What is sales enablement?

The term sales enablement has come to mean different things to different people, depending on their industry or company. At Seismic, we consider sales enablement the process of equipping sellers with the resources, content and technology to sell effectively. In essence, the tools your sellers use to engage buyers fall under the umbrella of sales enablement.

Benefits of sales enablement

The way your organisation approaches sales enablement will vary based on the needs of your business, its sellers and customers. Depending on your goals and objectives, there are several ways your organisation might define success. We’ve identified a handful of ways sales enablement can positively impact your organisation: 

  • Cross-functional alignment: When sales operations, marketing and sales enablement teams work together great things can happen. Having your go-to-market engine work together to create resources and share ideas can make life easier for everyone, including your sellers.
  • Streamlined workflows: When sellers have access to the right tools and information, they can work more efficiently, without jumping across multiple disparate systems.
  • Improved buyer engagement: Sales enablement software includes capabilities that allow sellers to personalise content at scale, which is critical because most buyers won’t buy from sellers who fail to personalise their outreach.  
Why it’s important to measure sales enablement success

On paper, sales enablement sounds like a no-brainer investment. However, it is still imperative to track the ongoing progress of your sales enablement framework. After all, it would be a waste of time, energy and resources without measuring its impact. And when it comes to sales enablement, success data and metrics should be reviewed often to determine if it’s actually working. Despite this importance, only 68% of organisations feel confident in the data they use to track the effectiveness of their sales enablement efforts.

Want to start putting the numbers in your favour? In the next few sections, we’ll explain what metrics to keep an eye on and how to measure sales enablement success.

Sales enablement metrics to measure

The truth is, the success of your sales enablement system is most clearly observed in the way that the day-to-day activities of your sellers improve. However, it’s important to look at a few key metrics for a more eagle-eyed view of the situation. Here’s a breakdown of some key performance indicators to track in your team’s sales enablement dashboard. 

Sales activity metrics

Sales activity metrics track the overall performance and behaviour of your sales team. They can include things like how many calls a seller makes in a day, and can highlight weak spots in your sellers’ productivity or sales enablement process. Some good places to start checking in on your sellers include:

  • Time to quota attainment: This is the time it takes a seller to hit their sales target, either in terms of quantity of sales deals or total ARR. Shorter quota attainment cycles can indicate that enablement helps reps close deals faster.
  • Actual selling time: This is the amount of time a seller spends on selling activities like outreach, follow-up and content generation. Enablement makes sellers more successful because it helps limit the time sellers spend looking for content and increases the time they spend selling. 
  • Discovery call to meeting conversion: Discovery calls are an important step of the sales process, but sellers still need to encourage prospects to then schedule a follow-up meeting. Measuring this rate can help you identify if your sales reps have been enabled with the skills and knowledge to effectively communicate the benefits with buyers. 
  • Lead pipeline: A sales pipeline dashboard tracks the number of prospects each seller brings into the deal cycle.

Sales enablement content effectiveness

It’s also essential to understand the impact your sales enablement content has on deals. After all, the content your prospects access can make or break a deal. This can also help teams better understand what content is most useful to sellers and popular with buyers. When studying your content performance, consider spending time on:

  • Content accessed by buyers: This is the amount of content that buyers engage with throughout the deal cycle.
  • Content accessed by sellers: This metric tracks the content your sellers leverage and share with buyers. It is also important to track how often your sellers search, utilise and engage with this content over time.
  • Content-influenced revenue: This metric measures how content is connected to closed-won opportunities. 

Sales enablement training

Sales training and coaching play a significant role in sales enablement. This portion of your sales enablement strategy equips sellers with the skills and knowledge they need to understand your organisation’s sales process, its content and buyer personas. The following metrics can be used to measure training and coaching:

  • New hire ramp time: This determines how long it takes a new hire to complete training and reach full sales productivity. Ideally, sales enablement helps ramp new hires faster so they can quickly contribute to sales goals and your organisation’s bottom line.
  • Training completion rates: How often do sellers complete training before a sales call or interaction? If there is a training topic that’s accessed by your most successful sellers, it can be leveraged as a best practice across your sales organisation.
  • Training engagement rates: While training completion is important to review, it’s also helpful to track if and how often a seller revisits training and how they interact with training content. 

By keeping track of seller behaviour, performance metrics, content effectiveness and training activity, go-to-market teams can identify trends and patterns with their sales enablement strategy. This will make it easier to determine what is working and what needs improvement to ensure sales enablement is driving the most success possible.

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Teams achieve sales enablement success with Seismic

While it may seem daunting to track the success of sales enablement in your organisation, there are tools that can help make this essential task easier than ever. The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ offers your organisation the tools to track essential metrics. By utilising a cohesive sales enablement platform, you can easily view the data and information you want when you want to get a holistic view of your enablement efforts. Click here to see how one customer increased win rates by 9% and sales pipeline by 7%. Or, click here to get a demo today!