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

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 ...Read More

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 y ...Read More

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 ...Read More

These are a few common areas to measure Sales Enablement efficacy: 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. 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. Revenue Growth: Track the growth in revenue over a specific period. Effective enablement should correlate with an incre ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 feedba ...Read More

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 ...Read More