Are you getting the most out of your sales enablement programs? Is all your hard work having an impact on the company’s bottom line?

Understanding the value of sales learning and enablement is not straight-forward. Many organizations struggle to prove the impact of their efforts.

C-level executives, sales leaders, enablement teams, sales operations, and product marketers are united by a common goal: to make sure their organization’s sales enablement activities are producing real and long-term business value.

1. How to Reach Your Business Goals

You need to prove impact on revenue consistently, especially if you have your sights set on larger budgets in the future. And you always need to get better—to iterate and improve programs so that you can reach your business goals more efficiently and effectively.

Seller competency is a critical performance lever. When you can draw correlations between specific learning and enablement activities and business outcomes, you can identify and replicate A-player behavior and prevent performance issues before they impact results.

• Show successes by correlating learning and content with CRM outcomes
• Prevent performance problems using holistic readiness scoring
• Ensure the content that produces revenue gets used and modeled
• Maximize coaching resources with targeted, AI-powered competency training
• Replicate winning behaviors using trend data from the point of sale
• Improve seller and team enablement adoption and engagement

Showing the value of sales enablement activities ensures you continue to get buy-in and support for current initiatives and more resources for future plans. But you’ve got to have the numbers to prove it. How will you make your sales enablement efforts count?

2. How to Define Business Outcomes to Deliver Value

One of the common reasons why many sales enablement programs fail to deliver value is that the team hasn’t defined desired outcomes. On any journey, it’s critical to understand where you’re trying to go before you start the car.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What do you expect as a result of content, training, and coaching?
• Is your goal to reduce ramp time with better onboarding, get people to their first deals faster, use onboarding as a lever to improve seller retention…or something else?
• Are you trying to improve your sellers’ quota attainment? Their win rate? Efficiency and productivity? Is this different for each team or each individual?
• Can you track sales content usage by rep? Would you like to tie sales content to pipeline and deals closed to measure the revenue contribution of specific assets?
• How will you measure results?
• Will your efforts produce tangible, measurable business results?

Key Question: What are you looking to change and how will you measure success?

3. How to Prove Sales Enablement Impact on Revenue

One way to measure the impact of sales enablement on revenue is to use discrete training methods on different cohorts, measuring results at agreed-upon intervals to determine comparative success. You can also look at the impact of sales content on your pipeline to better understand which pieces are driving deals forward.

This way, you can not only look at lagging indicators (deals won or lost) but also drill into the process to determine, for example, how quickly deals advance in sales cycles or how opportunity advancement maps to competency attainment (cold-calling, pitch delivery, objection handling, etc.)

This deeper analysis helps you identify how content influences the sale and the competency gaps for underperforming reps so you can focus your training on the areas of greatest need. Using separate approaches for different cohorts also neutralizes the impact of external influences, since the only “variable” is the training method or content used.

4. How to Tie Activities to Outcomes

Here are five examples of how you can show business impact for each element of sales enablement.

Onboarding & Training > Time to First Deal

Track the time from hire to first win. Decreasing time to productivity for new reps means that your cost of hiring goes down and your first-year revenue per rep goes up.

Sales Content Management > Content Contribution

Measure how frequently sales reps view and share collateral. Track the use of sales content by reps and tie content to pipeline and deals closed to measure the revenue contribution of assets.

Product Launches & Rollouts > Message Training

Calculate the value of ensuring sellers always have the most up-to-date messaging and materials by demonstrating the percent of sellers accessing training content around specific product areas and correlating that to their wins in those areas.

Coaching & Collaboration > Coaching Hours

Track the number of coaching hours by individual and/or team and correlate hours with the number of deals won to see the impact of coaching.

Virtual Selling > Deals Closed

Track content shared with buyers and training on how to sell in a virtual environment with deals closed to prove virtual selling success.

5. How to Use the Right Technology to Measure the Right Things

New technologies continually hit the market with tempting promises to solve your sales enablement challenges. But unless these platforms can demonstrate a clear connection between the technology and the business, you will not be able to understand the impact of your content, training, or coaching efforts.

The right sales enablement platform can provide the insights you need to reach your business goals more quickly and more effectively. Here’s how you can translate technology into business value.

Make sure that your sales platform can correlate activities with sales outcome data. A modern sales enablement technology stack includes data and analytics capabilities that provide the high-quality information and powerful insights you need.

Onboarding and training, product launches and rollouts, sales content management, and virtual selling are key functions of sales enablement. By comparing platform activity across all of these areas with sales outcomes data over time, you can start to clearly see the value of your new programs or content.

Learn More

Download The Complete Guide to Sales Enablement ROI to learn how to measure and maximize the impact of your sales learning and enablement.