Which KPIs do you typically use to track sales enablement success?

Question

Savita Kini · Accepted Answer

The above are great. A few more things to add on sales enablement

- if you have channel partners, you should include them in your sales enablement plans. Include their feedback, usage, deals closed as well.

- In sales training - depending on the levels of different sales folks, some may be able to call on to executive leaders while some call mid-level management - depends on their comfort and relationships. I would also group the sales team and serve up different types of trainings as well.

- If you have a sales enablement leader, ideally you should work with them to map geos, accounts, sales leaders based on experience, so you can offer up more personalized training as well.

- I am a big fan of just-in-time learning tools, and wonder if now Apps are easily available to provide sales a forum to post questions to each other and to the PMMS, PMs about objection handling, content to use etc.

Rajendran Nair · Answer

The most common KPI is the win rate. However, I dont think this is an accurate measure of your work as the eventual win depends a lot on other factors, starting with the salesperson running the cycle.

I prefer to track the number of sales cycles that go past the initial demo stage because it more accurately reflects the results of your work.

Nikhil Balaraman · Answer

* There are 2 main ways of tracking for success: Consumption Metrics and Outcome Metrics
    * Consumption metrics -- these metrics should be shared/co-owned amongst Enablement, PMM, and Content teams 
       * Content views
       * Collateral usage
       * Quiz scores (used as an Enablement metric when rolling out new messaging)
   
    * Outcome metrics -- these are more Enablement specific metrics, but PMM should definitely be attuned to how new launches and especially new product positioning affects these metrics
       * Win rate
       * Deal size
       * Deal velocity
       * Time to firsts (first opp, first deal, quota attained, etc)

* In the end, the enablement function should work with leadership on what strategic initiative is being prioritized, and build out a program to solve for it, using benchmarks and metrics to measure for success. 
    * For example, if the goal is to double the sales team, there needs to be a scalable onboarding program to ensure productivity early. A KPI might be, time to create first opportunity, time to create second opportunity, and same for deals. You’d want to start tracking how long it typically takes for a seller to create an opp after your onboarding, as well as some other early metrics, and then implement a program for onboarding and training reps, and compare those to your previous benchmarks.
    * Another might be wanting to reduce your sales cycle time. You’d want to identify what are some blockers within your sales process and work to remove those and compare your new cycle times to your previous.

Elizabeth Brigham · Answer

The most important KPI is closed won business. If your sales team knows to whom, how, what and at what time to sell (e.g. when to walk away), you've done your job.

Other internal metrics to consider are:

* Managers' qualitative review/certification of sales ability to pitch and demo (the demo piece may vary based on the size of your business or product complexity)
 * How often sales teams are using marketing materials in sales cycles, how clear they are to prospects and if any were critical to closing the deal (there are fancy tools now that give you the ability to send docs to prospects and track engagement/usage as well)
 * How many questions you receive, or don't (this can be a flag), during sales training
 * How many additional requests you're getting to come back to various groups and redo the training or augment

I'd be curious to crowd-source this one a bit more as well as I've seen a variety of definitions for sales enablement.

ShiQi Wu · Answer

I’ll break this down into 2 parts even though this might be simplified after all sales enablement likely will have multiple parts depending on importance of product.

* Whether sales has received the information
    * Attendance rates, Tests/Quizzes to capture main points, engagement rates during the training, feedback post the training and % of sales force trained

* Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer
    * Adoption of product/recommendation 
    * Revenue growth attributed to the product 
    * No. of clients pitch to
    * Higher win-rates

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