Much has been written about sales enablement – including here at Beautiful.ai. Why is it such a popular topic? Obviously, it’s in any sales team’s best interest to maximize its success. Sales are the backbone of every business, the entire purpose. More sales equals increased revenue, so anyone could tell you why finding ways to boost sales is a good idea. The challenge lies in how to do it most effectively.
Enter the sales enablement manager. This key role is responsible for providing sales teams with all the tools they need to effectively and efficiently close more sales, whether that be through coaching, content, technology or other support. The sales enablement manager is tasked with developing the best strategy to boost sales. Once you develop the sales enablement strategy, how do you measure its success?
How does a sales enablement manager measure their team’s success? Sales enablement metrics measure the skills of a sales team and answer the question, “How effective is a sales enablement strategy?” The following five sales KPIs will measure your team’s success:
Sales activities
How many sales activities is the team as a whole and each individual sales representative completing each month? Sales activities include any step in the sales cycle with the potential to lead toward closing a sale. They include activities like phone calls and emails to prospects, enrollments, sales visits, presentations and, of course, new contracts.
The sales enablement manager should provide the sales team with all the content, technology and confidence it needs to boost its sales activities. The sales enablement manager’s and the team’s forward success can be measured by comparing the sales activities from one month to the next.
Conversion rates
How many qualified leads are converted to sales? A sales enablement manager can optimize their strategy by measuring both how many marketing-qualified leads (MQL) and sale-qualified leads (SQL) are converted into paying customers. Don’t simply look at a single month and determine whether the sales team is reaching its potential.
What were conversion rates before you executed the sales enablement strategy? How have the conversion rates changed from month to month since the strategy has been implemented? What sales enablement materials have had the greatest impact on conversion rates? At what point in the sales cycle are the most prospects lost? The sales enablement manager should determine if the problem is with the quality of MQLs and SQLs, or if another step in the sales process needs additional work.
Sales cycle lengths
Time is money, and reducing the average number of days from opportunity to close ultimately reduces the average cost of a customer acquisition. A sales enablement manager will provide sales teams with the coaching and materials they need to close sales in fewer days.
Monitor sales reps’ sales cycle lengths before and after implementing sales enablement strategies, and watch for what sales enablement tools were most effective at reducing the length of the cycles. Does adding a tool reduce the cycle, or has a different cost-saving measure increased its length? Compare average sales cycles before rolling out new sales enablement strategies, then continue to compare them monthly moving forward.
Sales totals
Totals are some of the simplest KPIs to measure sales performance. How many total sales were made during a time period (often a month), and what was the total revenue generated? Still, totals can be misleading as they don’t take into account factors such as the number of selling days in the month, the number of leads generated or other influences that could have changed the totals for the period.
A sales enablement manager, however, should still monitor each sales rep’s totals, as well as the overall totals for the entire sales teams and departments. Considered with other factors, like average cycle length and conversion rates, they can indicate changing success levels over time.
Goals attainment
Sources will advise that sales enablement managers monitor teams’ quota attainments, but as demonstrated above, there are more sales performance metrics to consider than total sales. Instead, we recommend tracking overall goals attainment, tracking which reps and teams are hitting various key performance indicators.
Who is hitting their conversion rates within the specific sales cycle length? Who is conducting the most sales activities? Monitoring and tracking each individual goal helps the sales enablement manager gauge the success of their program through more than the end result, which will help to identify weaknesses in the overall sales engagement strategy.
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