How do you measure the success of sales enablement?

Ultimately is about revenue attainment. Are sales reps being able to make their numbers? If yes, you are likely doing your job well. Now, if we look more closely at how to impact revenue attainment from a product marketing perspective we end up with the following metrics:

• Win / Loss rate: this can indicate if the messaging/positioning needs work and if sales reps have the right tools at their disposal.
• Competitive win rate: indicates how effective are the battle cards and competitive training.
• Conversion along the marketing funnel: this will give you anindication of content performance and messaging.
• Pipeline coverage: are we targeting the right personas, the right companies, and are reps able to convey value.

Other metrics that the sales enablement team will be monitoring include sales ramp time, quota attainment, etc. which may not be relevant for product marketing unless your team is also involved with these activities.

Similar to the response around growth, adding some color here. 

I encourage my team to be the ‘mini CMO’ for the products they cover. That means the single biggest metric to measure is pipeline (with a focus on pipeline generation).

Depending on the specific in-quarter activities we have going on around sales enablement, we can see a dedicated focus on sales enablement and education show up in our sales-sourced pipeline in the trailing quarter.

My advice here is to track a few things:
Attributed pipeline = how are all your content activities showing up in your pipeline efforts, eBooks, webinars, etc.
Sales-Sourced Pipeline = Did you focus on a specific and deliberate effort around sales enablement that you can tie to an increase in sales sourced pipeline around a specific product or use case?

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I boil down measuring sales enablement success into three categories:

• Usage: This would be the volume of assets developed as well as ways to measure how often they’re utilized. For example, maybe you post your sales collateral to a sales team portal where downloads / views can be tracked.
• Quality: This is about getting feedback from sales on how useful the collateral you've developed is, which can be gathered informally in discussions with your sales team or formally through regular internal surveys.  
• Impact: This would be oriented around correlating the content you develop with metrics such as pipeline influence, win rate, sales rep revenue, etc. This is a mix of art and science though, as it is sometimes not straight forward to be able to tie a particular piece of sales content to a specific business outcome. So think about how to triangulate data points – e.g., did you train a specific group of sales reps in utilizing new sales enablement assets? How do the metrics differ from one group to another?

Measuring the success of sales enablement comes to having clearly defined metrics that PMM can influence. There are a few key metrics you can use to measure the success of your programs. These include:

1. Win rate: The percentage of deals that are won by your sales team. Useful sales enablement materials, training, and collaterals will grow the win rate.
2. Sales cycle length: The amount of time it takes for your sales team to close a deal. Again, the better sales collaterals, answers to typical questions, battle cards, and use-case, the faster SDR/BDR can close the deal.
3. Sales productivity: The amount of revenue generated by your sales team per unit of time (e.g. per month or quarter).
4. Sales team onboarding speed. The PMM sales enablement programs will help by providing comprehensive product training and giving access to the right resources (ICPs, case studies). So the new sales team members will ramp up more quickly and become productive members of your sales organization.