You want your sales enablement program to be as successful as possible to improve your company’s profitability and growth. But how do you measure your sales enablement efforts? Which KPIs are most important for your salespeople to monitor? How do you determine how well your sales enablement strategy works for your business? 

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the best ways to measure sales enablement success in your sales process and some great tools to keep track of these key metrics to improve your sales results.

What Is Sales Enablement?

In short, the role of a sales enablement team is to provide your sales force with the resources it needs to close more deals and increase customer conversion rates successfully. Sales enablement activities include strategic content usage, playbook management, buyer journey optimization, and technology optimization (such as CRM management). 

The Best Ways To Measure Sales Enablement Success

As discussed above, a sales enablement team has many responsibilities — but how do you know if their efforts are working? Below, we’ll cover some key sales performance indicators that can help measure sales enablement success. 

1. Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate

Though the definitions vary by company, a lead is a sales prospect, and an opportunity is a possible deal — with a dollar amount attached — that has a strong chance of closing. 

Lead-to-opportunity conversion is considered an excellent way to measure sales enablement success because it directly reflects the effectiveness of your business development representatives. If your BDRs are effectively trained, and the lead-to-opportunity conversion rate improves, it shows that your sales reps are getting the right message to the correct people at the proper time.

Tools to Consider
  • We recommend leveraging the deal stages and/or the lead-to-opportunities conversion rate that’s tracked within your CRM. 
  • Unbounce is a development tool that makes it easier to improve customer conversion rates using their grading tool.

2. Content Performance

Content can be a great way to engage prospects, so it’s so important to keep track of its effectiveness. Content includes case studies, feature comparisons, social media posts, articles, and many other things in between. 

Measuring content performance can help you see where and how a piece of content is being leveraged. Sales reps may be unaware of a particular piece of content that could be helping them to convert more leads to customers. By tracking content performance, you can gain more insight into what’s working for your sales reps and what information is valuable to your potential customers.

Tools to Consider
  • HubSpot provides content management tools that make it easier to determine how a specific piece of content is performing.
  • Content management tools like Showpad, Highspot, and Seismic effectively allow teams to understand which content results in conversions. It’s one reason why they’re increasingly called enablement platforms.

3. Win Rate

Win rate refers to the percentage of deals your company has won over a given period of time:

Win rate = # of won opportunities / total # of opportunities 

Measuring the win rate as one of your sales enablement metrics helps give you an idea of where your sales team is succeeding and where more training is needed. When salespeople have solid training and the resources to close deals, the win rate increases.

Tools to Consider
  • Zendesk Sell is a CRM software solution that provides tools for monitoring and growing win percentage.
  • TruSales for SFDC provides a range of sales enablement metrics, including win rate, lost deals, and similar KPIs.

4. Competitive Win Rate

While there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy competition, there’s no doubt that competitors can get in the way of a win. Similar to win rate, competitive win rate is also a reflection of your successes as a percentage of your total opportunities. However, this metric looks explicitly at how many deals you won directly against at least one competitor.

Many businesses realize that their markets are more saturated than ever — this means that your sales reps are fielding far more competitors than reps of years past. Measuring the competitive win rate allows you to see how your sales team stacks up to the competition. A rising win rate means that your reps are getting better at showcasing your business’s advantages. In contrast, a falling win rate could indicate that your value proposition and messaging need tweaking.

Tools to Consider
  • Yesware is a plugin for common email applications, making it easier for your sales reps to stay on top of communications with prospects.
  • SalesLoft provides a combination of communication tools and templates and sales training to improve sales rep performance.

5. Average Selling Price

Average selling price, also known as average contract value (ACV), represents how much your customers typically pay for your products or services. Note: This price accounts for any discounts. This metric helps identify whether or not your sales team is accurately portraying your brand’s value or if they need to discount services in order to make the sale.

An increased average selling price shows that your sales reps are doing a better job of representing your company’s value. The greater the average selling price, the more profitable your business stands to be. A decreased average selling price could show a pattern of heavy discounts that hurt profits and customer perception.

Tools to Consider
  • HubSpot‘s Sales Pricing Calculator gives you a range of sales calculation tools with an easy, free download.
  • Datapine allows you to easily see several sales KPIs in a single location, making it easier to centralize.

6. Average Discount

As its name suggests, average discount is a sales metric that reflects the average discounts that your customers regularly receive. While some companies claim to see their best profits from discounts, this should be done mindfully — if not, too many discounts will negatively affect your revenue. 

If your sales team is regularly resorting to offering deep discounts to secure business, you may want to consider better sales training when onboarding new hires. This information allows you to determine if the team is responding to the needs of the customer or if they are offering discounts as a standard practice to make their close rates look good.

Tools to Consider
  • Shopify has an average profit margin calculator as part of its dashboard, which gives you a similar metric to determine the discounting or profitability of your sales.
  • WooCommerce also has a calculator for determining the average profit margin, which can be used to calculate the average discount overall.

