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Unfortunately, many sales enablement programs have difficulty succeeding because they fail to track and measure the effectiveness of the program. Why? If you cannot prove the value and the return on investment of your enablement program, it will likely be very difficult to gain the budget support from your C-suite that will allow you to garner the headcount and tools you need. When you measure sales enablement metrics, you can paint a better picture of your work and success.
As sales enablement professionals, your work matters—and research proves it when you take the time to measure your impact. According to a report by Sales Enablement Pros, sales enablement is twice as likely to exceed executive expectations when they analyze the business impact of their effects.
You are doing so much to help your sales organization—the activities of your program are plentiful. But to prove the value of your program, you must align the outcomes of your program to the objectives and key results (OKRs) of your organization so you can show a meaningful impact on your business.
So, what are the metrics that matter when it comes to the success of your sales enablement program?
What is sales enablement?
Sales enablement is the strategic process of equipping sales representatives with tools, content, and knowledge that make them more effective in closing deals, building relationships, and boosting the overall sales of the business.
However, just as sales enablement professionals aim to make sales teams more efficient, they must also make finding and utilizing these tools, pieces of content, and information as efficient as possible. You could have all the right content in the world—but if your sales reps can’t find it or use it then it never creates the value you hope it will.
With Spekit AI, you get AI-powered content recommendations sent right to you—wherever you are in your workflow. Spekit automatically surfaces the case studies, one-sheets, answers, and more that sales reps need to close more deals, with that content reaching them exactly when and where they need it most.
Sales enablement metrics vs KPIs
KPIs stand for “key performance indicator” and can easily be mistaken for metrics, but sales enablement metrics are somewhat different from sales enablement KPIs. In a way, all KPIs are metrics. However, not all sales metrics are KPIs.
Your KPIs are tied directly to your business’s goals and objectives. They tell you if you’re on track to hit that target. Metrics, on the other hand, don’t need to be tied to a specific goal. They simply measure the performance of your sales enablement strategy.
KPIs offer a more high-level perspective and give you insight into your overall business goals, while metrics are more low-level. A KPI for sales enablement might be sales productivity, while a sales enablement metric would be more focused on what goes into sales productivity, like quota attainment or length of sales cycle.
Lagging indicators vs leading indicators
A lagging indicator is a factor that changes after an economic, financial, or business variable changes, indicating a long-term trend. A lagging indicator would not predict an economic shift, but it would tell a business that one has already occurred. Lagging indicators function as a KPI as they measure a business’s performance after something has already happened.
A leading indicator is a lagging indicator’s complement. Instead of telling you when an organizational or economic trend or shift has or is currently happening, a leading indicator is a set of data that helps you forecast future trends and shifts.
In terms of sales enablement, a lagging indicator might be quota attainment, as it’s related to something that has already happened and doesn’t necessarily tell you whether the sales teams will hit their quotas in the following quarters.
On the other hand, a leading indicator might be the number of opportunities created, as it gives sales enablement teams insight into future sales.
Why measuring sales enablement metrics matters
According to HubSpot’s State of Sales Report, sales productivity has become the most important sales KPI for sales professionals today. But to understand the overall productivity of sales, you need to measure what goes into it, which is where these sales enablement metrics come in.
Let’s get into why measuring your sales enablement metrics makes you a stronger sales enablement team and a more efficient and productive business overall:
1. Making the transition from being reactive to strategic
As Nick Lawrence (follow Nick here), curriculum design manager at Snowflake, shared recently in a LinkedIn post, there are two types of sales enablement professionals out there: those that demonstrate their value and those that prove their value. What is the difference, you might wonder?
Those who demonstrate are highly responsive, actively crossing things off the to-do list. Demonstrators are important because they get things done and ensure the team feels supported. However, at the end of the year, it will likely be difficult for a demonstrator to prove the value of their activities, which means that it will be difficult to gain buy-in for additional resources for the program.
