. And the more people you can serve with your solutions.
A simple leading indicator for multithreading is setting a goal for the number of decision makers you want to engage in an account and measuring against that. The research shows that “sellers who are connected on LinkedIn to at least four people at an account are 16% more likely to close a deal with that company.”
Conclusion
It’s important to realize that as a sales leader, you can’t just manage results. You can’t just tell your salespeople, “I want you to sell more.” They don’t know what to do with that.
Instead, 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 are the leading indicators we want to manage?
• What are the behaviors sales reps need to execute to get to those leading indicators?
When this is implemented with specificity and granularity, incorporating feedback from across the revenue engine, sales enablement initiatives are much more likely to be successful.
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