As Goodhart’s law formulates it: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

I could not find better description of what happens when the basic understanding of sales enablement is missing in goal setting.

Sales enablement (SE) is a strategic approach or a process, – depending on definition-, but definitely it isn’t a lonesome activity. The best indicator of how much an organization (or a person) understands the significance of SE is the attitude towards KPIs and goals.

SE is about synchronizing sales and marketing to improve the sales execution, creating a valuable conversation with customers, driving revenue and optimizing return on investment. Organization with poor understanding of SE considers sales enablement as an activity – without the underlying approach, and without the necessary behavior change.

In this case the action becomes the goal. It’s an easy analogy : does multi-channel marketing equal sending email? Is your goal sending more emails or increasing revenue improving customer experience? Can you define the success of multi-channel marketing only with the number of sent emails?

It’s exactly the same in SE. You shoot yourself in the foot setting the goal of SE only as a number of calls, or number of presentations. Yes, I know, it’s much easier to measure these metrics than the real impact on the quality of sales rep – customer interaction.

Ok, go ahead, try to track you success in SE focusing on easy measurable sales rep activities. The good news is that most probably (unless your reps are completely stupid) you will be able to show up incredible results, demonstrating wonderful increase in the number of calls and contacts – without any changes in revenue. Does it lead to the only logical explanation that SE is not effective and has no impact on sales performance? Or you just prove Goodhart’s law – getting what you measure.

That’s the art of goal setting and KPIs, choosing the irrelevant and selfish KPIs, there’s no real change on the quality of customer interactions and you are just wasting the investment in SE.