You’ve just invested in creating a sales enablement strategy to help strengthen your brand’s conversions, and you’re wondering how to track whether these tools are actually boosting sales.
Knowing how to measure sales enablement success is important because it can allow you to see which tools are helping your sales and marketing teams close deals — and which resources require more attention or training to actually generate a good ROI.
You can track sales enablement with various KPIs, and you can analyze the buyer’s journey from the first interactions a potential client has with your brand to the final moments that lead to a conversion. With all this data at hand, you can see just how your sales enablement strategy is working for your business.
In this guide, you will learn:
- What sales enablement is
- How to measure sales enablement with attribution models
- Benefits to your business of integrating sales enablement
- Using KPIs to track sales enablement strengths and weaknesses
What Is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is the process of creating and using various resources to improve sales within your business. Both the sales and marketing teams need to work together for a sales enablement strategy to work.
How to Measure for Successful Sales Enablement
Measuring sales enablement success lets you know if the sales enablement tools are actually worth the money you spend on them. Some tools could actually help marketing and sales teams close more deals, but others may be a waste of time and money.
Both the sales and marketing teams own sales enablement, and you can track sales enablement success through both teams with attribution models.
What Are Attribution Models?
An attribution model is a framework that gives credit for the conversion of a lead into a sale to specific touchpoints during the customer’s journey from brand awareness to the final loyalty stage.
Attribution models can allow you to determine any weak points that are limiting your conversions. Some examples of attribution models include:
First-touch attribution model. This attribution model puts all of the credit for a lead conversion on the first point of contact. This can help you determine ROI for sales enablement, particularly for tools you are using at the top of the funnel to attract users’ attention.
Last-touch attribution model. On the other hand, the last touch model hones in on the last business interaction with a user before they convert. This can highlight what helps to seal the deal and make a sale or weaknesses that are keeping potential customers from converting.
Linear attribution model. Rather than focusing on a single interaction, the linear attribution divides the credit for a conversion to all the various interactions that could have influenced a user during the customer’s journey to make a purchase. This can give you a broader view of your sales enablement program and its ROI across all stages.
Examples of Sales Enablement Success
Sales enablement success is more than just a great ROI. By implementing resources that can boost sales, you can also improve workflows, improve business procedures and even increase customer satisfaction. When your sales enablement efforts are working, you may see improvements in:
Speed of moving customers through the funnel. Sales enablement efforts should do just that: enable sales. As such, implementing these tools throughout the different stages of the sales funnel should make each stage move along more quickly.
For instance, maybe the sales enablement program for your marketing team means you secure better placement in the search engine results page for your target keywords, meaning you boost brand awareness. Or your content marketing leads to blogs and videos that are so useful that users begin to trust your brand and feel influenced to make a purchase.
Perceived brand cohesiveness. If you want your brand to seem like it “has it all together” to clients, sales enablement is a must. Because sales enablement unites sales and marketing teams, it can create more aligned messaging and processes. This way, when a client interacts with marketing content and then a sales agent or vice versa, they don’t feel like they are receiving conflicting or confusing messaging.
Workloads. Tools are meant to make our lives easier, and that’s no exception with sales enablement. Incorporating things like email marketing templates or setting up efficient sales processes based on previous successful customer case studies can help manage employees’ workloads.
Efficiency and productivity. Speaking of workloads, when employees have a more manageable set of responsibilities, they can work more efficiently and productively. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel with every client interaction, they can use sales enablement to follow set procedures and make use of helpful resources to make their work seamless and more effective.
Customer satisfaction. Of course, sales enablement doesn’t just impact the business side of things. By investing in a sales enablement strategy, you can also give your customers a more pleasant experience from the awareness stage to the decision stage. When your business is operating smoothly and providing valuable content to the target audience, the customer can make their decisions faster and with more confidence.
Before you start tracking specific KPIs across your business, consider these various signs that your sales enablement strategy is on the path to success. From there, you can hone in on which specific KPIs to track. For instance, if customer satisfaction seems to be improving, you can use surveys and net promoter scores to determine if that’s truly the case.
Measuring Sales Enablement With KPIs
Sales enablement is essential for any business that wants to meet or even exceed its sales goals, retain quality talent and improve the customer journey and customer satisfaction. So, how do you measure sales enablement success? There are a number of different KPIs and tools you can use to measure how effective your sales enablement strategy is and where there are opportunities for improvement.