7. Sales Cycle Length

Sales cycle length, also known as deal velocity, tracks the length of time from first contact with a new lead to the final sale. The sales cycle includes a number of moving parts, such as demos, meetings with stakeholders, free trials, and similar activities.

Though deals can be slowed down by factors outside of your control, many delays result from not creating a sense of urgency in your prospects. A shorter sales cycle implies that your sales team is better conveying that your product or service can fill a customer’s urgent need with immediacy.

Tools to Consider
  • MondayCRM provides sales cycle tracking, including tools for your sales reps to accelerate the sales cycle and improve results.
  • Keap is a CRM focused on small businesses, providing analytics on several sales metrics, including sales cycle length, to help boost sales efforts.

8. Quota Attainment

Quota attainment provides a standardized measurement for your sales team’s performance to their set goals. As your company grows, more sales teams are split off and are often held to different selling standards. But ensuring that your quota and compensation tactics are aligned to your company’s goals will help standardize and incentivize your team members appropriately.

By holding your sales team to a quota, you’ll be able to see who is regularly hitting their numbers and who is not, which can give you an idea of how the entire sales team is performing overall. You may see a rise in overall sales from a few sales reps, but quota attainment may stay the same. If you see a rise in quota attainment, the whole sales team is working more effectively to grow the company.

Tools to Consider
  • SalesHandy is a sales engagement program that provides management tools, including tracking individual sales rep quotas via email marketing.
  • Close is a sales engagement platform that includes various tools for sales reps, including insights into customer interactions.

9. Knowledge Retention

Did you know that one year after training, most employees can only recall about 15% of what they learned? Periodic, ongoing training is the best way to reinforce knowledge retention. Providing onboarding training is great, but repetition and context are vital for committing information to memory.

Your sales staff should be knowledgeable about not only your services but also about the industry as a whole — including your competition. This allows them to address any concerns a lead may have about whether your company is the right choice. 

Using learning management systems (LMS) to track knowledge retention can help you gain more insight into what training techniques are working and where there’s room for improvement.

Tools to Consider
  • Thought Industries allows you to create interactive flip cards that you can share with your team as a training tool. Their platform also includes several other knowledge retention tools, including gamification options that make refresher training fun and engaging. 
  • ConveYour is a platform that emails questions to learners for a broad number of days after training or workshop ends to keep the training material fresh in their minds.

10. Certification Scores

Assessments created and administered during the sales training program help you measure the program’s effectiveness. Having your entire sales staff on the same page makes it easier to unify your sales enablement strategies and ensure more uniform results across the entire organization — rather than depending solely on the success of a few star sales reps. 

Tools to Consider
  • Advantage Performance Group delivers a three-pronged approach to a total sales training program including negotiation, empathy, and sales acceleration.
  • GoSkills’ online training program provides your sales team with a range of sales techniques and knowledge to grow your business effectively.

11. Time to First Deal

Time to first deal measures how long it takes for a new sales rep to close their very first deal. This sales enablement metric is a reflection of how well your onboarding or ramp-up program is at training reps on your sales methodology, building knowledge and confidence, and setting them up for success — and how quickly that leads to closed deals. 

Decreasing ramp time is a common goal for revenue organizations, and sales enablement teams can play an influential role. They inform the onboarding process, provide ongoing education materials, and focus on initiatives that increase pipeline. That said, it’s important to acknowledge that onboarding and time to first deal can be influenced by a wide range of factors. 

Tools to Consider
  • We recommend using your preferred sales CRM or pipeline management tool to measure time to first deal, along with the other individual and team performance metrics we’ve covered in this article. 

12. Churn Rate

Churn rate measures the number of customers lost over a given time period, typically measured by month or by year. Churn rate can increase if your company suddenly faces a public relations crisis, if your product or service isn’t delivering as well as a new competitor, or if your sales team is doing a poor job of retaining clients. If it decreases, it shows that you’re keeping more clients for longer periods of time, which decreases the cost of sales acquisition and improves profitability.

Tools to Consider
  • Churn Buster helps you recover some of the 10-15% of automated payments that fail to preserve customer relationships and includes high-value opportunity alerts.
  • FirstOfficer gives you a range of tools for managing customer churn, including customer segmentation, cohort grouping and analysis, revenue analytics, and retention curves.

Scale Your Sales Enablement Success With Sales Assembly

These sales enablement metrics provide you with solid insights into how effective your sales and marketing efforts are, and whether they’re improving or degrading over time. But what if you need to scale your efforts? Sales Assembly’s Scale-as-a-Service model makes it easier than ever to strengthen your team and improve your profitability. Contact our experts today to find out how your business can grow with Sales Assembly.

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For more support in Scaling Better, Scaling Faster, and Scaling Smarter, Sales Assembly can help. Contact us for more information.
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