In my opinion the effectiveness of sales enablement should be measured by reducing the customer acquisition costs over time and reducing the time it takes to close a deal. Having these in-process KPIs that you can track month over month will help you demonstrate how your enablement activities are helping sellers meet their quotas.
I think there's a similar question above on measuring KPIs. Please refer to it. But essentially I'll look at 2 parts
1. Whether sales has received the information
2. Whether sales has activated post the training which might take longer
Create a quiz or set up role playing for your sales team on their understanding of the product features, capabilities and messaging. When you set aside time to observe how your sales teams are understanding and consuming your sales enablement, you create a better relationship with the team, and know which reps may need more help in what areas. By watching how well the reps could talk through the key messages in a role play, or through their quiz answers, I know what was working and what wasn’t.
As an industry marketer I am mostly concerned around the sales cycle, ASP, win rate, content performance, and rep productivity. Good enablement, marketing, and content, should shorten sales cycles and drive how things are leveraged ie case studies, whitepapers, solution briefs, and blogs.
Often times good enablement will measure these variables continuously on a rolling basis and will work closely with industry and product marketers in understanding training gaps.
We use Workramp for formal trainings - so we can see with that tool completion rates and if there are quizzes or assesments, how folks did on those. We have more informal training sessions called Scoops for our sales / csm team and then a Technical Scoop for our technical teams. We also hold office hours for newer, more technical product or feature releases. The overall questions and engagement - while more qualitative - help us assess how well enablement is going there.
When I am starting up a Sales Enablement practice (or it is a new product/market or even a new sales team), I prefer an intense, heavy handed approach, because that helps me develop and fine tune my stories and the assets I use to convey/manifest my stories. Over time, sales will have a bigger role in iterating on these assets, and possibly, to innovate on the messaging too.
If the playbooks are insightful and get used... I'm not frustrated! ;)
Creating sales playbooks is frustrating when we're in a loop of perfection over progress. Oftentimes we forget how powerful a small amount of clear, digestible insight can be over an incredibly robust, in-depth asset. I picked up a mantra from a consultant that I love: "consumable over comprehensive."
Adding depth over time is both more sustainable for you as a PMM and more digestible and actionable for your stakeholders. Get the most important concepts landed, then expand.
Budget wise, PMM is a straight up expense. Sales enablement on the other hand more of a Sales opportunity cost. THe function sits in Sales and that department needs to decide if it wants more 'feet on the ground' or 'hands in the air'.
If ability to make revenue is slowed by complex non-documented processes or if there is a wave of new hires or a transformational product launch coming up, its definetly worth investing in a stand alond department
Great question! I am biased, but I LOVE having a dedicated Sales Enablement partner, so I'd say the sooner the better.
They're able to focus entirely on the enablement strategy, what's working well for sales, what isn't, the biggest opportunities for impact, balancing their cross-team learning priorities, etc., and share that back to PMM to optimize effectiveness.
PMM will always be juggling sales enablement with product messaging, core positioning, customer research, etc.
One of the KPIs for the PMM team should be around sales enablement. I have seen this KPI measured when a PMM delivers sales training. After every live session, we would do a survey where we check two dimensions: Quality of the presentation and usefulness of the material. Though this was interesting initially, we noticed that there is general fatigue over time, and most people would give a high average rating of over 8 (scale:1-10).
There are sales enablement tools like Highspot that provide more visibility into the content impact by "stage," but I've not seen this action.
This is always a fun topic!
Here are some approaches I've taken in the past:
Internal sales surveys or qualitative feedback (e.g., 'what decks do you use when pitching?' 'what assets are most helpful?') can work. If you have an internal sales wiki built where you host assets, you may be able to access analytics about how many visits/pageviews/downloads you're seeing across key materials. But most importantly, having strong relationships with sellers and sales leaders can help create a feedback loop for PMM so that the materials that are most needed are the ones being created.
More tactically, here's a sample template originally from Salesforce that I use for training sales on demos.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzSot4wxOi-VUk5TZTlwdVMyQ2M/view?usp=sharing
I second Jennifer's suggestion. Features come and go, but the problems stay roughly the same. As long as the product continues to solve the same problems, the demo doesn't have to change. If you do your canned demos by video you have a lot more flexibility to make changes (and a lot more consistency too). Good demos are alike a play. They tell a good story that has a happy ending. They shouldn't be Greek tragedies.
Align the demo updates with the larger product launches, so that you're highlighting some of the major product updates in the canned demo. I've found what works best in delivering canned demos is to create a script and get feedback on it from other GTM stakeholders prior to the launch, and then to work with sales enablement to deliver training on the demo and any updated messaging after.
We have been experimenting with a monthly recorded demo presented as a webinar. Our teams can then share out that latest recording with customers and they're never more than a month out from the latest product greatness.
By nature of being a webinar, it saves us from the curse of perfection—we record it live, it does a great job of conveying the value, and we don't obsess over every phrasing.