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Businesses using sales enablement see a 49% close rate on forecasted deals.
But is your sales enablement program helping you achieve such a win rate?
To correctly answer this question, you’ll need to review your program’s performance using the right sales enablement metrics.
Not sure which sales enablement metrics to track? We asked 31 respondents for the metrics they monitor for analyzing their sales enablement. Here’s what we learned and more:
Dig in.
Sales enablement is the process of providing the sales team with the resources, tools, and content that help them close more deals.
It typically has two sides to it:
Not to mention, the external-facing content also includes content that helps reps prospect and close more deals. For example, email templates for outreach and following up.
Think of sales enablement as the process of empowering the sales team by providing them with invaluable resources to become better at their job and hit their sales quota.
Sales enablement content is super helpful for improving reps’ performance and productivity. Ultimately, it helps businesses hit sales targets.
However, it’s only when you measure sales enablement that you can tell how its helping or hindering sales growth.
Essentially, too many resources can be overwhelming. And instead of assisting in reps’ training and development, the bucket load of content can confuse them. In the same vein, sales enablement content that’s not usable is barely helpful.
The solution? Useful sales enablement that’s planned, created, and measured by both the marketing and sales teams working together.
This makes sure that sales enablement provides:
Most of all, sales enablement content should be easy to search for, understand, and apply in the day to day.
But to make sure sales enablement is helping you hit all these basic goals, start measuring its performance. By looking at the right sales enablement metrics, you can also ensure that it’s helping shorten the sales cycle.
Considering how important measuring sales enablement is, 93.55% of the companies we surveyed shared that they analyze sales enablement. The rest (6.45%) don’t practice it, but plan to.
As you create an analysis plan, it’s important to keep the following factors in mind so you can measure your sales enablement metrics against them:
For most of the contributors who analyze sales enablement, finding the length of the sales cycle is the most important.
As its name suggests, this is the total number of days it takes to close a deal. This cycle length depends on several factors though such as the price of your product. However, knowing it is very important to understand how sales enablement helps reduce the time it takes to close deals.
Quota attainment is the second most important factor that our contributors analyze. It’s usually measured monthly, quarterly, or annually. And it’s a track of the total sales a salesperson makes as a percentage of their quota for a specified period.
These are short messages that encourage a message’s recipient to take action. Their effectiveness is crucial for moving prospects in the sales pipeline. It’s why tracking CTA performance is essential.
Sales closing rate is the number of deals closed in comparison with the number of quotes your team sent. Again, tracking it is critical for understanding how sales enablement helps improve this ratio.
PRO TIP: If you’re a HubSpot CRM user, you’re probably already tracking things like calls, emails, logged new deals, and all by sales rep. But there’s one metric that isn’t easily tracked in HubSpot CRM. And that’s close rate by sales rep. With Databox, there are a few different ways you can easily track and visualize close rates by sales reps from HubSpot CRM — no manual workarounds needed.
Win/loss rate is the ratio of the opportunities your team wins to the opportunities they loss. Effective sales enablement helps you win more opportunities. Depending on your goals, sales enablement can also help turn cold leads into closed deals.
This involves keeping tabs on how your marketing material is performing in terms of the leads that it sends to the sales team (both lead volume and quality).
Related: Sales Volume: Why It Matters and 12 Ways to Increase It
Deal size is the average price of all the closed deals. It’s an important factor for sales enablement analysis as it helps you see how your enablement content impacts the revenue.
Related: 12 Tried and Tested Tips for Increasing your SaaS Average Deal Size
This is a track of how well salespeople are complying with the sales process that you’ve planned out and trained them in. As mentioned, easy to read and use sales enablement ensures better sales process adherence.
Smart Sales Managers know that to achieve your monthly and quarterly goals, you have to monitor your team’s sales performance on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. To do that, you need an actionable dashboard that summarizes both team and individual sales rep metrics and allows you to:
If you use the HubSpot CRM, you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing some of the most important metrics for monitoring your sales team performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
The employee net promoter score is a measure of how engaged your employees are to your business — in this case how committed sales reps are to your company.