Those who prove are less concerned about the volume of activity; instead, they are focused on one thing: sales productivity. And they track the outcomes that support sales productivity through metrics.
Nick clearly points out that a successful enablement team requires both of these people. However, if you are in the “demonstrate” category and seeking to begin proving how your program is impacting sales productivity, you will need to shift from reactive to proactive.
In a recent podcast with the Sales Enablement Society, Kristen McCrae McMullan (follow Kristen here), global sales enablement and readiness leader at Amazon Web Services, spoke to exactly this. She talked about all the success she was achieving with her sales enablement program until one day, a company executive asked her, “But how do you know you’re making an impact?”
This question changed the way Kristen worked. She made a shift and sought to create an enablement charter that aligned her program’s focus areas to business outcomes — with sales enablement metrics that showed how her program was moving the needle for those outcomes.
2. Creating a data-driven sales enablement strategy
Tracking sales enablement metrics will make it easier for you to show whether your program is successful in making your reps more efficient — as well as the impact that has on your business’s bottom line. But more importantly, reporting on these metrics will give you a higher likelihood of success in getting buy-in for your program and acquiring the resources you need to make future improvements for growth.
After all, engagement + enablement = revenue. By showing that your enablement program is driving efficiency through data visualizations, you will prove the financial value your program is delivering for your business.
Qualitative vs. quantitative sales enablement metrics
As you begin to identify which metrics you will measure to show your alignment with business outcomes like sales productivity, there is an abundance of metrics to consider. You’ll want to consider which qualitative and quantitative elements align with your enablement charter.
Qualitative data is information that you can observe but not compute. Quantitative data focuses on numbers that can easily be calculated and computed — something you can represent in a spreadsheet, dashboard, or visualization.
Of course, you’ll want to select quantitative metrics that you can report on slides to your leadership team. But you may also want to consider some qualitative metrics that will help you keep a finger on the pulse of the effectiveness you are having with your sellers.
Qualitative sales enablement metrics to measure
Qualitative sales enablement metrics can provide you with insight into things in your business that are less easily measured, like employee satisfaction and sales training effectiveness. Here are some of the qualitative sales enablement metrics you may want to begin tracking:
Check-in surveys
By developing check-ins with your new sellers at specific points in their onboarding process, such as 30, 60, and 90 days in, you’ll gain valuable anecdotal evidence that can improve your onboarding programs. It’s crucial to optimize your onboarding process to make your salespeople feel more prepared, informed, and confident. From helping them gain certifications to unpacking in-depth product knowledge, you want to be sure your sales reps are on track to ramp up right.
Proficiency in specific sales processes
Proficiency will likely vary depending on what your organization’s focus is at the moment. If you’ve recently had process changes, you will likely want to check to see how those processes are being adopted. Or perhaps you are seeking to measure improvements in specific areas that may have fallen short in the past, such as sales forecasting.
Demo proficiency
When you work in the tech/software industry, you likely require your sellers to be demo-certified. Your sales representatives are likely demoing your product/service and doing presentations frequently, which means that you want to track their performance in customer interactions.
As demo proficiency requires a certain level of one-on-one feedback, this metric is more qualitative than quantitative. You’re not measuring how many demos they perform but how they perform the demos themselves.
Level of confidence
Research shows that there’s a direct correlation between confidence and productivity at work. You should check in with your sellers on their level of confidence. Both new and more tenured sales professionals need these check-ins, as they are both frequently learning new tools, processes, and more. Their sales confidence score can tell you where they may need more training, as well as overall support.
Tool adoption
Often, we invest in many tools to help our revenue teams to be successful. Salesforce found that sales teams use an average of 10 tools to close deals, like content management systems, sales coaching software, and customer relationship management platforms.
According to Spekit, only 29% of sellers would describe the rollout of a new tool or process as “excellent.” As enablement professionals, we need to show that we are helping the organization get ROI from these investments by increasing adoption.
