12 Sales Enablement Metrics You Should be Tracking

There are a series of activities, processes, and strategies that the sales team develops and implement to boost sales and increase their revenue.

One of these is sales enablement, whose definition has been pretty much very vague for many years until HubSpot developed a clear meaning/definition of sales enablement. HubSpot defines sales enablement ” as the processes, content, and technology that empowers sales teams to sell efficiently at a higher velocity”

Considering the number of tasks and responsibilities that falls on the sales team – to find and nurture leads, develop sales strategies, meet and possibly exceed sales goals, negotiate all contracts with prospective clients, increase sales quotas, etc., it’s not entirely surprising that sales teams have to use sales enablement to make their work a lot easier.

Unfortunately, many sales enablement programs don’t always bring the sales team their desired result because they fail to measure and track the effectiveness of the program.

Lending credence to the popular saying that “you can’t improve, what you don’t measure”, similarly with sales enablement, if you don’t constantly measure how your sales enablement are doing and the return on investment on your sales enablement program, it would be hard to identify what’s working and what’s not working, to improve on them.

In this article, we will give a brief introduction to sales enablement and explain some of the important metrics to measure the effectiveness of your sales enablement efforts.

Table of Contents

• What is Sales Enablement?
• Why is Sales Enablement Measured?
• Important Factors to Consider when Analyzing Sales Enablement
• 12 Most Important Sales Enablement Metrics to Track

What is Sales Enablement?

Sales enablement refers to the continual process of providing the sales team with all the resources and strategies they need to improve their sales process and close more deals.

It is essentially providing them with everything they need to get more leads, nurture them and convert them to paying customers.

Some sales experts have grouped the sales enablement process into two, the first is the content that the sales team would provide for the buyer to convince them to buy the product or service while the second is the best practices, research materials, and tools that sales teams can use internally to improve their sales and business results.

Sales enablement metrics and analytics provide sales and marketing teams with data-driven insights that can be used to drive revenue and optimize their business results.

Why is Sales Enablement Measured?

Sales enablement is critical to the success of every sales team – it can help sales reps improve their performance, and productivity and ultimately help them hit their sales targets.

To make this happen, sales teams create a lot of content to support their sales and help prospective customers make faster decisions.

However, it is only when you measure the sales enablement that you can determine how they are performing and understand if it’s helping or hindering your sales growth.

When sales teams have too many resources to support their sales, it can be overwhelming and confusing to know what works and what doesn’t if they don’t measure the content regularly. Hence it’s important to measure sales enablement for the following reasons:

1. To understand the content that sales reps need

Measuring existing sales enablement content enables sales reps to understand what content is helping the team nurture and convert their leads.

From this, they can optimize the content and create new ones that can support sales while they discard the ones that are not helpful or usable.

2. To gain a better understanding of the content that resonates better with the target audience

When you measure your sales enablement, it helps you gain a better understanding and data-driven insights into the content that your target audience and prospective customers prefer and respond better to and the ones that help them convert faster.

From this, you can develop effective strategies on ways you can create more of the content and send them to your prospects for better business results.

3. To reduce costs from creating content that doesn’t support sales

Sales teams spend so much money, time, and effort to create sales enablement content, organize sales training, and use sales enablement tools.

Without measuring the sales enablement, it would be hard to know what content should be retained and which should be discarded as well as the ones that are bringing in the highest revenue. Sales teams can save costs when they spend more on sales enablement content that drives results. Check out the detailed guide about gross revenue.

Important Factors to Consider when Analyzing Sales Enablement

Before deciding on the sales enablement metrics to measure, you must keep the following factors in mind to measure your sales enablement metrics against them. They include:

1. Length of the sales cycle

To effectively analyze the success of sales enablement, it is important to find the length of the sales cycle. The length of the sales cycle as the name implies is the total number of days it takes to close a sales deal.

This cycle depends on several factors such as the price of your product, the customer services, the quality of your product, etc. However, it is important to understand to know how sales enablement can help reduce the time it takes to close deals.

2. Quota attainment

Quota attainment is the measure of the total sales a salesperson makes as a percentage of their quota for a specific period. It is the second most important factor that is usually measured on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.

3. Calls to action (CTA)

Calls to action (CTA) is a written directive used in marketing campaigns to prompt a response from the target audience and encourage them to take action. Tracking call to action (CTA) performance is crucial to moving prospects in the sales pipeline.

4. Sales closing ratio

As the fourth most important factor to consider when measuring sales enablement, the sales closing ratio refers to the number of deals closed compared with the number of formal quotes sent by your team.

