What are some ways to measure whether Sales is properly enabled?

Check out my reply here, in a previous question.

Building on my previous response, I do think about this in those two phases: At launch and post-launch.

At Launch

At launch, you need your teams to be ready and aligned to the GTM strategy. If a rep cannot effectively pitch, demo, solution with a prospect or a customer, that will extend your sales cycle at the very least. Also, if only some reps are ready, your GTM will end up sending varied or multiple messages to your buyers and influencers in your market... which can have long-term implications. Because this step is so important, I do like a certification process that jointly owned between Sales and Marketing. However, I know that this is not possible at every organization. So in lieu of a certification process, be able to gauge readiness through a survey or other means of feedback is an alternative option. 

Post Launch

When your offering is in the market, I really like making adjustments to your GTM based on Win / Loss analysis and sales feedback. The combination of both should at least give you a baseline of market feedback to form several hypotheses on how to adjust. I also think other traditional sales metrics such as attach rate, revenue, average deal size, etc. can also help as indicators on how your GTM is doing.

These are a few common areas to measure Sales Enablement efficacy:

1. Win Rates: Keep an eagle eye on how many deals your sales team is winning. An uptick suggests that your enablement efforts are hitting the mark.

2. Sales Velocity: Monitor the time it takes for a lead to convert into a closed deal. A decrease in this timeframe signals streamlined processes and effective enablement.

3. Revenue Growth: Track the growth in revenue over a specific period. Effective enablement should correlate with an increase in sales-generated revenue.

4. Deal Size: Are your sales reps consistently closing larger deals? This indicates that your enablement strategies are helping them capture higher-value opportunities.

5. Content Engagement: Analyze the engagement metrics of the content and tools you provide. Higher utilization suggests that your resources are valuable and being utilized effectively.

6. Onboarding Performance: Evaluate the ramp-up time for new sales hires. If it's decreasing, your onboarding and training efforts are likely paying off.

7. Feedback Loop: Regularly gather feedback from the sales team on the quality and usefulness of enablement resources. A positive feedback loop signifies alignment.

8. Adoption Rates: Measure how quickly your sales team adopts new tools and processes. Swift adoption implies that your enablement initiatives are resonating.

9. Sales Enablement ROI: Calculate the return on investment of your enablement efforts by comparing the cost of your programs to the revenue generated.

10. Alignment with Marketing: Assess how well your sales and marketing teams are aligned. Proper enablement should result in smoother collaboration and shared objectives.

11. Customer Satisfaction: Solicit feedback from customers who interacted with your sales team. High customer satisfaction (NPS for example) reflects effective communication and engagement.

12. Competitive Analysis: Monitor how well your sales team responds to competitive challenges. A well-enabled team should demonstrate improved competitive positioning.

By focusing on these key metrics, you'll gain a clear picture of whether your Sales Enablement strategies are steering your team toward success.

There are several small ways to measure whether Sales is properly enabled: training quizzes, shadowing sales calls, 1:1 conversations with reps. But my favorite way to do this at scale is with sales confidence surveys.

SurveyMonkey has a template you can get started with: https://www.surveymonkey.com/templates/sales-enablement-template/

We measure sales confidence every quarter to help us identify where we are improving as well as gaps in knowledge. This helps us shape our enablement roadmap for future quarters.

Things we capture in our sales confidence survey include:

• Role and tenure for filtering during analysis

• Confidence in speaking about the different products in our portfolio

• Confidence is speaking to our various personas/buyer profiles

• Confidence in speaking to our differentiation across our top competitors

• Confidence in the various aspects of the sales process/tools: discovery, pitching value, mapping the right solution to customer need, scoping, pricing & bundling, demos

• Ability to identify up-sell / cross-sell opportunities

• Satisfaction across content/collateral: one-pagers, pitch decks, thought leadership, case studies, example deliverables, events to share with prospects

• Ability to find what they're looking for

• Customer hand-offs

I mentioned this elsewhere but in my mind there's two key dimensions to sales effectiveness. One is the core sales skills side..i.e how good are they at discovery? how do they navigate objection handling? How are their deal progression skills and so on. These are typically built up over time with more and more experience but are enhanced through 'sales skills' training. The other dimension is product/solution enablement. How well do they know the product? How well can they position the value of the product to suit the customers needs? Do they know how to flip between various solutions based on customer input? And can they effectively position the product over and above it's competitors? These are key areas that we as PMM's can heavily influence. And so, if you think about it that way then 'properly enabled' at least on the product/solution side would be indicated by how effectively they deposition competitors in deals. How quickly they show value and thus close deals (time to close) and of course how bought in the customer is to the current and future value of the products thus increasing the deal size. You will also find (in my experience) that there's a direct correlation between the sales members who eagerly participate in enablement training, they download and use all the assets you've produced and their effectiveness!

Measuring sales enablement effectiveness requires a combination of business metrics and internal metrics. Ultimately, you need to ensure that enablement is making an impact in Sales teams' ability to win deals and retain customers, while making sure that the process to do so is efficient and effective.

