Evaluate Your Enablement Programs for Impacts to Revenue

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Identify areas of improvement in traditional enablement programs.
  
• Explain how outcome-based enablement supports your company’s revenue targets.
  

The Problem with Typical Enablement Programs

Your sales team needs the right information, insights, and tools to execute a sales strategy for your markets, run sales plays for your products, minimize the length of sales cycles, and fend off competitors. Ideally, a properly enabled sales team can effectively position all your company’s products and services, maintain a steady pipeline, close deals quickly, and help your company achieve its revenue goals on time. Most likely, your company runs sales programs that are designed to enable sales teams to meet these goals.

For example, you might run sales programs for these reasons.

• To build or accelerate your sales pipeline
  
• To educate sales reps about new products
  
• To help sales reps get started in a new market or region
  
• To win against competitors
  
• To cross-sell or up-sell existing customers on other products or services
  
• To onboard new sales reps
  

Most companies expect sales reps to ramp up quickly and start producing results in a short time. Enablement leaders are people who help coordinate enablement activities and aim to ensure that sales programs are efficient. They prioritize proficiencies that get reps closer to generating leads, converting leads to opportunities, winning deals, and delivering revenue.

Consider all the training and coaching that you currently provide to your in-house sales reps or partner sellers that you contract with. Maybe you’re proud of the enablement content that you’re using and believe that it’s helped produce some productive and confident sales professionals. But you notice that your current sales programs aren’t effective at achieving your revenue goals. Perhaps some markets are struggling, some cycles are slow, some products and services are underperforming, or you’re losing deals to more competitors.

Consider these potential explanations why your sales programs aren’t effective.

• Programs are disconnected from a sales rep’s daily work. Programs can be a distraction from regular duties and include content that’s spread across multiple formats or systems, requiring lots of clicks and browser tabs.
  
• Programs take too long to create, are too cumbersome to maintain, and provide little accountability for sales reps to demonstrate or apply their understanding of the material.
  
• Programs are difficult to track and relate to revenue. You can analyze completion metrics, views, or downloads, but you can’t connect that data to specific revenue outcomes, such as larger average deal size or shorter cycle times.
  

How can you easily develop and maintain sales programs that make your training content more accessible and help change behaviors that directly relate to your revenue outcomes?

The Case for Outcome-Based Enablement

At Salesforce, we asked ourselves how we can provide a simple experience for delivering sales programs. And we asked how we can offer better tools for evaluating the success and value of that enablement experience. We tackled the question from a new perspective. Rather than focus on the input (a checklist of required content to consume), we started with the output (the specific business impact, or outcome, that an enablement experience is meant to generate).

To see how this approach works, let’s take a look at Cloud Kicks, a footwear brand that makes stylish and comfortable sneakers, designed and personalized for its customers. Cloud Kicks has business-to-business (B2B) contracts with major retailers to make its sneakers available online and in stores.

Sales reps at Cloud Kicks work on finding new retailers to do business with. Jose Figueroa is a sales manager who manages a team of high-performing sales reps at Cloud Kicks. He’s just hired Candace Evans to join his team as a new sales rep. He expects Candace to quickly earn her spot among his team’s group of talented salespeople.

Jose’s current enablement program for new sales reps at Cloud Kicks consists of a spreadsheet that links to a set of slide decks, videos, PDFs, and other curated content. The program is meant to take 2 weeks to complete. Candace is excited, and she tenaciously begins her tasks. Candace wants to make sure that she understands everything, so she reviews the material thoroughly, internalizing as many details as she can. But it’s a lot of content! Almost a month goes by before she feels she has a better grasp of selling at Cloud Kicks.

But after 6 months in the job, Candace is still struggling to meet expectations. She’s nowhere near to closing her first deal. Cloud Kicks expects its sales reps to bring in their first deal after 4 months. Jose wonders whether Candace’s enablement experience played some part in her slow start. He asks her about it, and Candace admits that she found some of the content inaccessible, inefficient, or out of place. Often, she found that she would read some content that didn’t immediately apply to what she was currently doing, only to find weeks later that she had to return to that content when it did finally apply to her work.

Jose thinks about how the enablement program could be simplified to ease Candance’s experience. He begins by writing a simple problem statement: “Shorten time to first deal.”

Hmm. Jose reflects on what he wrote down. What exactly does “shorter” mean in this context? He writes a second statement that’s more specific. “Sales rep closes their first deal in 60 days.”

Jose’s first statement describes a more generic goal. His second statement describes a specific objective that he can work toward to achieve that goal. Jose also thinks that it would be great if he could measure that specific objective using Cloud Kicks sales data in Salesforce. He organizes these statements another way.

Next, Jose considers what behaviors a rep needs to demonstrate to achieve that outcome. Closing a deal takes a lot of work and represents an accumulation of many other accomplishments along the way, including dialing, connecting and having conversations, and booking meetings.

Jose thinks that if a new hire can achieve some of these important milestones in smaller bites, they may be more likely to achieve the outcome. For example, Candace wasn’t on the phone until day 30, but in order to reach Jose’s outcome, a new hire should achieve some important phone skills by day 10. Jose adds some more specific, measurable activities to his notes.

Finally, Jose understands that these smaller milestones don’t happen in a vacuum. A new hire needs the right type of exercise, delivered at the right time in their flow of work, to help train them on how to satisfactorily complete the milestones of placing calls, holding conversations, and booking meetings. Jose wants to make sure that his new hires are prepared to complete those activities.

Jose decides that the first 10 days of the enablement program should focus on content that builds competence with prospecting, such as:

• Watch a video from an experienced sales rep that coaches a new hire on prospecting.
  
• Review a slide deck that describes the prospecting process and gives suggestions for how to ask qualifying questions.
  
• Listen to an audio recording of an actual, top-rated customer call.
  
• Read a customer case study.
  
• Practice a sales pitch, record it, and seek feedback from managers and experienced sales leaders.
  

Program content related to tasks that occur later in the sales process, such as quoting deals or negotiating contracts, is deferred until it’s relevant to a new hire’s daily work.

Jose organizes all his notes into a plan.

Jose’s plan is the first step toward outcome-based enablement. Instead of thinking about a checklist of content first, Jose starts from the revenue outcome he’s trying to achieve (“Shorten time to first deal”). He works backward to identify the specific incremental milestones that he can measure in Salesforce to guide the behaviors required to support that outcome. And he determines what content to provide to help achieve those milestones.

A Model for Evaluating Outcomes

Jose’s thought process can be repeated for identifying and measuring other business outcomes that affect revenue. Here’s a model that he (and you!) can follow.

1. Identify a revenue outcome to improve, and determine how you want to measure that outcome.
   
2. Identify what behaviors you plan to change to achieve that outcome, and determine how you can measure those behaviors using records that already exist in Salesforce.
   
3. Identify what content your organization needs to support those new behaviors, and determine how you can measure content completion and evaluate whether someone has understood that content.
   
4. Evaluate the entire enablement program’s success, and iterate where necessary.
   

In the next unit, review more examples of business outcomes you can influence and measure as part of an updated enablement experience for new hires.