Stop Counting Bodies: Why Presence Is an Awful Metric for Sales Enablement

A photo circulating on LinkedIn shows a crowded conference hall filled with hundreds of attendees, with approximately 80% of them looking down at their phones.

The caption? "Great turnout today — over 400 people attended our keynote."

Sound familiar?

We've become obsessed with presence; a metric that looks good but tells us almost nothing useful. Ultimately, all presence tells us is whether someone's backside was in a seat. In sales enablement and training, we need to have an honest conversation about why that has to stop. 

The Lead Indicator That Isn't Leading Anywhere

In sales, we love our lead and lag indicators. Lagging indicators tell you what happened, e.g. deals closed, revenue generated, and quota achieved. Leading indicators are supposed to predict those outcomes. For years, one of the most commonly cited leading indicators of training effectiveness has been attendance.

However, as most of us know, attendance is not a leading indicator. It's a vanity metric.

The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety puts it plainly. Rather than measuring attendance at training sessions, you should be measuring the number of people who engaged in the meeting and how many met the key learning objectives. In other words, being in the room is far from being evidence of impact. 

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