The Two Calls: Chapter One of Gap Revenue Performance
The two client calls, a Fortune 50 Worldwide VP of Global Sales Enablement who couldn't say what her team's win rate was, and a Fortune 500 Head of Enablement who measured success by how many people showed up to training, that convinced Keenan sales enablement had quietly become the problem it was hired to fix.
A few years ago, ASG got pulled into a discovery call for one of the biggest deals it had ever chased: a Fortune 50 tech company, two thousand reps, seven figures on the table. The prospect, a Worldwide VP of Global Sales Enablement, already knew what she wanted. She just needed someone to deliver it. So Keenan asked about her business instead of her training wish list, win rate, time to close, average contract value, and got "I don't know" four times in a row.
A few months later, a different call with a different company went almost the same way, except this Head of Enablement had an answer: module completion rates, certification pass rates, NPS scores, all up sharply. None of it was a sales metric. It's the equivalent of a personal trainer who shows up to every session, runs you through every set, and can't tell you if you're losing weight, only that you came to the gym five times this week.
Chapter One is the two calls in full, in Keenan's own words, and the moment he realized these weren't outliers.
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"A bold and necessary rethink of modern sales enablement — and one of the more thoughtful books I've read on sales performance in a long time. CROs, CEOs, and boards will appreciate it."
— Mark Roberge, Co-founder @ Stage 2 Capital, Professor @ Harvard Business School, Founding CRO @ HubSpot
What's Inside
Four beats building one argument: sales enablement has been measuring the wrong thing, and almost nobody in the field has noticed.
Two Credentialed Leaders, Zero Answers
A Worldwide VP of Global Sales Enablement with a seven-figure budget and two thousand reps under her, unable to answer basic questions about win rate, time to close, or quota attainment. What happened on the call after Keenan asked, and why he knew they'd never hear from her again.
The Metric That Wasn't One
A second Head of Enablement, a few months later, who did have an answer: training participation, module completion, certification pass rates, all climbing. The specific reason none of it told Keenan whether anything the team was doing worked.
The Gym Membership You'd Fire
Keenan's own comparison for what most enablement functions deliver: a trainer who shows up, runs every exercise, and never once checks whether you're losing weight. Why activity and performance keep getting treated as the same thing when they aren't.
Why This Keeps Happening
Keenan's case for why these two calls describe most sales organizations, not a rare few, and the chapter's closing turn: enablement often inherits the chaos from above, but at the end of the day, it's still the function's problem to fix. The line that sets up the rest of the book.
About A Sales Growth Company
A Sales Growth Company builds sales training and consulting programs on Gap Selling and the Problem-Centric™ Operating System, the same operating system Gap Revenue Performance lays out for enablement, sales ops, and frontline management.
The firm has worked with B2B sales organizations for 25 years across hundreds of companies. The two calls in Chapter One are drawn directly from that consulting practice. ASG is named a Representative Vendor in the 2025 Gartner Market Guide for Sales Training Service Providers.
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FAQ
What is Gap Revenue Performance about?
Gap Revenue Performance is a book by Keenan that argues sales enablement has been buying training when what it needed was a performance system. It lays out the Problem Centric Operating System, three connected layers for skills, opportunity, and forecast, built to close the gap between what reps are taught and what they do in a live deal.
Is Chapter One useful on its own, without the rest of the book?
Yes. Chapter One makes the complete case, through two real client calls, for why measuring training activity instead of business performance is the industry's default, so a reader can decide whether the problem it names is the one they're living with before committing to the full book.
How is Gap Revenue Performance different from Gap Selling and Gap Prospecting?
Gap Selling and Gap Prospecting are methodology books, how a rep diagnoses a buyer's problem and earns the first conversation. Gap Revenue Performance is an operating system manual, written for the CRO and Head of Enablement who need the infrastructure that makes any methodology stick in the field.