Call it flattery if you want but we’re not kidding: enablement is one of the toughest jobs in sales. Only the strong savvy can hack a gig where metrics matter so much—and you have so little way of showing your contribution to them.
Some enablement organizations solve the problem by reporting on narrow metrics—but easily trackable—metrics like training completion and satisfaction. But these metrics don’t connect to the only one the boss really cares about: Money, money, money, money, moooo-ney (sorry about the earworm). Teams committed to improving deal sizes, velocity, time to quota, and win rates get more love from the top, but it’s a risk if they can’t prove direct impact on deals.
Getting credit for meeting goals is tough enough—but not as hard as getting the data and insight you need to meet them. Many organizations create trainings, sales playbooks and other tools in a void, with little way to measure the impact of specific tactics and deliverables.
If you can’t prove which tactics work, it can become open season on your priorities. Every department wants something different from you. Welcome to the land of competing goals. Is it us, or is it getting hot in here?
Drawing a straight line between sales enablement tactics and revenue isn’t easy—but without doing so, how can you get taken seriously as a strategic function? And how can you keep control of your own priorities and strategy? The good news is: proving that connection is definitely possible once you’ve built the right foundation.
Demystifying success
Quickly and effectively onboarding new sellers is one of the hardest tasks—but also the one where you most impact revenue and attrition.
While most of the sellers you’re onboarding really want to do the right thing, using the right content, pitch and sales play can feel like magic or luck. It’s your job to demystify all of it . But if you’re not confident about which tactics work, it’s impossible to help your salesforce.
Traditional sales enablement tools were designed to solve part of this mystery—which sales content works at what moment—but you have to be able to track full life cycle of a sale. And most enablement suites aren’t set up to do it. One way to fix this is to layer tools like Gong and call intelligence into your suite. When your sales team is in the habit of using your enablement tool to host calls, conversations can get recorded and scored—and you can start to see how calls influence deals.
Using call tracking and conversational intelligence puts more tools in your hands to:
- Record the calls that move a sale forward—and share them with your other sellers
- Test new pitches and identify the ones to replicate
- At the individual level, record new sellers’ calls and share scoring results with their managers for feedback and coaching
Measuring training and support success
Training is critical to sales success, and it takes a lot of resources. But it’s also one of the hardest activities to evaluate—training surveys from participants are useful but do they tell you how much the training impacted revenue?
With any big messy problem like this, you need a lot of data to find answers.
For Showpad, enablement requires a holistic approach. Integrating training, testing and coaching with your sales enablement platform creates a direct line between training programs and assets and closed deals. It’s time to forget sales trainee satisfaction and completion (OK, don’t actually toss these vital metrics but they shouldn’t be your only measure), because now you have richer data to evaluate things like:
- Which soft and hard skills drive deal success
- Which training modules the sales reps who made quota quickly took
- Knowledge retention using quizzes
- Which sales playbooks work in faster deals
- Which voicemail and email templates succeed
- Trends about knowledge gaps that need filling team-wide
Most importantly, you can tie training programs and specific trainings, including microlearnings, to sales effectiveness. Understanding which training deliverables deliver the highest ROI is key to spending your training resources effectively. That’s a big deal.
Metrics matter
Leading sales enablement in a complex organization means you don’t have a lot of close contact with sales representatives. So how do you identify skills gaps, best practices and training impact deals: hunches and gut instincts? That won’t take you as far as real data that helps you evaluate and measure how well programs and tactics perform. But as the data grows, so does the need for integrated technology to make sense of it in context.
We’d love to show you how the Showpad suite lets you gather rich data tied to actual deals so you can figure out where to invest your valuable resources. Aaaaaannnnd … getting credit for the work is also nice. Book a custom demo if that sounds good.