Surveys. You can use surveys to determine how different sales enablement tools are working based on employee and customer opinion. For example, during and after the onboarding or training process, you can send out surveys to new sales team members to see what parts of training clicked, what parts could use improvements and how confident they feel as they hit the sales floor or start making calls to leads. For customers, you could send out surveys after they receive a sales call or after they interact with a blog post, asking if the information was useful. You can also send out a survey after a client makes a purchase, asking questions like how satisfied they are with your sales team or what influenced them to buy.
Knowledge retention quizzes. Providing the most valuable information and tools to sales teams can help them do the best job. You can determine what information is the most memorable and what tends to be the most forgettable by providing employees with knowledge retention quizzes after onboarding or training sessions.
People can forget up to 90% of material within one month of learning it on average, and if employees forget training material, they may work less efficiently or provide less accurate information to inquiring users, so these quizzes can help you pinpoint how to improve your training. You may need to offer information in smaller sections, create more visually appealing presentations or create fun games with training content to make it more memorable.
Content performance. If you’ve spent time crafting blog posts, how-to guides, informational videos and other content for users, you can measure its performance and get an idea of what materials are driving leads and conversions. Some content KPIs to review include:
- Traffic
- Average session duration
- Click-through rates
- Returning visitors
- Bounce rate
- Social shares
You may notice that certain topics perform better for your audience, or a certain medium, like video or audio content, gains more views than written content. With this knowledge, you can adjust your strategy to focus more on what works.
Quotas. You can track quota attainment as a sales enablement KPI. Which team members in sales tend to reach or even exceed their quota, and what do they usually do to make that happen? Are certain teams, in general, having more success in meeting quotas, and why? Tracking quota attainment can help you determine what behaviors and tools are helping employees reach quotas, as well as determine which teams could use additional resources to meet their goals.
Companies that provide important information via training programs, one of many potential sales enablement tools, typically see a 10% improvement in meeting quotas, according to LLC Buddy.
Average contract value. The ACV refers to the average price your customers pay for your products or services, including discounted prices, over a certain period of time. The reason you may want to evaluate the ACV is to see how frequently conversions rely on a discount or deal or whether there are opportunities to increase discount offers to lead to more conversions.
Win rate. The win rate, or the amount of opportunities won compared to total opportunities, is important for tracking sales enablement. A lower win rate can be a sign that your sales team needs more resources or additional training to make more deals.
Companies that have a sales enablement program tend to reach a 49% win rate on forecasted deals. By comparison, those without sales enablement hit about a 42.5% win rate.
Churn rate. Churn rate measures how many customers are lost in a certain amount of time. This matters because your marketing and sales efforts aren’t just for potential clients — you also want to retain the customers you’ve already secured. When customers don’t return or continue their subscriptions, they may be dissatisfied in some way. Reviewing churn rate can help you determine why clients are leaving and how to improve customer retention.
Sales cycle length. The sales cycle length is the amount of time between a user’s first interaction with the company to the point of sale. When reviewing the sales cycle length, look into which stages tend to take up more of a user’s time. Are there tools you can use to make these stages run more efficiently and promote quicker movement through the funnel?
Net promoter score. A customer may be satisfied with their purchase. But were they so impressed with the product or service and the interactions with the company that they’d be willing to refer the brand to their friends and family? The net promoter score measures just that. It’s a short survey that asks how likely or unlikely a customer is to refer your company to someone they know, but this little survey can show you how satisfied someone is not just with your product or service but with the brand as a whole.
Conversion rate. One of the most important sales enablement KPIs is the lead-to-sale or lead-to-customer conversion rate, or how many leads make a purchase and convert into customers. With a sales enablement strategy in place, you should see a boost in conversions. But if the conversion rate is declining, you will want to evaluate each stage of the funnel to see where potential customers are falling off.
Measuring Sales Enablement Reveals Strengths and Weaknesses
When you want your business to increase sales and gain more revenue, sales enablement can help. With a suite of tools, resources and training to help your marketing and sales teams work more efficiently and effectively, your team can work seamlessly and productively.
For your business, that means a better experience for employees and customers alike, which can lead to more sales. By tracking KPIs for sales enablement success, you can see just how your sales enablement efforts are paying off and where you can focus your attention to improve your business.