• Business metrics should be mostly include ratios, not just the absolute number of deals or revenue. Classic metrics include - win rate, renewal rate

• Time to close deals

• Sales team readiness feedback collected through a survey or one on one internal interviews.

• Survey your sales reps quarterly or biannually on the effectiveness of the sales enablement materials/programs

• Listen to sales calls to hear how prospects are reacting to what the sales rep is saying/presenting - are there objections that could be better handled? Could the pitch be refined? Do the prospects get hung up on pricing?

• Audit the buyer journey as if you were the buyer. Once you are in the purchasing stage and talking to sales, can the sales reps provide the materials and answers you'd be looking for as a buyer?

• Gather closed-lost reasons/a report and make sure Sales is enabled to battle the lost reasons

• Look at your sales team's win rate over time - has it improved since implementing new sales enablement programs/materials?

There are many ways to measure whether Sales is properly enabled but the goal setting is just as important as the measuring. A few key things to remember, goals should be: realistic, agreed upon before enablement content is developed, and measured in a way that supports qualitative and quantitative feedback.

Why you might ask?

1- Realistic: our enablement team always reminds us that sales will only remember 10% of the content you shared. Really!

2- Agreed upon: taking a moment to work with your content teams to understand what are truly the key takeaways. What do they want to make sure Sales remembers? It is okay to nudge them into a direction that lands on the 10%.

3- Qualitative & quantitative measures: proper enablement is subjective in many ways so ensure you are taking into account volume of replies with a quick thumbs up/down alongside the opportunity to provide comments/color into how you can continually improve.

Finally, don't measure in isolation, understand what all is going on across all enablement. You can find that list for sales gets longer pretty quickly. Work with your functional teams to develop an intake process and throttle the enablement throughout the quarter.

To second Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann, I find Sales Confidence/Enablement surveys essential for measuring whether Sales are properly enabled and where the gaps are in the sales process that you can close with enablement.

While running a survey may seem easy, it requires several crucial activities beyond downloading a template. These include collecting responses, creating insights, presenting them to stakeholders, devising an action plan based on findings, and implementing it.

Here is my take on the process of measuring Sales Confidence / Enablement:

Step 1 — Define Your Survey Goals

• Instead of jumping straight to the survey template, I recommend defining your goals and expected outcomes of the survey. The goals will vary based on whether your organization has conducted similar surveys before. You may be the first to run the survey at your current company or already have benchmark data from past surveys.

Step 2 — Create the Sales Confidence Survey

• There are multiple Sales Confidence Survey templates available online. However, most of them are focused on a particular aspect of Sales Enablement, not approaching this holistically. When I was working on my first survey, I had to mix and match all the surveys out there to make the survey that assesses all the aspects of Sales Enablement.
  You can access my holistic template in Google Forms.

Step 3 — Launch The Survey And Get Answers

• Once you’ve built the survey, it is time to get the answers from your front-facing teams. It is a best practice to run a sales confidence survey at the beginning of the new sales cycle, as running it any other time may conflict with the teams’ goals to close the quarter, and they may give your survey less attention than it deserves.
  
  This part of the process may be the most challenging. In the complete guide via the link below, I share the list of vetted and validated strategies that can help get a 95% fill rate for this survey.

Step 4 — Follow up with the attendees to get deeper insights

• After receiving all the answers from respondents of your Sales Confidence Survey, I recommend scheduling a 40-minute call with different personas in your sales department. The reason for this step is that different sales “personas” have different needs, and it is not always possible to capture them via the survey. In the complete guide via the link below, I share the questions you can ask during these follow-up calls.
  

Step 5 — Write a survey report

• Now, you need to compile a survey report based on the data you’ve collected in the previous steps. I like to keep a Sales Confidence Survey report as short and actionable as possible. The report can easily become your Sales Enablement strategy for the next enablement cycle.

  The report is very easy to put together, as it consists of three parts:

  • Executive Summary - The executive summary should include the goal of your survey, the key takeaway that should preferably be aligned with your company goals, and the action plan outlined based on the survey results and your follow-up calls with the team.

  • Survey results in detail

    • Overview of the team’s experience — department, team’s experience, prior industry knowledge, and team’s confidence level in different sales areas.

    • Sales Collateral — the answers to the four benchmark questions and insights from the follow-up calls.

    • Products and Services — showcase the insights regarding the confidence in pitching products or services that your company provides.

    • Competitive Intelligence — assess the team’s confidence to beat the competition.

  • Action Plan — in this section, you will need to convert the results from above to your action plan.

Step 6 — Start acting on the plan

• In the previous step, the Action Plan section, you have identified the next steps in your Sales Enablement strategy. Now, you need to start working on a detailed plan, organize the project timeline, and start implementing new initiatives.

Here is my extensive guide on measuring sales confidence: https://medium.com/@sashajjang/an-ultimate-guide-to-sales-confidence-survey-73a941ceb1f4