Good sales enablement motivates employees by training them better and helping them achieve their quota. In turn, it indirectly impacts the employee net promoter score. It’s why looking at this metric is an important factor to consider in your sales enablement analysis.
This is the time it takes to train and familiarize an employee or a new customer/client with your company and product/service, respectively. Again, on-point sales enablement can reduce the time it takes to bring employees and clients on board.
With the fundamentals out of the way, let’s walk you through the final steps in analyzing sales enablement — the sales enablement metrics that you should be monitoring.
Here’s a short list, followed by the details:
“The most important metric for me when analyzing my business’ sales enablement is the length of the sales cycle,” opines Peter Robert of Expert Computer Solutions.
“This means figuring out approximately how much time it takes to get from searching for leads to closing a deal with a specific lead. Understanding my business’ sales timeline allows me to optimize the foundation of our sales process.”
Says Robert, “By looking at the sales cycle, I can determine what part of our sales process aren’t optimized for maximum efficiency. For example, if you look at your sales cycle, and notice that the process of finding leads is increasing the overall time of the cycle exponentially, you can begin looking for new ways to automate or improve that part of your process. Sales enablement is all about securing maximum sales efficiency.”
Tracking this sales enablement metric also helps you revise your sales strategy. This one’s a hat tip to Jess Pingrey from Fit Small Business who explains with an example: “if you know your average sales cycle is on the longer side at three to four months, you know you need to have ample sales opportunities in the pipeline so you don’t have large gaps between new revenue coming in.”
Related: How Healthy is Your Sales Pipeline? 8 Strategies to Make It Stronger
“This is particularly important in startups before you establish a steady flow of new business,” Pingrey adds. “Sales cycle length should also be factored in with your average deal size and close rate.”
And, finally, Become’s Ryan Montgomery makes the case for measuring this metric by pointing out that “shortening the length of the sales cycle [is] one of the core objectives of both departments: sales and marketing.”
Explaining how their team is working on shortening their sales cycle, Montgomery writes: “We understood that the nature of our business is new to our target audience, and despite being positively perceived, our leads need to sleep on the new ideas before moving forward. Thus, we had to plan several engagements with our sales team, which became a costly exercise.”
“We’re now testing several sales funnels with different scenarios of using sales enablement materials as pre-reads and handovers. Suppose we manage to remove at least one of the currently necessary engagements with our sales team,” continues Montgomery. “In that case, it will be a collective success of the project team working on sales enablement materials.”
A handful of contributors review this sales enablement metric.
To begin with, Khamis Maiouf from Book of Barbering shares, “This metric helps us understand how many deals we are closing per number of opportunities that present themselves.”
“If we were not closing any deals, then we would know our sales pitch was either too complex, too ambiguous, or something else,” Maiouf explains about what this metric reveals about their sales enablement.
“Additionally, we could also conclude that there is a problem with the product itself, such as it is not fitting with market expectations or it simply did not live up to its brand promise. The sales closing ratio allows us to analyze all aspects of our company and make sure that everything is working well together.”
Entire Looks’s Ansar Hammad adds: “I know that there are a lot of other metrics you could look at to help determine success or failure when it comes to sales enablement, but I think that the closing ratio tells you everything — it shows you how well your sales team is able to close deals with potential clients.”
“It’s simple math: how many of the deals that were on offer did you actually close?” Hammad points out.
Related: 11 Common Sales Mistakes to Avoid If You Want to Close a Deal
“If your sales team is closing all of them, then they’re doing an amazing job, and they must be using their sales tools and training to great effect. If they aren’t closing many (or any) of their deals, then something’s wrong: either the tools and training aren’t effective, or your team isn’t utilizing them properly.”
In short, tracking this metric is essential for understanding how effective your sales enablement is, how well your team is adhering to using the provided resources, and whether you need to audit and rework your sales enablement. You can also identify areas that need more training resources or better tools according to Hammad.
According to PriceListo’s Admir Salcinovic, “Quota attainment is the most important metric when analyzing our sales enablement.”
