Measuring Sales Enablement Success
In the Sales Enablement Collective’s recent report “MEASURING SALES ENABLEMENT REPORT 2021”, they open with the following statement
“You can put your heart and soul into your work as a sales enabler - developing immersive coaching strategies, refining cadences, organizing kiss-ass kickoff meetings - but, unless you can tangibly demonstrate the progress you’re making, you’re never going to get the recognition or the investment you need to drive continuous growth. And that can be frustrating.”
I think we can all relate to that!
It is clear that there has long been a disconnect between the efforts of the enablement function and the measurements and activities of the sales team. In fact, e4enable’s CEO, Kate Lewis, wrote a blog on this very topic for SEC: Bridging the sales and enablement gap. Being aligned on measurement is a huge part of the story.
At best the benefits are felt but not easily proven, at worst, the enablement team simply cannot demonstrate their impact on any sales success. This has simply got to change!!!
In their report, SEC breaks measurement down into three key areas for priority:
Behavioural indicators
Leading indicators
Lagging indicators
In our opinion, these should not be looked as three separate indicator buckets but rather should be delivered as a collection of interdependent indicators of success.
When an e4enable client is onboarded onto the platform, we ask the question:
“Fast forward 12 months, what does success look like to you? What are you presenting on your slide deck to the board around the impact your efforts [and e4enable] has had on sales performance?”
Often a client hasn’t mapped this out yet so we’ll start further up and out. For example “in 3 years time, what does the business strategy hope to achieve?” and then we’ll work back from that. You can find a more detailed whitepaper on defining your leading indicators.
What we find is that rather than being separated into buckets of indicator types, instead they are different views on the same data by different stakeholders but against a common operational model.
Let’s use 3 different perspectives to illustrate:
The Sales Leader
Example Sales Manager Dashboard
In the example e4enable dashboard above the Sales manager has built their own dashboard.
As a Sales Manager, they have chosen to focus in on performance comparisons across different teams or roles in their downline. In this example, they’re looking at meetings. But they’ve also got their eye on individual pipeline performance trends over time.
They also want to assess the impact and success that LinkedIn usage is having on their team’s ability to book meetings, so they’ve chosen to review this as a trend over time.
They’ve even spent time coaching their team on how they overcome objections so they’re tracking the impact this is having on their conversions of calls to meetings. It’s all there, tracked and ready for you to use.
These elements and KPIs are a Sales team’s bread and butter and it’s important that they can track and measure the impact their coaching is having on their downline’s performance metrics.
The Sales Trainer
Example Learning Manager Dashboard
As a sales trainer or Learning manager, I am likely to have a different perspective on the data and the operational impact my team or activities are having on the sales environment.
From a learning Manager’s perspective, I may be more interested in tracking the ramp times of new starters Vs those who joined previously as I’ve made improvements to onboarding.
I could view and analyse the impact training is having on performance over time or how those engaged in training are performing compared to those who haven’t engaged. This helps me understand and demonstrate the correlation between learner engagement and performance. It’s especially important that these are aligned to the success metrics we identified at the outset of this blog rather than internal team metrics.
Of course I still need to review the # of training courses completed so I’ll probably want a view of this by team or role too.
Finally, I’ll probably want to track competency improvements over time to really view the impact my programs are having on the skills of the teams.
The Sales Enablement Leader
Example Sales Enablement Manager Dashboard
As a Sales Enablement Manager, I may have a whole different view point on goals.
For me, I may be driven by Sales Velocity (Sales Velocity = Number of Opportunities x Deal Value x Win Rate / Length of Sales Cycle) as an indicator that the team are being the most effective they can be. This is a true indicator that my team’s effort are truly enabling.
I may want to look at how managers are rating their teams Vs what the individuals themselves think – if there’s a huge disparity, I may want to address it with training to support the Managers or I may even review whether I can make our competency framework even more objective.
I may want to track how engaged the teams are with the e4enable platform so I can take action if needed to address any gaps or areas of low engagement.
e4enable has the benefit of integrating with all the platforms your sales teams use so, I can even compare the effectiveness of call feedback Vs Opportunity conversions to ensure it’s delivering an ROI.
Final Thoughts
At e4enable, we make it simple to view all of your metrics, in the way you want to see them, for all of your stakeholders but fancy looking dashboards are certainly not going to deliver your success on their own, even if they do make measurement easy.
To achieve true success, you need to embed a culture of coaching and development into the heart of your sales teams’ operating rhythm. You must ensure all of the data is automatically collected and MOST importantly presented in a way that is actionable and holds sales accountable. This will deliver ongoing alignment and continuous development across all sales stakeholders, from SDRs and sales managers through to sales enablement and training leaders.
To find out more about how you can operationalise and scale sales coaching read our blog on the topic: How to consistently scale & operationalise sales coaching