The 9 Most Important Sales Enablement Metrics
Selling operations teams increase staff performance and opportunity conversions by aiding salespeople with content, knowledge and process automation.
Their programs are measured by their ability to increase top line revenues, grow customer acquisitions, increase staff productivity and reduce sales cycle duration.
They rely on sales enablement metrics to measure progress and surface variances that need swift course corrections.
However, there is a near endless number of key performance indicators (KPI). And just about any sales enablement agency can share that most don't gain user adoption. In fact, they are utterly ignored. They are dismissed for two reasons. They are not the most important values, and they do not induce action.
Research findings published in the Sales Excellence Report revealed that KPI-rich dashboards achieve 30% utilization following a go-live event. But within three weeks that utilization falls to 9%. Over time it falls further. The falloff is due to KPIs that do not provide real help to sellers.
Business intelligence is most successful when it measures the fewest metrics that matter the most. Too much data clouds what's most important.
The research also shared that the most important KPIs were financial measures that linked to the company's most important objectives.
The chart below shows the Sales Enablement metrics that most matter.
Here's how these values are calculated and improved upon.
Content Effectiveness
McKinsey reports that reps waste 10 to 20 hours per week searching for content. They then waste more time recreating content because they can't find what they are looking for. To make matters worse, SiriusDecisions reports that Marketing goes to great effort and expense to create content, but 60% to 70% goes unused because it's not found.
The solution is to make content easily accessible, apply push-based technology to suggest content recommendations, and track content effectiveness by measuring utilization.
Coaching Effectiveness
Coaching delivers significant improvements to sales conversions, salesforce quota attainment and revenue growth. But to be effective a coaching program must advance from informal and impromptu engagement to intentional and purposeful execution.
It must also be measured in a way that demonstrates a payback. This can be done by dividing the sale opportunities won by those opportunities that incurred one or more coaching sessions.
Training Effectiveness
Sales training is often approached with a car wash mentality. You're in, you're out, and you're ready to sell. But this isn't how real learning happens.
The training programs we have found to be most successful are designed for the employee experience. They change the objective from delivering training to measuring learning. To do this, we often apply the four-stage progressive training model of See it, Know it, Try it and Do it.
Then we measure training effectiveness by dividing the sale opportunities won by those opportunities that incurred concepts learned in training.
Technology Effectiveness
CRM technology can deliver a 360-degree customer view, dynamic sale plan for each opportunity, guided selling suggestions and next best action recommendations among other benefits.
But here's the thing. Sellers have to enter contacts and activities into the CRM application. And that's the obstacle because most sellers don't want to incur data entry time.
Fortunately, there are CRM and AI tools that can automate these data entry processes. So, to measure technology effectiveness we adopt these methods and then calculate the time savings.
Sales Productivity
There are three ways to increase seller productivity. You can redesign processes to be more streamlined and effective, apply technology to automate manual activities, and develop analytics to work smarter.
Sales Win Rate
The win rate calculates the percentage of opportunities that are won.
Some of the methods to improve the win rate include the following.
- Adopt a sale methodology. Research shows that sellers with optimized sale methodologies achieve 11% higher win rates than those with informal methods.
- Apply opportunity win plans. Most reps don't create a dynamic sale plan for each opportunity. If they did, they would improve their close rate by 5%.
- Construct a predictable selling process. This enables you to pinpoint the biggest obstacles by measuring the duration and conversions between each step of the process.
- Implement guided selling. Configure your CRM system to suggest next best plays, actions or other recommendations that improve speed and results.
- Use a playbook. A sales playbook will improve staff productivity and performance results.
Funnel Conversion
The lead-to-revenue (L2R) funnel conversion shows the percentage of leads that convert into customers.
Some companies start the calculation with unqualified leads. That's helpful in analyzing an end-to-end L2R funnel. Other companies measure from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to closed deals. That puts more emphasis on selling results and largely ignores marketing performance.
We usually advise our clients to measure the entire revenue funnel. You can then make performance improvements by analyzing the conversion and duration at any stage of the funnel.
Sales Velocity
This measure reveals the amount of revenue generated during a sales cycle.
Or put a different way, it's the average time duration and revenue generated for a prospect to go from lead to customer.
It's a speed of revenue generation measure that is calculated as shown below.
This figure is stated in terms of revenue, not time.
A high velocity value signifies a tight prospect fit, an effective sale methodology and a streamlined selling process.
Some methods to improve this measure include the following.
- Increase your MQL to SQL conversion rate. This is best achieved by better targeting your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and improving your lead score calculation.
- Streamline your selling process. Every company has a defined selling process. Most are not data driven and therefore not sufficiently predictable. If you bring measurability to the process you will identify where leads stall and surface the bottlenecks so they can be resolved.
Revenue Growth
This is generally the final and ultimate measure of selling success.
It measures the percentage increase or decrease in revenues between two stated periods. Those periods are most often the prior period and the same period for the prior year.
The four factors that most improve this critical success factor are opportunity volume, average deal value, sales cycle velocity and opportunity conversion rate.
The Point of Sales Enablement Metrics is This
You can't manage what you can't measure.
That's why defining the right performance measures is essential. These KPIs track progress and highlight variances for swift corrective action.
When implementing performance analytics with clients, our sales enablement consultants often get asked how many sales enablement metrics should be tracked. The answer is always the same; as many as will get acted upon.
An interesting thing happens when you track the most important KPIs. Sellers spend less time accessing reports and more time improving or making changes to their revenue processes. That's the sign of a successful analytics program. If it is causing operational changes to be made, it's working.