Is your sales team operating at its best? How do you know? What if you could find out exactly how to kick productivity up to a new level?

You can with sales enablement intelligence—a data-driven approach to learning, coaching, and content to maximize revenue per rep.

Why is sales enablement intelligence important?

That’s a little like asking why it’s important to keep score during a basketball game. If no one knew the score as the game went on, every player could simply decide whether they were playing well or not—even whether their team is winning or losing.

Imagine how difficult it would be for a coach to develop a cohesive strategy without a scorecard.

Yet a surprising number of sales teams operate that way. In its recent State of Sales Analytics study, Gartner reported that “only 55% of sales teams standardize metrics across all business units, regions, and teams within the sales function itself.” That lack of standardization leads to decisions based on assumptions and intuition instead of data.

Sales analytics can remedy that. In-depth basketball statistics provide insights beyond the score: rebounds, turnovers, and shooting percentage. Analytics can help the sales enablement leader drive a strategy to catch up—and stay ahead of the game.

Determining the best way to leverage data for your organization is one of the most important requirements for sales enablement leaders. But the challenge of understanding sales analytics is real. Many organizations struggle to gather data, nevermind analyze it well enough to produce insights.

Sales Enablement Intelligence Answers 4 Key Questions

Do you face these common challenges?

• Sales enablement can’t prove the business impact of learning, coaching, and content strategy
• Teams lack visibility into seller competencies and the winning behaviors that are leading indicators of success
• Content creators and managers struggle to see which content is associated with revenue production

Sales enablement intelligence helps sales leaders and enablement managers answer four important questions:

What happened? This is the raw data, broken down into different categories: sales by region, by team member, by product, and by timeframe, as well as things like learning program completion and content usage.

How did it happen? Sales analytics can point out patterns in the raw data that provide useful insights, including answers to difficult chicken-or-the-egg questions. Once you’ve identified an underperforming team, for example, analytics lets you take a deeper dive and establish whether the underperformance is due to factors within the market itself or to a particular seller’s approach.

What is likely to happen next? Once analytics pinpoints particular patterns that repeat over time, it becomes much easier to create accurate forecasts and replicate “A-player” behavior.

How can we improve the outcome? This might be the biggest benefit of sales analytics. Figure out what’s been happening with your sales teams and why, and you can refine your sales enablement approach and redeploy your resources to produce greater accountability and better results.

Key Sales Enablement Intelligence Metrics

Sales enablement intelligence allows for apples-to-apples comparisons. Is a training initiative having the desired results? Which learning content or external collateral pieces are moving the needle? Sales enablement intelligence empowers you to swiftly translate insights into action.

Remember those basketball statistics we mentioned earlier? Well, by aggregating statistics from individual games, you can track larger trends. In other words, in addition to documenting which player scored the most points or got the most rebounds in a particular game, you can gauge which players are the most consistent scorers and rebounders over the course of a season.

Sales enablement intelligence provides the same kind of detailed, data-based analysis of how your sales team performs over a specific period of time. This analysis helps you take a deeper dive that puts your sales metrics in a broader context.

Here are sample metrics you can track to optimize your sales learning, coaching, and content to drive better outcomes.

1. Sales Learning Analytics

> Time to first deal: onboarding completion to close

> Competency scores: rep proficiency

> Rep attrition: turnover rate

> Competitive win rate: percentage of wins/losses

> Percentage of reps making quota: team stability and success

2. Sales Coaching Analytics

> Rep call performance: rep-to-prospect speech

> Sales call topics or keywords: use of messaging / value proposition

> Prospect engagement: pain point and objection patterns

3. Sales Content Analytics

> Content contribution: Content use to deals closed

> Content lift: Difference in average deal size

> Content deal velocity: Average time spent in a given stage

Harness Your Sales Analytics

Sales enablement intelligence harnesses your sales analytics to pinpoint specific objectives. Using data from sales learning, coaching and content gives your sales enablement team actionable insights to achieve your goals.

These analytics help you identify strengths and weaknesses and make a better business case for when, why, and how to adapt. You can use analytics to detect patterns, trends, and anomalies in your existing sales data—and then use that intelligence to sift out inefficiencies and refine programs.

More importantly, sales enablement intelligence will help you lead a winning team.

Learn More

Download The Complete Guide to Sales Enablement Intelligence to find out how to power up your sales team, be more effective (and efficient), and drive revenue growth.