5 Key Sales Enablement Metrics to Track Sales Performance
Track these 5 crucial sales enablement metrics to see if your solution is impacting your business KPIs. Learn more on measuring sales success from Guru.
There really isn’t one specific tactic, function, or task that makes up sales enablement.
It encompasses a number of tools and resources that were created to optimize daily tasks, such as onboarding, content creation, knowledge management, sales cycles, etc…
I find the phrase, “what works for one doesn’t always work for all” very applicable to sales enablement solutions. Every business and team has it’s own unique needs, so naturally, sales leaders choose solutions they find compatible with their organization.
(Hence why every business has their own make-up of sales enablement tools.)
But the main objective of sales enablement always remains the same: to equip every seller with anything and everything necessary to close a deal.
How do you do that? Well, it generally entails providing reps with proper skills, methods, and behaviors to win over a customer, giving them an effective knowledge base and easy way to communicate, making sure they stay consistent and on-message, and so on…
Chances are by now, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time and money searching for the perfect tools to enable your sales team. Maybe you’ve hit the jackpot when it comes to enablement tools and things are going well and your revenue has skyrocketed. Or, maybe, your team is still having trouble closing deals. Either way, one thing is for certain, measuring your sales enablement ROI can be difficult.
Don’t get me wrong, the ability to have numerous sales enablement tools is awesome! But how do you determine which tools are actually effective? More importantly, how the heck do you find out which tools you’re wasting money on month after month?
The solution is to track a few critical metrics.
Once you know which metrics to track, weeding out the fruitful tools from the useless tools becomes very straightforward.
**Here are a few metrics to help you determine how effective your sales enablement tool really is:
Tying knowledge back to closed or lost deals
This is the holy grail. Not many companies have data around this, but expect many sales enablement solutions to begin to offer analytics that combined with CRM data will tell a story around what knowledge may have lead to a closed or lost deal. Imagine finding out that knowledge around the technical aspects of your Slack integration is consistently leading to closed deals. From this data, you can create a nicely designed one-pager on your Slack integration to give to your reps so they can send it to your prospects. For your SDR’s prospecting you can push them to target companies who use Slack. Finally, you can inform your product marketing team about this and suggest they create new demand generation campaigns surrounding your integration with Slack. With better insights into the specific knowledge and content that is resonating best with your prospects, you can better enable your sales team by creating relevant material for them, and your organization as a whole as well.
Faster sales cycles
How fast is your sales cycle? A best-in-class sales enablement solution will be able to tell a compelling story around this key metric. Two key features of Guru allow teams to see improvements in their sales cycle time: our trust verification engine and our browser extension. If reps trust the content they are using is accurate, they don’t have to wait to get an answer from your experts. In doing so, they answer prospect’s question while they are on the phone with them, not in a follow-up email after. In addition, if your enablement solution is not a destination and you have integrated it with tools like your CRM, you will also see a reduction in time spent searching for information. These small gains add up quickly across your team and any opportunity to reduce the “back and forth” time it takes to close a deal increases the velocity of your sales team.
Onboarding ramp time
How fast do you onboard your new sales reps? As we mentioned in a previous article regarding the benefits of using video in your onboarding process, on average, it takes 7 months and almost $30,000 to recruit and onboard a new sales rep, as well an additional 5-11 months until reps are fully ramped up. Quite frankly, that’s too long. In order to measure this effectively you need to make sure you compare cohorts of reps who were hired at the same time before you rolled out your enablement solution and after. If your new classes or reps aren’t improving on average as a group, it’s impossible to separate the impact your solution made vs. the difference in skill level of each individual rep. While there are a number of variables that would impact each class’ ability to ramp up, the cumulative average of this success metric should be trending upward as you implement your sales enablement solution.
What would it mean to your company’s revenue numbers if new sales reps started closing deals in half the time it used to take?
Replicate your best performers
Every sales team has their A-players who consistently beat quota and always seem to make it look easy. There are many reasons they perform well, but one of them is to understand what they are saying to your prospects to get them to buy. With your enablement solution you should be able to capture and track all content usage by rep so you no longer have to guess at this. Turn this insight into action by reinforcing this effective content with the rest of the sales team to help them up their game.
Staying consistent and on-message
Inconsistencies in messaging amongst your sales team can cripple a deal. Even worse, it can create unrealistic expectations for new customers which cause them to quickly churn, wasting precious time your team has invested in trying to make them succeed. By making your sales enablement solution the “single source of truth” for your team, you can keep your team consistent and on-message when talking to prospects. For example, you’ve analyzed the data and found a particular industry case study resonating extremely well with prospects. Since your solution is integrated directly into your CRM, the case study surfaces for your team when they open the opportunity record. Now, all members of your team are sending the assets proven to resonate well with prospects and your marketing team is happy knowing your team is using the assets they create. That’s a win-win.
Check out Guru's new guide to sales enablement to learn more:
What are the key metrics you track to measure your sales enablement success? Let us know on Twitter!