Knowledge retention
B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information they learn within a week of training. Many sales enablement tools will give you the ability to quiz your sales reps on what they learned and what knowledge they continue to retain as they progress in their skill development.
This can also be a quantitative metric if you’re looking at submission rates, average scores, and pass rates. If you find a gap in knowledge, you can then create additional resources to ensure your team has the information they need to be successful.
Spekit sends sales reps Knowledge Checks, short quizzes designed to test and reaffirm their knowledge, delivered right in their workflow.
Quantitative sales enablement metrics to measure success
To be successful in your shift from reactivity to strategy, you must take a data-driven approach. We’ve compiled a list of the must-measure sales enablement KPIs that will help you prove your program’s value, your contributions to sales rep performance, and your organization’s high-level objectives.
1. Meetings set
Unless you are solely relying on an inbound pipeline, part of your revenue organization’s goal is not just to close business but to generate new business. Tracking sales activity metrics such as your reps’ number of meetings set is a good surface-level indicator of their effectiveness when it comes to outreach.
You can track this metric in the activity logs of Salesforce or other CRM. However, to do so accurately, you must first be sure that your reps are logging their meetings consistently.
2. Opportunities created
Along with tracking meetings, tracking the opportunities your outbound reps are creating is another great way to keep an eye on the effectiveness of your pipeline-generation function. Tracking the opportunities created will help you to understand your team’s ability to accurately generate and qualify new business.
By tracking the opportunities created (easy to do in Salesforce or other CRMs), you will be able to also gain a view of your lead-to-opportunity rate. Measuring your lead-to-opportunity conversion rate will show your team if your enablement program is effective in helping your reps to deliver the right content to the right audience in order to develop pipeline.
3. Time to first deal won
You will always be onboarding new sellers — it’s a huge part of the job. But you may be surprised to learn that nearly half (47%!) of sales reps have reported that they have left a job because of a bad onboarding experience. And only 8% of sales leaders say that most reps stick around for longer than one year.
Even as hiring slows during times of economic downturn, we will still be hiring and onboarding new sellers as inevitable churn happens. But if the average rep quits after just 18 months, your program must be centered around completing the milestones needed to perform the role to help your sellers to ramp quickly.
Tracking the time to your sellers’ first deals won is a great way to illustrate how effective your onboarding program is.
4. Sales pipeline
Sales-generated pipeline is arguably one of the most important metrics when it comes to the success of your enablement program. This is the most visible metric to prove your enablement program’s ability to help your sellers be effective prospectors.
If your team is able to quickly ramp up new hires and give them the resources they need to successfully prospect (see previous metrics: Meetings Scheduled and Opportunities Created), this should result in a team that is consistently generating pipeline. This is also likely one of the metrics your leadership will watch closely.
5. Quota attainment
So your reps are getting meetings and creating opportunities. But one of the biggest factors you can use to measure their success is whether or not they are achieving their quotas. Only 28% of sales reps report that they always hit their sales target or quota. As an enablement team, it’s your job to drive up this percentage so your company can successfully and predictably hit its revenue targets.
Tracking quota attainment allows you to dig into individual sales performance — which reps are consistently hitting their goals and which may need additional enablement support. Quota attainment is also helpful to look at from a high level. Which regions are consistently achieving quota? Is the overall team achieving quota?
When you consider metrics for your sales enablement program, quota attainment is one that will likely align directly with your company’s overall revenue goals, so we recommend that all sales enablement teams keep a close eye on this one.
6. Lead-to-customer conversion rate
Measuring your lead-to-customer conversion rate will allow you to gain an understanding of the efficiency of your entire sales cycle, from an incoming or prospective lead all the way to close. It’s a good idea to keep a baseline of your lead-to-customer conversion rate so that you can make changes if you see that it is beginning to dip.
7. Average win rate
Your win rate is the total number of won opportunities divided by the total number of opportunities. This should be easy for you to see within Salesforce (or other CRM).
