Over the last few years, sales enablement has become all the rage in business circles. The majority of companies have now adopted sales enablement program for their sales teams. Those who haven’t yet invested in are planning to do so in the near future.
What is sales enablement?
The term encompasses everything you do to empower your sales team for success. It includes training, development, and learning, but it goes far beyond one-day workshops. It includes the tools you provide them, and the content you create for their use. Finally, it also refers to strategies, techniques, and tactics, as well as attitudes and ideologies in the sales department.
Once you’ve adopted a program for your sales team, you’ll want to keep an eye on performance. After all, you need to be able to prove that this new initiative is delivering results. If it isn’t, you want to know so you can fix it.
Which metrics should you be monitoring?
It’s been reported that sales enablement programs improve quota attainment drastically within most companies. Essentially, with a program in place, more of your salespeople will achieve their quotas more often.
This will also show in quota attainment distribution. Without an enablement program, your core performers will have fairly solid performance. Only your star reps will be routinely achieving their quotas, however.
A five percent shift in the performance of these middle-of-the-pack sales reps can increase revenue up to 70 percent. This is why you want to see who is now achieving their quota month after month. If performance is shifting for the majority of your sales team, you’re on the right track.
More of your sales reps are achieving quotas more often. That’s great news, and it shows just how well sales enablement is working for your team.
Enablement programs also affect the kinds of deals your reps are winning. With the right program in place, more reps should be able to sell longer and more lucrative deals to clients.
This is one way sales enablement can increase a company’s revenue so drastically. Your reps may be selling more, but the average size and length of the deals they’re selling should also shift upwards.
How long does it take your new sales reps to get up to speed and start selling? Without an enablement program, it takes longer on average.
This is because enablement is aimed at making sure your salespeople have the tools and training they need to be productive and successful. The more support they have, the easier it is for new team members to get into the groove.
Your onboarding time should decrease when you introduce an enablement program. You should also notice higher productivity. This isn’t reflected in sales quota attainment alone. Enablement helps your employees get more done more efficiently.
You can also help determine how successful your program is by measuring selling time. The more time your team can spend selling, the more productive and efficient they’re going to be. If your team can spend more time selling, they’re going to close more deals. It’s as simple as that.
There are so many other tasks that eat up time in the sales department. Sales enablement seeks to reduce the amount of time your sales reps are spending on these other tasksby providing the right tools and tactics to get through them faster.
There are, of course, other metrics you can use to measure enablement success. These are a few of the key metrics, and they can help you determine if your efforts are paying off.