“Different sales employees are held to unique standards when it comes to how much they are required to sell at a given period, as our sales team grows over time and are separated into different teams. This metric is useful in helping us determine the percentage of our sales team who are attaining expected quotas.”
Explaining further, Salcinovic says, “This metric is a great measure of our sales enablement since it delivers a better average selling price and a reduced sales cycle.”
“While each of these are excellent benefits, they can be deceptive when taken out of context because they can leave us with a magnified sense of how well our sales teams are performing,” warns Salcinovic. “For example, when a few sales employees go on a consistent streak, our overall metrics improve significantly. This is no thanks to sales enablement but could encourage others to be more productive on their job.”
For the team at NuLeaf Naturals too, quota attainment is an important sales enablement metric.
“As our business and sales teams grew, it became more and more important to set realistic standards and hold our people accountable to them,” notes Ian Kelly.
“Quota attainment became one of the key metrics that we looked at when analyzing our sales enablement. Being able to look at our quotas and optimize our strategy around those numbers was crucial to our sales strategy, and it helped our sales team grow and reach the next levels.”
The take home message? Quota attainment is a crucial metric to measure when your team grows as it becomes detrimental to their productivity after a point.
Related: Sales Metrics Reporting: Track These 16 Sales KPIs and Metrics to Improve the Performance of Your Sales Team
“This metric is important in analyzing our sales enablement because if it takes a long time to onboard a new customer, then there’s something wrong with our strategy or tactic,” observes Milkwhale’s Andre Oentoro.
“Our goal is to spend as less time as possible on onboarding customers unless their spend is high.”
To recap, effective sales enablement content such as product start guides helps speed up onboarding.
Not to mention, enablement content that educates salespeople on your product, its use cases, and more also helps improve customer onboarding. How? By training the rep on using your product, you can help them easily nurture, close, and onboard customers.
“Target completion is likely the most accurate indicator of a sales rep’s performance,” admits David Reid, VEM Group.
“This metric has helped us measure weekly, monthly, and quarterly by referring to the proportion of sales closed by each sales professional in a certain period. However, the sales enablement strategies must operate together to help the sales team meet their quota.”
“The performance of salespeople can be analyzed on a dashboard to identify any knowledge gaps preventing them from meeting their quota,” Reid goes on. “Compared to individual KPIs, tracking quota attainment has provided a more comprehensive view. The whole success path was displayed as the quota attainment increased, and this indicator allowed us to drive our target achievement.”
“This allows us to really figure out our agent’s sales skills if they spend more than 5 minutes on the phone with a client and never make sales this allows us to accurately help them improve through training,” notes ParamountQuote’s Tim Connon.
Not only does the closing rate tell you about a rep’s performance and the area(s) they need improvement in, but it also tells you how well your sales enablement is doing.
“Since closing rate measures how much time it took a sales rep to convert a lead into a customer, this metric will give a general overview of how effective an organization’s sales enablement is” as Perry Valentine of AtPerry’s puts it.
“In our business, by tracking and comparing the closing rates of each sales rep, we are able to determine the areas our sales enablement may be lacking,” Valentine points out. “Since there are a lot of factors affecting the closing rate, what we do first is to identify which reps have lower closing rates and investigate closely as to which part of their sales cycles can be improved.”
Now that you know how important sales enablement is, how it impacts your sales, and the sales enablement metrics to track, let’s leave you with one final tip.
Make it easy to measure your sales enablement success. How, you ask? Begin with determining the most important sales enablement metrics you want to review. From there, plug in the metrics’ sources in a Databox sales dashboard.
Next? Watch Databox display all those metrics in a visually engaging, easy to read manner on one screen. It also updates these metrics automatically so there’s no extra load on your plate. This is best for focusing on creating and reviewing your sales enablement success.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Databox for free today and make it uber-simple to grow your sales by effectively monitoring your sales enablement performance.
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Masooma is a freelance writer for SaaS and a lover to-do lists. When she's not writing, she usually has her head buried in a business book or fantasy novel.
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