Sales enablement can be a powerful driver of change in organizations.
Sales enablement drives change within organizations by impacting the behaviors of frontline sellers. And businesses are rightfully prioritizing these efforts, with sales enablement budgets expected to increase on average by 50% over current levels by 2027.[1]
Despite this increase in investment, sales leaders struggle to measure enablement efforts, often highlighting metrics that have little to do with enablement’s impact. Instead, they should build a compelling narrative to show stakeholders how the sales enablement strategy drives necessary changes in seller behavior. Our Gartner research-backed guide provides sales leaders like you with a three-step framework to get there.[1]
What is sales enablement, and why is it important to measure?
Sales enablement refers to the activities, systems, processes, data, and resources that support and promote knowledge-based interactions between sales reps and buyers.[2] Measuring sales enablement allows you to identify the trends, strengths, and weaknesses in your sales team and processes so you can identify what’s working and what isn’t.
Step #1: Align sales goals with seller behaviors to execute enablement activities
As a sales leader, your first task is to outline your organization’s sales goals and determine the behaviors sellers need to exhibit to reach those goals. For example, if the goal is to boost sales quota attainment (as in our example below), your sales reps should be able to effectively differentiate themselves from competitors.[1]
Once you’ve linked the goals to desired seller behaviors, you’ll gain a clear understanding of the enablement activities to implement or resources to provide to drive the required changes in sales reps’ behaviors. Without this agreement, your sales enablement strategy could result in ineffective or even misaligned behaviors.
Step #2: Identify the right metrics to measure enablement activities and seller behaviors
The next step involves identifying metrics that showcase whether your sales force is effectively leveraging the enablement activities you’ve conducted or resources you’ve provided. We’ve rounded up some sales enablement metrics in the table below.[1]
Enablement activity/resource | Metrics |
|---|---|
Sales training | Training consumed, assessments and courses completed, assessment scores, demonstration of acquired knowledge and skills |
Seller tools | Adoption in the sales process, use in sales stages, insights from tools |
Events | Participation, demonstration of acquired knowledge, long-term knowledge retention |
To measure enablement’s impact on sales reps’ behaviors, you may also need assistance from other departments. For instance, conversational intelligence could help track changes such as sellers’ increased use of specific phrases in customer interactions compared to previous levels. Similarly, your marketing team could provide data (e.g., customer-facing assets consumption, inbound activity) to understand whether the intended changes are taking place. You could also run surveys to gauge how effectively sellers are applying newly learned knowledge when interacting with customers.
To simplify the process, first establish a baseline for the targeted behaviors. This will allow for a comparison with the altered behaviors resulting from sales enablement efforts. The graphic below shows some ways to measure seller behavior using information obtained from different areas of your organization.
Measuring sales enablement success is all about finding the right metrics to track and showcasing how they’ve changed since the commencement of your enablement program. The table below illustrates our previous example of increasing sales quota, desired seller behaviors, aligned enablement activities, and outcomes to track in the sales process.[1]
Desired behavior | Behavioral goals | Enablement activity/resource | Enablement results |
|---|---|---|---|
Sellers differentiating themselves from competitors | 14 competitive swap-outs A swap-out is a situation where a customer is using a product or service offered by a competitor, and the salesperson replaces the competitor's offering with their own. this quarter2x proposals with targeted configurations | Competitive playbook A playbook is a document that sales teams use to employ best practices, tactics, and strategies during different stages of the selling process. Just-in-time eLearningJust-in-time learning is a strategy focused on meeting an employee's training needs when they arise, rather than delivering pre-planned training sessions. : “how to target competition”Webinars to provide configuration guidance | 43% of sellers viewed the playbook 85% average assessment score 56% increase of special configurations in quotes |
Step #3: Use a dashboard to demonstrate the progress of sales enablement metrics
Now that you’ve identified which metrics to track as well as created an action plan for your sales team, it’s time to connect the dots. To demonstrate sales enablement results, recap the following to stakeholders:
Explain how sales reps’ behaviors link to your organization’s sales goals.
Showcase enablement activities you’ve conducted to help achieve the desired seller behaviors.
Highlight the metrics you’re tracking to measure sales reps’ consumption or use of enablement activities and resources.
Compare how these metrics have changed since the sales enablement program began.
A sales dashboard can pull all this data together, allowing you to track sales goals, seller behaviors, and enablement metrics from a centralized platform. It lets you organize data in a way that makes it easier for your stakeholders to understand and interpret.
Dashboard showing the performance of enablement content in sales enablement platform Showpad
You can leverage visualization options such as charts, graphs, and tables to present an easily scannable summary of progress on the delivery of enablement content and assessment of a sales rep’s knowledge. You can also make comparisons, such as the achievement of sales goals before and after enablement efforts, to create a compelling narrative showcasing enablement’s impact on top-line revenue targets.
Build your sales enablement toolkit with the right tech
Now that you know how to measure sales enablement and its impact, it’s time to build your sales enablement toolkit. Here are some tools that can help you out:
Sales coaching software can assist in setting up and delivering your enablement program. You can use these platforms to onboard new reps as well as provide continuous sales training to current reps to ensure consistent performance levels. Features include sales goal setting and tracking, learning gamification, and the ability to create assessments.
Conversational intelligence platforms can analyze your sales team’s conversations with customers to uncover behavioral shifts by identifying phrases that sellers are using more frequently in conversations than in the past.
Marketing analytics software can collect and process data, such as consumption of customer-facing assets and inbound website activity, needed to evaluate your team’s sales performance.
Another tool worth investing in is sales enablement software. These platforms are a great way to house content and communication tools that help your sales force show product information to prospective customers, engage potential leads, and overall boost sales performance. Check out our 2023 Capterra Shortlist for sales enablement software here.
For more information on sales enablement, check out the following articles:
