Hot Topic: Sales Enablement Measurement

Why is sales enablement measurement and ROI becoming such a hot topic right now?

Following the growth and success of the sales enablement movement over the last 3 years, a reckoning has happened over the last 6 months where enablement has been caught in the boom bust cycle of rapid hiring followed by the great layoff. It’s been sad to see so many talented sales enablement folks be caught in this. But what can we learn from it.

Whilst in the boom, enablement were focused on rapid onboarding programs and fast scaling, attention has now, rightly in my opinion, turned to efficiency, focus and value.

When the CEO of Salesforce doesn’t know why 96% of it’s revenues comes from just 50% of it’s sales reps, we have a problem.

But the issue goes deeper that the onboarding boom and the race to scale. Much of sales enablement has it’s roots in L&D so has potentially suffered from an alignment more to training than perhaps to sales.

When you look at Sales Enablement Pro’s Latest Analytics recent report, whilst there’s definitely progress been made, it’s there in black and white when you look at how teams are measuring training. The top 5 measures are:

1. Completed Lessons / Courses

2. Post training evaluations on training quality

3. Behaviour change

4. Number of training sessions delivered

5. Post training quizzes to assess knowledge

I’m going out on a limb here and other than ‘Behaviour change’, all the others are simply vanity metrics and not measures at all.

Let’s work through an example here…

When Senior Sales Leadership request that every sales rep needs to go through negotiation training, they are not doing it for s**ts and giggles or to see how many people have completed it, they are doing it for a reason.

So the reason for the training should be the north star, the goal. What are we looking to impact by doing this training? This should be mapped to a measurable sales KPI in every instance, otherwise why are we doing it in the first place? We are looking for an outcome after all.

Once that North Star has been established, our job in enablement should be to challenge and baseline it using data to ensure you are really applying the right training in the right place in the first instance.

Let’s take that request for ‘Negotiation Training’ for example.

Step 1: What’s telling us that we have a problem with negotiation, other than gut feel? What is it we want to impact, what’s that north star. We could look at metrics like:

• Conversion ratios of opportunities to Closed won

• Average discount rates

• The number of deal stuck in the equivalent negotiation stage

Step 2: Is there even an issue here?

Let’s dig deeper. Lets evaluate across all sales where we believe our best performers are against this.

What differs between the top 50% of reps and the bottom 50% of reps across these metrics in terms of skills and behaviours.

The example on the right analyses the top performers in Closed Won Ratios against their corresponding strengths in comparison to the bottom performers.

Turns out when we do this, Negotiation is not the biggest gap, we should probably start with Qualification and do some morale boosting and then move onto Negotiation training.

e4 Competency Intelligence Recommendation Engine

e4 Competency Intelligence Recommendation Engine

Step 3: Measurement

So now we are going into this with our eyes open with true alignment.

Not only do we have a much clearer picture on where to focus training but we also have the baseline to work to and the right measurement metrics that matter to sales.

This makes measuring outcomes much easier and automated.

What skill were we looking to improve with our training Vs what sales metric were we looking to impact.

Layer in a provable correlation and you have yourself a reliable measure that all stakeholders buy into and importantly a material impact on the performance of the sales team.

Not only that but you are spending your time, resources and budget in the right places to drive the right outcomes.

But don’t just take our word for it, Gartner is clear on how sales leaders can prove the ROI of sales enablement:

“To effectively demonstrate sales enablement ROI and, in turn, protect associated budget increases, CSOs should instead focus on:

Drawing a stronger connection between revenue goals and enablement activities by consulting with sales leaders on the seller behaviors needed to hit their most important sales goals (e.g., better articulating competitive differentiation to win more deals).

Building and implementing a variety of enablement activities, such as coaching, training and creating tools, to achieve the desired behaviors.

Measuring those behaviors and gauge enablement impact by comparing changed sales behaviors and enablement activity to the baseline.

Promoting a complete view of enablement’s impact by building a compelling narrative of the behavior change driven by enablement that ties back to the sales goals.”

Forrester is also clear on the need for clearly defined competencies mapped to outcomes:

“It’s going to be extremely difficult to measure sales effectiveness if we haven’t clearly defined and articulated what skills and knowledge are needed to be successful in a particular role…

1. Define seller competencies.

2. Competencies should be mapped to business goals.

3. Identify and define competency proficiency levels.

4. Assess seller competencies.

…By taking the time to map the required competencies for each sales role, you’re ensuring that reps who have those defined competencies are more productive, efficient, and, as a result, more successful.”

If you want to find out how e4enable’s sales competency intelligence platform can do all the heavy lifting for you, get in touch.