There really isn’t one specific tactic, function, or task that makes up sales enablement.
It encompasses a number of tools and resources that were created to optimize daily tasks, such as onboarding, content creation, knowledge management, sales cycles, etc…
I find the phrase, “what works for one doesn’t always work for all” very applicable to sales enablement solutions. Every business and team has it’s own unique needs, so naturally, sales leaders choose solutions they find compatible with their organization.
(Hence why every business has their own make-up of sales enablement tools.)
But the main objective of sales enablement always remains the same: to equip every seller with anything and everything necessary to close a deal.
How do you do that? Well, it generally entails providing reps with proper skills, methods, and behaviors to win over a customer, giving them an effective knowledge base and easy way to communicate, making sure they stay consistent and on-message, and so on…
Chances are by now, you’ve probably spent a fair amount of time and money searching for the perfect tools to enable your sales team. Maybe you’ve hit the jackpot when it comes to enablement tools and things are going well and your revenue has skyrocketed. Or, maybe, your team is still having trouble closing deals. Either way, one thing is for certain, measuring your sales enablement ROI can be difficult.
Don’t get me wrong, the ability to have numerous sales enablement tools is awesome! But how do you determine which tools are actually effective? More importantly, how the heck do you find out which tools you’re wasting money on month after month?
The solution is to track a few critical metrics.
Once you know which metrics to track, weeding out the fruitful tools from the useless tools becomes very straightforward.
**Here are a few metrics to help you determine how effective your sales enablement tool really is:
Tying knowledge back to closed or lost deals
This is the holy grail. Not many companies have data around this, but expect many sales enablement solutions to begin to offer analytics that combined with CRM data will tell a story around what knowledge may have lead to a closed or lost deal. Imagine finding out that knowledge around the technical aspects of your Slack integration is consistently leading to closed deals. From this data, you can create a nicely designed one-pager on your Slack integration to give to your reps so they can send it to your prospects. For your SDR’s prospecting you can push them to target companies who use Slack. Finally, you can inform your product marketing team about this and suggest they create new demand generation campaigns surrounding your integration with Slack. With better insights into the specific knowledge and content that is resonating best with your prospects, you can better enable your sales team by creating relevant material for them, and your organization as a whole as well.
Faster sales cycles
How fast is your sales cycle? A best-in-class sales enablement solution will be able to tell a compelling story around this key metric. Two key features of Guru allow teams to see improvements in their sales cycle time: our trust verification engine and our browser extension. If reps trust the content they are using is accurate, they don’t have to wait to get an answer from your experts. In doing so, they answer prospect’s question while they are on the phone with them, not in a follow-up email after. In addition, if your enablement solution is not a destination and you have integrated it with tools like your CRM, you will also see a reduction in time spent searching for information. These small gains add up quickly across your team and any opportunity to reduce the “back and forth” time it takes to close a deal increases the velocity of your sales team.
Onboarding ramp time
How fast do you onboard your new sales reps? As we mentioned in a previous article regarding the benefits of using video in your onboarding process, on average, it takes 7 months and almost $30,000 to recruit and onboard a new sales rep, as well an additional 5-11 months until reps are fully ramped up. Quite frankly, that’s too long. In order to measure this effectively you need to make sure you compare cohorts of reps who were hired at the same time before you rolled out your enablement solution and after. If your new classes or reps aren’t improving on average as a group, it’s impossible to separate the impact your solution made vs. the difference in skill level of each individual rep. While there are a number of variables that would impact each class’ ability to ramp up, the cumulative average of this success metric should be trending upward as you implement your sales enablement solution.
What would it mean to your company’s revenue numbers if new sales reps started closing deals in half the time it used to take?
Replicate your best performers
Every sales team has their A-players who consistently beat quota and always seem to make it look easy. There are many reasons they perform well, but one of them is to understand what they are saying to your prospects to get them to buy. With your enablement solution you should be able to capture and track all content usage by rep so you no longer have to guess at this. Turn this insight into action by reinforcing this effective content with the rest of the sales team to help them up their game.
Staying consistent and on-message
Inconsistencies in messaging amongst your sales team can cripple a deal. Even worse, it can create unrealistic expectations for new customers which cause them to quickly churn, wasting precious time your team has invested in trying to make them succeed. By making your sales enablement solution the “single source of truth” for your team, you can keep your team consistent and on-message when talking to prospects. For example, you’ve analyzed the data and found a particular industry case study resonating extremely well with prospects. Since your solution is integrated directly into your CRM, the case study surfaces for your team when they open the opportunity record. Now, all members of your team are sending the assets proven to resonate well with prospects and your marketing team is happy knowing your team is using the assets they create. That’s a win-win.
Check out Guru's new guide to sales enablement to learn more:
What are the key metrics you track to measure your sales enablement success? Let us know on Twitter!
Experience the power of the Guru platform firsthand – take our interactive product tour
![[閉じる] アイコン](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/5d8d029013ffd80bbb91320d/60634db8e001683398b23894_X-close.svg){kind=small}