For example, if you send 20 quotes to your prospective in a month, and 5 of the prospects convert to paying customers, your closing ratio becomes 25%. Tracking your sales closing ratio is important to understand how sales enablement help improve the ratio. Check out the finest guide about sales prospecting.

5. Win/Loss rate

The win or loss rate is the ratio of opportunities that your team wins compared to the opportunities they lose. In simple terms, it tells you how many times the sales team will win a sales deal to the number of times they will lose deals.

This factor is important to help you understand how sales enablement can help you win more sales opportunities and possibly turn your cold deals into closed deals.

6. Marketing Collateral performance

Marketing collateral refers to any content, media, or resources used by the marketing and sales teams to promote the products or services.

This factor monitors how the marketing materials are performing about the number of leads it generates and sends to the sales teams – based on the volume and quality of the leads.

7. Deal size

Deal size as the name implies is the average selling price of all the deals closed. This factor is important because helps to understand how sales enablement content impacts the sales revenue.

8. Sales process adherence

This factor tracks how well sales reps are complying or adhering to the sales process that the sales team has planned out and trained them in. With the sales enablement content, you can ensure that your sales team gets better sales process adherence.

9. Employee Net Promoter Score

The employee net promoter score measures how engaged employees are to the business, which in this case is the measure of how sales reps are committed to the company.

A good sales enablement motivates sales reps and helps to improve their training to become better at their job and hit their sales target. It is an important factor to consider because it can indirectly impact the employee net promoter score.

10. Onboardiing time for new employees and clients

Onboarding time refers to the time it takes to train and get an employee or customer/client accustomed to the company and its products/services. An effective sales enablement should contain all the important information that can help new employees and clients/customers come on board faster, thereby reducing the onboarding time.

12 Most Important Sales Enablement Metrics to Track

A sales enablement has a lot of benefits to the sales team – it can help you generate new leads, nurture them and ultimately help you close more deals, but how do you know if the sales enablement is working if you don’t measure it?

Below are some of the key sales performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics that can help you measure the success of your sales enablement metrics.

1. Lead to Opportunity Conversion Rate

In simple terms, a lead is a sales prospect with the potential of becoming a customer while an opportunity is a qualified prospect who has a high probability of becoming a customer or depending on the context could also mean a possible deal with a strong chance of closing.

Lead to opportunity conversion rate is regarded as a good way to measure sales enablement success because it shows the effectiveness of sales representatives. In simple terms, the lead to opportunity conversion rate measures how long it takes for sales reps to nurture a lead to an opportunity.

Essentially, a sales rep’s performance can improve significantly if the sales enablement strategies are effective and every sales rep is properly trained, which can ultimately improve the lead to opportunity conversion rate. If the LTO rate truly improves, it shows that sales reps are getting the right messages to the right audience at the right time. Check out the detailed guide about lead-to-revenue management.

2. Content Performance

Content is an important aspect of sales enablement due to its role in engaging prospects and helping them understand the product/service better. Sales enablement content ranges from case studies to social media posts, articles, product reports, feature comparisons, ebooks, explainer videos, etc.

Content performance as a sales enablement metric helps you understand how a piece of content is being leveraged to help you achieve certain goals and business results. Since there’s usually so much sales enablement content used by sales reps to support sales, sales reps maybe not know which content is helping them convert more leads to customers.

Hence by measuring the content performance, you can data-driven insights into which content and sales enablement strategy is working and what information is more valuable to the potential customers. This way you improve your sales success

3. Win Rate

Win rate refers to the percentage of deals your company has won over a specific period. It shows whether the bid strategy has been effective. Win rate is measured by dividing the total number of impressions or opportunities won by the number of submitted impressions or the total number of opportunities.

Win rate as a sales enablement metric helps to understand whether the sales team is winning and identifies where more training is needed. When sales reps have good training and up-to-date resources to close deals, the win rate increases.

4. Competitive win rate

Every healthy business environment has competition, and in most cases, your competitors can get in the way of your success, which explains why it’s important to measure the competitive win rate. Although slightly similar to the win rate, the competitive win rate measures the number of deals that a company has won directly against at least one of its competitors.

In simple terms, it is a reflection of your company’s success as a percentage of your total opportunities. Since many businesses understand that their marketers are becoming more saturated than ever, measuring the competitive win rate can allow you to see how your sales team is performing against your competitors.