Keeping a close eye on your win rate will help you to understand your team’s success rate. If your team has the training and resources they need to close the deal, they should have a strong win rate.
If the win rate is not where it needs to be, then you need to start digging into lost deals to gain an understanding of patterns of why they are lost. You should also have conversations with your sales team to gain a greater understanding of where they need help so you can provide additional programs or resources.
8. Average deal size
Average deal size (or average contract value — ACV) is the total selling price, including discounts, averaged for a certain period of time. This can be a helpful metric to track to gain an understanding of 1) if your reps are frequently forced to add discounts to sweeten the deal and 2) if your reps are effectively selling add-ons and services to increase the value of the sale. This metric is also crucial in revenue enablement, which focuses not only on getting more sales but also on generating the most revenue from those sales.
9. Length of sales cycle
You can track the length of your sales cycle by looking at the time from the first contact of a new lead to the final sale. You should be able to pull reports or add this view to a dashboard in Salesforce or your CRM. It may also be helpful to look at this more granularly to see the time spent in each stage of the sales cycle.
Tracking your sales cycle length can help you understand if your prospective customers are getting stuck at a certain point in the process. For instance, maybe the demo stage is growing longer. This may indicate that your team requires additional demo training. Or maybe the initial meeting stage is starting to drag and you need to address the handoff process from your BDR to your AE. There are many points of failure in a sales cycle, and keeping track of changes can help you understand where your team may need additional support or process improvements.
10. Internal sales team NPS
As an enablement professional, part of your job is to help ensure that your reps are engaged and have the resources they need to be successful. If your HR team conducts internal employee surveys, pulse checks, etc., it’s a good idea to see if they can give you the results for just the sales team so you can keep an eye on your team NPS — are they happy? Would they recommend working at your company to their peers and friends?
With the world largely working remotely, it is harder than ever to engage personally with your team, and they may be missing that face-to-face engagement. And if your reps don’t feel like they have the tools they need to be successful and are not feeling engaged in your company’s culture, then they are more at risk of leaving — which leads us to the next metric.
11. Employee churn rate
As we mentioned earlier, the average sales rep will leave in just 18 months. Your reps have aggressive quotas that they are under pressure to hit faster than ever before. If you have a rep who struggles through onboarding and slogging through clunky processes and systems, they are likely to leave.
Your organization will have a very difficult task of achieving sales goals predictably if your team is constantly churning — it’s an uphill battle. So it’s critical that you keep a close watch on your sales team’s churn rate.
Retaining your talent and enabling them to succeed is one of the best values your team can contribute to your company’s success. In fact, research shows that top sales performers are nearly 3x more likely to report their onboarding experience as “good” or “excellent” compared to poor performers.
12. Buyer content usage
As an enablement professional, you know how essential it is to ensure your sales reps have access to useful content that creates conversion. After all, Forrester found that 65% of sales content goes unused. But while you want to know how your sellers are engaging with your sales enablement content, you also want to know how your buyers engage after being delivered this content.
By tracking your sales content analytics, you’ll gain insight into your buyer content usage. What are the conversion rates on a piece of content? The bounce rates? How often is a particular piece of content used, and how many leads have been generated by that content?
This insight helps you to optimize your content and ensure it’s valuable for your sales representatives. From social media posts to sales playbooks to case studies, all content you create should serve a purpose and be relevant to both seller and buyer needs.
13. Time to productivity
Time to productivity refers to the time it takes for a new hire to ramp up and achieve their target goals, which goes back to the value of onboarding successfully and effectively. A poor onboarding process can leave a new seller floundering and feeling like they’ll never reach their goals, which is discouraging.
Not only will a poor onboarding process leave you with high times to productivity, which means longer sales cycles and lower sales overall, but it also can lead to a higher employee churn rate.
