Sales enablement metrics are the data points you benchmark and track over time pertaining to all facets of your sales enablement program. This data capture might occur in your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, email marketing automation tool or Google Analytics.
Covering marketing and sales content, organizational sales performance and individual key performance indicators (KPI) for each salesperson, your sales enablement metrics should paint an informed, data-driven picture of your company’s success.
Analytics in the sales cycle: starter metrics to know
Quota attainment for your sales reps is made all the more easy when they have as much prospect information as possible in advance of all meetings.
This might be the prospect’s:
- Occupation
- Industry
- Internal buyer persona they map to
- Specific business needs or pain points
- History of prior interactions with your company
That latter point (prior interactions) might be as simple as downloading a past ebook your marketing team created or “liking” one of your social media posts. It might also be further down the funnel in the form of past purchases. You might refer to these as consumption metrics: They give you more clues about how the prospect “consumes” your marketing or your product at a surface level but not much else.
ROI metrics
Then there are the more sales-specific metrics that correlate to:
- Dollar amounts
- Conversion rates
- Win rates
- Deals closed
These are the bottom-line KPIs that drive revenue — the ones your boss cares most about. You might call these macro or ROI metrics, since they’re tied to hard figures and are the larger commercial goals your company has.
Micro metrics
Underneath (or just prior to) the above touchpoints are micro metrics, which are significantly important to your organization’s overall sales success but not always dollar-driven, such as:
- Duration of successful sales calls
- Length of time a warm lead spends in each phase of the sales funnel
- How quickly and efficiently a lead was nurtured to closed won
You can see how your micro metrics tell a more nuanced story than your macro metrics. This subtext is just as important.
Conversational or call metrics
Depending on how advanced your business’s analytics tools are — and if they were recording the interaction — you can run data on even more granular details like:
- Word choice
- Phrase repetition
- Body language
- Overall demeanor and responsiveness
What words, tone, storytelling and rhetoric were used by salespeople to close a deal? Human interactions and nonverbal clues may be harder to quantify, but they’re useful nonetheless.
Whatever data you can gather, the better. Each data point can be stored and then resurfaced for a future purpose, like engaging similar prospects or shortening sales cycles.
Beyond that, all of your enablement efforts — from both sales and marketing — become more sophisticated and targeted. And even if a particular deal ended up not closing today, the analytical insights gleaned from the experience are still wildly invaluable for sales training, prospecting, content creation and more.
Quantifying sales enablement
To develop a genuinely meaningful assessment of your sales process, you can’t rely on data from one sale, or even a handful of them. The sample size is just too small.
At the bare minimum, you’ll need data on a week’s worth of sales to draw any substantial conclusions about how your team performs — using monthly, quarterly or yearly data will be even more effective.
Some of the metrics that can help accurately inform your sales enablement strategy include:
Pure sales data
Along with the basic number of how much your sales team brought in for a given period, you can look at:
- Sales growth or contraction between now and some point in the past
- The sales target you intended to hit for the period
- Transactions closed by each sales rep and sales by region
Product performance
Quantity and dollar value of sales broken down item by item. For example, which products are selling best, and which are falling out of favor for whatever reason? Can you map product performance to sales rep performance? Perhaps some sales agents are better suited for certain verticals and products.
Cannibalization rate
The degree to which new product sales are adversely affecting the sale of the old standbys in your product catalog is key. A high cannibalization rate is unfavorable because it means you aren’t keeping customers interested in your established offerings, thus causing total sales to vary wildly.
Lead conversion rate
This is the percentage measurement of how many leads are ultimately converted into completed sales.
Quote-to-close
A quote-to-close ratio is the number of would-be sales conversations that reach a quoted price against how many closed deals actually go through.
Opportunities
Opportunities, generally, are the measurement of a sale’s value vis a vis how likely it is that the deal can actually be done.
Average purchase value
Simply defined as how much revenue the average closed sale brings in.
Each of these KPIs can lead to valuable insights when gathered with a reputable sales enablement platform and carefully, critically examined by team leadership.
How sales KPIs become sales enablement solutions
The quality of your sales enablement program will ultimately determine the value of your sales team to the organization. As a result, it’s critical that you properly evaluate it.
You can do this by cross-referencing all metrics through different channels and tools, and also head-to-head against specific sales reps past and present. Additionally, sales leaders might consider creating a sales assessment or sales matrix to better quantify and compare sales performance in a way that makes the most sense to your organization.
Perhaps you’ll find that some members of the team are having a run of good luck but their success is more a matter of chance. Meanwhile, you may also be able to determine that another one of your reps is having a rough start yet still has a great deal of untapped potential. It’s really all a matter of looking comprehensively at the right information in the proper context and applying it correctly.
Using the training interfaces available on the Showpad Coach platform, you can provide your novice reps with a wide range of training exercises. This will help them learn how to address hypothetical situations that might come up on sales calls before they’re thrown into real meetings. Tracking the progress of your team’s newest members in real time and assigning them scores according to appropriate KPIs is made possible by Showpad’s AI-driven platform.
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