A high competitive win rate shows that your sales reps are getting better at promoting your business’s advantage while a low competitive win rate could be an indication that your sales enablement strategies and content need to improve.

5. Average selling price

An average selling price otherwise known as average contract value (ACV) measures how much your customers are paying for your products or services, as well as discounts. This metric helps to determine whether the sales team is accurately portraying your brand value or not and to understand if they need to improve their discount services to boost sales.

A high average selling price clearly shows that your sales reps are doing well at promoting your company’s value, hence the higher the average selling price, the more profitable the business is.

On the other hand, a low average selling price could be an indication that heavy discounts could be affecting your profits and your customer’s perception of your brand.

6. Average discount

Average discount as the name implies is a sales metric that shows the average discounts that your customers receive regularly. As mentioned earlier, a company giving heavy discounts to its customers can have declining revenue, although some companies claim to be gaining the best profits from discounts.

Average discount as a sales enablement metric helps you determine whether your sales team regularly offers heavy discounts to close deals. If this is the case, you may want to consider providing better sales training when onboarding your new hires.

Measuring your average discount can provide you with important information that can help you determine whether your sales team is offering discounts to meet the needs of the customer or if it’s just to close deals.

7. Sales cycle length

Sales cycle length otherwise known as deal velocity measures the length of time it takes to convert a sales deal from the first contact to the final sales. It also includes every process or activity involved in the sales cycle such as the number of calls made, the demos, meetings with stakeholders, free trials, and other similar activities,

Although many factors can affect the length of the sales cycle outside of the sales reps’ control. A shorter sales cycle indicates that the sales team is doing a good job at promoting your product or service and can solve the customer’s needs a lot faster.

On the other hand, a longer sales cycle shows that something is not right. Either way, you can improve your sales process and strategies by tracking the sales cycle length

8. Quota Attainment

Quota attainment measures a sales rep’s total sales, as a percentage of their quota for that period. It provides a standardized measurement for the sales team’s performance to set their goals.

Consider that sales reps as they advance in the organization develop their own sales tactics and techniques that work best for them to close sales deals. In such a situation, an organization has to ensure that its quota and compensation tactics are effectively aligned with the company’s goals to help them standardize and incentivize its sales team members accordingly.

Lending credence to the saying that “You can improve, what you measure,” providing your sales teams with their quota for a specific period enables you to see who is hitting their sales target and those who are not, which in a broader sense can help you determine how your sales teams are performing. High quota attainment shows that the whole team is working more effectively to grow the company.

9. Sales rep lifetime value

A sales rep lifetime value (LTV) refers to the total revenue generated by a sales rep during the time they are employed. Your sales enablement program can help you improve your sales rep lifetime value and help you to develop your sales enablement strategy.

For example, If you have had an average tenure of 48 months and a quota of $1 million per year, their lifetime value could mean $4 million during their entire if all goes well.

10. Knowledge Retention

Knowledge retention is the process of absorbing and ultimately retaining information over a specific period. Following the report that most employees can only recall 15% of what they learned after one year.

Hence it is important to organize ongoing training to improve sales team knowledge retention continuously. Since sales staff are the face of the organization and charged with the duty of promoting the company’s products or services, you have to make sure they are knowledgeable about not only your services but your company industry as a whole as this can help them better convince the prospect that your company is the best choice.

11. Time to first deal

Time to first deal metric measures how long it takes for a new sales rep to close their very first deal. As a sales enablement metric, it reflects how well your onboarding and sales training is at training sales reps on the best sales methodology to use for better sales results, helping them build their knowledge and ultimately helping them achieve more success.

12. Churn rate

Churn rate as a sales enablement metric measures the number of customers that a business loses over a specific period, usually measured monthly or annually. If an organization suddenly experiences a public relations crisis, has low-performing sales, a lower competitive win rate, or isn’t able to retain its customers, the churn rate can increase.

However, if it reduces, it indicates that the sales team can retain more customers for a longer period, which decreases the cost of sales acquisition and improves sales and profitability. A sales rep performance can also be determined by measuring the churn rate.

Conclusion

Sales enablement refers to the content, resources, and strategies that sales teams use to support sales and close deals. To determine the effectiveness of every sales enablement content that salespersons use, sales leaders and managers use sales enablement metrics to measure how best the sales enablement support sales.

By measuring the aforementioned factors and sales enablement metrics, you will in-depth understanding of how successful your sales enablement content and strategies are. Although there are many more to track for this purpose, the above sales enablement metrics and factors will get you started on getting better sales results with your sales enablement strategies.