Optimize Your Sales Team With These 3 Sales Enablement Metrics
Sales enablement metrics have become particularly important, allowing teams to harness sales analytics to pinpoint specific objectives. Using data derived from sales activities gives sales enablement teams actionable insights to achieve goals. These analytics help teams identify strengths and weaknesses and make a better business case for when, why, and how to adapt.
“Go with your gut.”
We’ve all heard this philosophy. Trusting your gut is supposed to lead you in the right direction. The problem is our gut is emotional and irrational. And with so much data available, there’s no need for organizations to make decisions based on anything but facts.
This applies to sales enablement as much as any other department. With the right sales enablement platform, sales leaders and enablement managers can take a data-driven approach to sales learning, coaching, and content to drive better outcomes.
Sales Enablement Metrics Answer Important Sales Questions
Sales enablement teams can use analytics to detect patterns, trends, and anomalies in their existing sales data—and then use that intelligence to sift out inefficiencies and refine programs.
Specifically, sales enablement intelligence helps you answer these four questions:
What happened? This is the raw data, broken down into categories, such as sales by region, by team member, by product, and by timeframe. It also includes things like learning program completion and content usage.
How did it happen? Sales analytics can uncover patterns in the raw data that provide useful insights. For example, did a seller underperform because of market factors or because of their approach?
What is likely to happen next? Once analytics pinpoints patterns, it becomes much easier to forecast and replicate “A-player” behavior.
How can we improve the outcome? If you can determine what’s happening with your team, you can refine your sales enablement approach and redeploy resources to produce greater accountability and better results.
3 Key Sales Enablement Metrics
Before you can answer those questions, you need to determine the correct sales enablement metrics to measure, analyze, and track. These three important sales enablement intelligence metrics will help sales leaders and enablement managers optimize sales learning, coaching, and content to drive better outcomes.
1. Sales Learning Analytics
Time to first deal: On average, how long does it take for a sales rep to close their first deal after they complete their onboarding and training? Once you start tracking this metric, you can work on shortening that interval, which will reduce your cost of hiring and increase your first-year revenue per rep.
Competency scores: How proficient are reps on the skills you’ve identified as critical? How quickly do they complete training courses? How many of them are passing quizzes or certifications? You want to show how well your onboarding and training efforts produce competent and confident sellers.
Rep attrition: Are reps leaving the company after their onboarding and training? If so, what’s the frequency? Research shows that reps who are onboarded well tend to stay longer and report higher levels of satisfaction.
Competitive win rate: What’s the percentage of deals a rep or team closed compared to the number of deals that a competitor won? Certification processes that incorporate competitive intelligence from the field can reveal wins that are directly attributable to training.
Percentage of reps making quota: How many sales reps are hitting their quota? Is the percentage rising or dropping? An increase in quota attainment reflects the success of sales enablement, signifies greater team stability and job satisfaction, and correlates with lower turnover.
2. Sales Coaching Analytics
Sales rep call performance: How quickly did the rep speak? How many questions did they ask? What was the ratio of rep-to-prospect speech? How much of a call was spent discussing products? These metrics will help you understand call performance across the team and automate next-best-action coaching, learning, and follow-up content suggestions.
Sales call topics or keywords: What topics did the sales rep and prospect discuss? What actions did they take? Did the rep include overused stock phrases? Sales enablement metrics like these help you gauge whether reps are adhering to sales best practices and messaging, as well as identify skills in need of coaching.
Prospect engagement: Did the prospect mention a competitor? Did they talk about pricing? Did they recap pain points or key objectives? Highlight prospect engagement patterns to see rep and team strengths and weaknesses. You want to compare the actions of your most successful reps to those of your least successful reps and, if there’s a correlation, share best practices.
3. Sales Content Analytics
Content contribution: How effective is your sales content? Get the answer by tracking who uses each piece of content, tagging each opportunity, and tying content to pipeline and deals closed. That lets you measure the revenue contribution of specific assets.
Content lift: Did the average deal size change when sales reps shared content, compared with reps who didn’t share content? By calculating the difference in average deal size in a quarter between closed opportunities that had shared content and those that didn’t, you can determine the revenue lift of a content piece.
Content deal velocity: Did a rep’s use of content speed up the buying process? To measure the impact of content on deal velocity, first look at the average time spent in a given stage of the buying process across all closed deals. Then measure if there is a difference when a rep shared an asset during that stage to determine if the average time the prospect spent in that stage decreased.
Taking a Data-Driven Approach with Sales Enablement Metrics
Today’s markets are too competitive for companies to allow their sales teams to “go with their gut” or to “wing it.” One bad sales call can mean a lost deal. Sales leaders and enablement managers can reduce the risk of that happening by taking a data-driven approach to onboarding, coaching, and content.
Using sales enablement intelligence, you can measure the effectiveness of your programs and performance of your reps—and lead your team to success.
Learn More
Download The Complete Guide to Sales Enablement Intelligence to learn how sales enablement metrics can help you power up your sales team and drive revenue growth.