While 54% of top performers say that they were fully onboarded in three months or less, poor performers are five times more likely than top performers to say that they aren’t fully onboarded even after one year. As a sales enablement professional, you want to turn those poor performers into top performers, and a more effective onboarding solution can be a valuable way to start.
14. Ratio as sales won
The ratio as sales won is the number of sales opportunities that have successfully converted against the number of deals lost. Most likely, you’ll have more deals lost than deals won, but if your ratio is very out of balance, with many more deals lost than won, it might indicate that you need a change in processes or strategy.
It can also indicate that your sales reps need some additional training or a better onboarding process. When you look at an individual’s ratio as sales won, it can show you that they may need an additional hand that other reps may not require.
15. Sales velocity
Sales velocity is the measurement of how quickly opportunities move through your sales pipeline and result in a won deal. To determine sales velocity, you must also measure your number of opportunities, average deal value, average win rate, and length of sales cycle.
To find your organization’s or a specific individual’s sales velocity, you would add the number of opportunities to average deal value and average win rate. Then, divide that number by the sales cycle length. Ideally, you want to increase your sales velocity, which means increasing everything in your numerator and decreasing the sales cycle length in your denominator. Doing so will give you and your sales reps a sales effectiveness boost.
16. Actual selling time
Actual selling time refers to the time that sales representatives spend, well, actually selling. You may be surprised to learn that this number is often quite low. Sales professionals spend less than 30% of their week actually selling. The rest of the time is focused on other aspects of their work, like prioritizing leads, manually entering customer and sales information, and other administrative tasks.
One of the best ways to increase actual selling time is by limiting the amount of time needed to spend on these other tasks. Many sales enablement tools and other selling platforms automate tasks like tracking customer data or generating quotes, saving your sales team valuable time.
Sales enablement micro-KPIs
We’ve covered the high-level metrics that can help you align your sales enablement program to your company’s high-level growth OKRs. However, those aren’t the only metrics that can help you shift your program from reactive to strategic. As Kristen McCrae McMullan shared in a post on LinkedIn, “micro-KPIs” can also be an effective way to track a metric tied directly to an enablement initiative that shows a change over time.
One thing that many enablement teams struggle with is how to tie in the work you do on a daily basis to improve overall sales success. Micro-KPIs become the bridge between enablement programs, initiatives, and activities to overall productivity and quota attainment.
These micro-KPIs are a great way for you to measure the tactics that fuel your overall enablement program. Which micro-KPIs you choose will be largely tied to a specific initiative that your team wants to share visibility and improvement over time at a more tangible, granular level.
For instance, your team’s usage of content and messaging could be tied to the number of meetings set. If your sales team is adopting the messaging they have been trained on, ideally, it will improve the meetings set KPI. Improving meetings set can lead to more ops, increased pipeline, and better win rates.
Some examples of sales enablement micro-KPIs include:
- Adoption time of a specific tool
- Percentage of click-backs to training and other assets
- Meetings set with C-level executives
- Percentage of confidence increase
- Sales competency after a specific training program
- Improvement of objection-handling tactics
While not fully tied to your company’s high-level OKRs, they may be helpful in showing a correlation — especially because it’s not always possible to show a 1:1 connection between your enablement initiative and revenue growth or sales efficiency. Micro-KPIs are also helpful to test theories you may have about your enablement initiatives without making large-scale changes.
Get support improving your sales enablement metrics
At this point, you may be thinking that tracking all of these metrics sounds like a lot of work — and initially, that might be true. It’s a good idea to create a tight partnership with your RevOps team and have a conversation with them about what metrics you would like to measure. They will likely have the skill set to help you build Salesforce dashboards that can help you automate as much as possible.
When focusing on the best practices in sales enablement, measuring your sales enablement metrics is a must-do to show the value of what you create and your overall impact on not only the sales team but your organization as a whole. With Spekit, you can see in-depth analytics and sales intelligence on your prospects, content usage, and more, providing you with all you need to measure your work’s value.
