Chapter 26

Measuring Success

All the clients were very impressed. In some of the opportunities they took pictures or asked me not to clean the white board. It was impressive. They loved it, and plan to use it themselves as the basis for telling their own story “up the ladder” to the committee that approves their funding. The whiteboard got the customer to start identifying areas of opportunity. It expanded their understanding of what was possible.

—Enterprise Seller Symposium Participant

One of the most often-asked questions we get when proposing Whiteboard Selling to prospects as a way to increase knowledge ownership, improve confidence, sell higher, and close more/bigger deals, is, “So, show me the ROI.” We submit that it is no easy task for any sales methodology or other training approach to take credit for quantitative sales metric improvements. While it is possible in rare cases to confidently correlate a single set of skills or a new way of selling with sales improvements, we believe making blanket statements is in most cases deceptive selling. We frequently observe methodology and training vendors claiming that they “increased sales by x” or “improved deal close rates by y.”

There are so many other factors that can contribute to fluctuations in sales growth and other sales patterns—seasonality, addition of new products, management changes, reduced competitive pressures, and so forth. For example, one of our largest clients, a leading provider of storage and data management solutions, has grown from $750 million in revenue to $1.5 billion in the four years we have been working with them. Whiteboarding is widespread there due to the important role whiteboard training plays in the organization's new-hire training program. However, it would be disingenuous of us to claim that whiteboarding is responsible for this growth. This is why we primarily rely on anecdotal feedback and repeat business rate as the best indicators of the success of whiteboarding as a better way to sell expensive stuff to educated buyers.

There are, however, examples of independent research that demonstrate the efficacy of using whiteboarding instead of PowerPoint slides. Surveys of 310 enterprise sales organizations conducted by Aberdeen Research (in conjunction with an October 2012 report titled Train, Coach, Reinforce—Best Practices in Maximizing Sales Productivity) found that:

In addition to independent research, there are four primary ways we use to quantitatively measure overall whiteboarding initiative success. These are:

Post-Training Web Surveys

A web-based survey three weeks after a whiteboard training session is one of the best ways to gauge the immediate results. It will tell you how the event was received, the initial impact on customer interactions, and in some cases the impact on average deal size when the whiteboard is used compared to the prior six months when it was not. We routinely run these surveys, and the data gathered tends to be very consistent. Here is a sampling of the questions we routinely ask, and the average responses calculated across dozens of surveys we have completed on behalf of our customers:

In some cases, it is possible to get quantitative results from sales data from these surveys. For example, in one survey we asked respondents to provide the deal size associated with specific sales opportunities when the whiteboard was used more than once, and found that on average it was 23 percent higher than the deal size calculated from CRM data dating back six months prior to the training. But as mentioned earlier, many other factors could have contributed to this increase.

CRM Integration

Another effective way to measure success is to ask sellers to identify when a whiteboard was used in conjunction with a particular sales opportunity, by checking a box or filling in a custom field in their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. There are a number of challenges with this approach, the least of which include training sellers on how to do this and why it is important. Another challenge is that the CRM system itself must be modified, which requires working through the IT or sales operations department, and perhaps waiting for the next release of the software before implementing the tracking mechanism.

However, in one case we were able to put this process in place, and the results were quite impressive. The data were gathered from more than 250 sellers, 1,000+ opportunities, and 600+ customers. Sellers used a drop-down field in their CRM system to indicate how the whiteboard was used, and data were tracked on total revenue but also on average deal size. The resulting data were impressive and reliable.

What this data unequivocally tells us is that the more sellers felt the whiteboard helped them, the larger the deal size. As the anecdotal feedback at the beginning of this section indicates, customers are indeed able to create their own buying vision when participating in a whiteboard dialogue, thereby increasing the overall opportunity size.

Certification

A surefire way to ensure that sellers who have been through a whiteboard training symposium know how to deliver the whiteboard “cold” is to get them into a room with an actual whiteboard and a panel of their peers or superiors. The exercise involves the seller going through the whiteboard presentation, “in role,” during which the panel is working off a standardized score sheet and asking a set of questions or throwing out objections as the presentation progresses. Participants are measured not only on their knowledge of the whiteboard content, but also on a variety of other whiteboarding best practices (see Part 6). Once the data is gathered, it is tabulated and presented to sales management and other executives to demonstrate the level of uptake driven by the training event. The data can be sliced and diced by Area, Region, Team, and all the way down to the individual level. Ideally, each participant will receive a personalized report that documents their strength and growth areas, and how they compare to the other members of their team. While it doesn't measure impact on revenue, it is a good way to ensure some measure of ROI from the perspective of all the participants learning the material and increasing their knowledge ownership of the solution.

Controlled Studies

Probably the most effective (but logistically difficult) way to measure the efficacy of Whiteboard Selling's (or any methodology's) positive impact on sales metrics would be a controlled study of some sort, which, admittedly, we have never conducted. This study would involve putting half of a sales population through whiteboard training, leaving the other half out, and then tracking the sales performance of both groups over six months to a year. A study of this sort would require a statistically significant number of sellers, selling the same thing, in the same way, and controlling for a variety of outside influences that might impact one group over another. The reason we have never conducted such a study—aside from the logistical difficulties and room for error—is that sales and marketing leaders are frankly less interested in academic-minded studies with control groups and statistics, and more focused on enabling all of their sales resources to become more effective now, regardless of the approach (whiteboarding, negotiation skills, sales process, etc.). They've either witnessed the benefits of a sales training program firsthand, or heard about its impact through word of mouth from new hires or colleagues, and they don't need to see (or may not believe in) the results of a controlled study to tell them it works.