Procter & Gamble NA CBD Capability: Era of Education

Jessica Krinke - 6/4/12

At Procter & Gamble NA CBD Capability, Chief Learning Officer magazine’s No. 10 ranked LearningElite company for 2012, measurement strategy has transformed how the company learns and does business.

Valerie Brantley, associate director, Procter & Gamble NA CBD Capability

While Procter & Gamble NA CBD Capability (P&G) boasts a substantial cache of continuing education courses and years of intensive on-boarding for new hires, learning leaders believe what sets the company’s learning culture apart is its three-year measurement and evaluation strategy for sales training.

“It is important to understand that moving to our measurement strategy changed everything about our work,” said Beth White Marshall, measures and evaluation manager for P&G. “It required a change in behavior, not just for the capability team, but for all stakeholders — managers, learners, channel VPs [and] senior leaders.”

Marshall said the strategy impacted everything about the way the company does business. “You have to assess differently, design content differently, drive manager engagement differently, etc.”

The measurement and evaluation strategy required a realignment in thinking, the scope of which was far-reaching. “It changed how we did our work — requiring more engagement, accountability and ownership than previous systems and processes. It also changed how we structured our team to ensure we had experts in all areas, but they were interdependent upon each other,” Marshall said.

P&G attributes much of the success in implementing its measurement and evaluation plan to the fact that the sales department’s training arm is run with the same tenets as the business one; there is a solid plan to meet direct goals that must always be backed up by return on investment data for senior leadership.

“We also capture payout of our training, ROI quantitative, the way P&G finance calculates it on volume with the same benchmark for P&G North America,” Marshall said.

An approximately four-month-long process was implemented to align senior management, develop the strategy, develop the evaluation, identify the external best-in-class benchmarks and execute the strategy. “Completing the M&E strategy was a difficult process, but our team is delivering the best business results for our P&G stakeholders because we are able to measure the value of our training,” Marshall said.