How do you measure the success of sales enablement?

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?

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.

This is a tough one, and it has been a journey to figure out how to measure the success of the sales enablement work PMMs do.

In larger companies with a dedicated field enablement team, there's often better instrumentation and PMMs can partner with another team to activate enablement programs (like certification programs or sales enablement platform/portal implementations), whereas in a start-up, you're much likelier to be DIY'ing it.

Here, I think it's critical to look at both leading and lagging indicators. If you only rely on lagging indicators like sales pipeline and revenue, it's a bit like looking at a star through a telescope: that thing you're seeing? It happened years ago. Leading indicators are less strategic and less tied to the success of your business, but they'll give you early detection and more real-time insight to course correct or shift strategy before you miss plan in a quarter. If your sales team isn't generating pipeline, that's going to show up as a bookings miss in a quarter or two or four. If your sales team isn't using your enablement assets or participating in training, that's going to show up as a pipeline gap in a quarter or two (or four).

Here are the main metrics I care about:

LEADING INDICATORS:

• Sales enablement asset usage - I look at usage of core enablement assets like sales playbooks, pitch decks, demo scripts, economic value calculators, solution briefs, call scripts and email templates. If you're producing effective sales enablement content, your sales reps are going to want to use them because they know it will help them close more deals. There are sales enablement tools out there that can help you monitor content usage. I've used Showpad now across two companies, and Highspot and Outreach are a few others that come to mind.
  

• Sales certification - While it doesn't correlate as closely to your top-line revenue, I've often partnered with sales enablement teams to ensure sales reps are certified on pitch decks and sales messaging, in addition to certifying sales engineers on demo scripts. If you've got your sales messaging right, it's going to influence purchase intent and help your sales reps close deals faster and more easily.
  

• % of sales reps with active pipeline for my product - just as you don't want to be dependent on a few big whales in your deal pipeline, in a healthy B2B business, you don't want to be dependent on a small number of sales reps to hit your number.

LAGGING INDICATORS:

• Sales pipeline is more useful to me than counting MQLs (marketing-qualified leads), because it's a more reliable indicator of forecasted revenue. Another metric I look at is pipeline coverage ratio, which is a measure of your total pipeline divided by your bookings target. Most SaaS companies I've been at target 2.5X-3X pipe coverage. If you're operating in an emerging market or aren't a leader in your category, you'll likely need a higher pipe coverage ratio to hit your bookings target. If you're in an established category and/or a category leader, you may be able to get away with a lower ratio.
  

• Bookings and/or Revenue are the ultimate success metric, and as a PMM, you should bird-dog this closely, tracking sales opportunities, asking how you can help, making yourself available to tag in and join sales calls and meetings with prospects to help your sales team close deals. Good PMMs are a sales team's secret weapon, and you should be getting tapped to join customer meetings and help your sales team get deals over the goal line.
  

• Win rate is the percentage of opportunities that turn into closed won deals, or the dollar value percentage of sales pipeline that turns into bookings. It's one of the most reliable measures of sales efficiency: how effective is your sales team at winning new business vs. alternatives such as competitors or "do-nothing's".

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.

Some ways to measure the success of your sales enablement efforts include

• Surveys: Every quarter, send a survey to the field asking questions about confidence selling to different personas, industries, packages, and against top competitors. Based on this info, you’ll gain a pretty good understanding on where you should focus your efforts the following quarter.

• Win Rates: measure win rates each quarter to see how your focused training has impacted sales for different verticals, and against different competitors.