I’ve had a lot of members over the last couple of weeks ask me essentially the same question – “How should we measure and evaluate our efforts to build Challenger™ reps?” 

The actual measures will be different depending on your go-to-market model and the length of your sales cycle, but there are several universal measurement principles that can be applied to any business:

Measuring Adoption:

Adoption is a tricky metric to measure, because of two challenges:

1. Just because a rep says they delivered a pitch, doesn’t mean that they delivered it well
2. Just tracking what sales did gives you little insight into how a customer reacted to that sales interaction

In light of those two challenges, consider the following two ideas:

Periodic internal “spot checks” from either the management team or some other vetting team (comprised of people who are deemed “the best” at delivering the pitch) would be subjective, but helpful – you could then cross reference that with reps’ actual sales results. 

For a concrete example of this, see the process and scorecard that Britannia developed for measuring coaching interactions.  You can take the principles of this scorecard and apply it to reps and Challenger behaviors. 

Another member that has done a lot of work around “teaching” is W.W. Grainger.  Grainger doesn’t necessarily measure whether a rep delivered a teaching pitch, but rather that the customer completed a diagnostic that complements the sales pitch.  This could only mean the teaching pitch was delivered well – because otherwise a customer would never care about completing the diagnostic.  For similar ideas about measuring customer reactions and “customer verifiers,” review our Improving Sales Predictions study. 

Measuring Sales Results:

Common practices of monitoring sales results would still work – identify the sales metrics you expect to inflect as a result of developing reps’ Challenger behaviors and run a decent size pilot to monitor the changes. For example, take a 6-month pilot with a group of reps and see if there are noticeable differences in conversion rates, cycle time, deal size, and rep % to goal.

If you’re going to measure ROI based on sales results, one member had a very unique approach to test Challenger behaviors by isolating deals that had stalled in the pipeline—since the deals have already stalled, making mistakes won’t affect the close ratios.  BUT, pockets of success WILL show up.

Especially in the near term, focusing solely on financial results (e.g., strict ROI) would give you a false read, since Challenger behaviors will take different reps anywhere from a few months to a few years to learn and start implementing effectively.  You may even have some reps’ results slightly decrease in the short term, since they’ll inevitably make mistakes as they learn the new approach.  

Measuring Skills:

Don’t overlook the skills your reps are developing by solely focusing on the sales results achieved.  In higher-complexity sales, reps’ skill set matters quite a bit – so you should be measuring not just the ends (results) but the means (skills).  We’ve profiled several examples (competency-focused cases from gen-i and IBM as well as coaching-related cases from Novartis and Britannia) to show how companies have measured rep skills.

Related posts:

1. Digging Deeper On Challenger™ Sales Reps
2. Why Sales Challenger?
3. Think You’re Good At Coaching? Your Reps Don’t.