Everyone wants to succeed. Nobody starts a business because they have some savings they need to get rid of or because their lifelong dream is to barely break even, right? But let’s face it, the B2B landscape is pretty dog-eat-dog. If you want to lead the pack, then you’ll have to work at it. The first step is creating a sales enablement strategy. The next step is defining your top sales enablement metrics and KPIs and then tracking them diligently.
But it can be hard to know what’s important to track and what sales enablement metrics just amount to noise.
Some sales enablement metrics can be important to the bigger picture, while others are relevant to specific goals. Many of these KPIs overlap or measure the same thing in different ways. However, some metrics are just distractions you don’t need that only serve to take your focus off of what’s really important.
But if that sounds way too complicated, you’re not alone. That’s why we’re going to help you cut through that pile of benchmarks and pick out the ones that matter to your B2B business. That way, your sales enablement seeds can grow into fully realized profits.
Read on to learn:
- What a sales enablement strategy is
- Why measurement is so vital
- What KPIs actually matter, according to experts
- What each metric actually means for your business
Get out your abacus and warm up your calculator. Let’s dive right in.
What is a sales enablement strategy?
A sales enablement strategy is the process of having your content management team create specific sales enablement content to help your salespeople close deals. Basically, your marketing team creates content like case studies and message templates to provide potential customers and sales teams with the information they need to improve the sales process.
Content is created for each stage of the buyer’s journey to help move customers down the sales funnel. The right sales enablement initiatives and sales training can substantially improve sales rep performance. Having a sales enablement program can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your sales strategy.
Why is measurement key to sales enablement success?
The saying, “What gets measured gets improved,” attributed to Peter F. Drucker, a management consultant and author of “The Effective Executive,” has become a business cliché because it truly works. Without clear key performance indicators (KPIs), you have no metric for determining your progress or whether your sales enablement team’s efforts are having an impact.
Without clear sales goals, you can’t be on the right track or the wrong one. However, once you have clear sales targets, you can use sales metrics to measure your progress toward that endpoint.
That’s why tracking sales enablement and other key metrics is vital. You can’t know when you’ve improved sales KPIs that you aren’t measuring, right? So, that’s where progress must begin: identifying your most important metrics and tracking them to see if your sales enablement tools are helping you achieve your goals.
Top 10 sales enablement metrics and KPIs to measure
There’s a vast difference between knowing that you need to measure sales enablement efforts and knowing which sales enablement metrics are worth tracking. There are endless KPIs you can measure. But not all of them will help you increase your sales productivity. That’s why we’ve compiled the top ten sales enablement metrics that the experts say will help you achieve revenue growth.
1. Sales cycle length
Your sales cycle is the time from your first contact with a potential customer to closing the deal. Every industry has a different average sales cycle length. On average, for B2B businesses, it’s around 102 days.
To measure your business’s average sales cycle length, track the time from the initial customer contact to the sale for every customer over a given period. Then, divide by the total number of sales cycles tracked. That’s how fast you’re closing deals on average.
2. Pipeline creation
Pipeline creation or pipeline generation measures the number of opportunities added to your sales pipeline over a given period of time. This will help you see how much outreach your sales team members perform.
You can track new customer contacts in your customer relationship management system (CRM). Consistent outreach ensures new opportunities are always being added to allow for steady sales.
3. Quota attainment
Quota attainment is the path to better sales volumes. This is how you see if your sales teams are meeting their goals. Simply divide the number of sales made by the sales quota and then multiply by 100 to get the quota attainment percentage.
For example, if you had a sales goal of $100,000 and the actual sales amounted to $80,000, then the sales quota attainment is 80 percent. This can be done by sales value or number of sales closed. You can find the quota attainment percentage for sales teams or individual sales reps to find your sales leaders.
4. Onboarding time
Onboarding time is just what it sounds like: how long it takes to complete the onboarding process from start to finish. This can be for new hires in your sales organization or for customers learning to use your product. Measuring your onboarding time for new sales reps is important because the faster they get up to speed, the sooner they make sales.
5. Target completion
Target completion is one of the most important sales enablement metrics to track because it shows you who is meeting what goals. Targets can be anything from meetings, phone calls, and sales pitches to leads added, opportunities created, and sales volume. If your reps are meeting their target for certain sales activities but not others, you know where to focus your efforts to improve your bottom line.
6. Lead-to-customer conversion rate
This one is also self-explanatory. A lead-to-customer conversion rate tracks the percentage of leads who eventually become customers. This is how you can tell if you have an effective sales process. If you routinely have very few leads that pay off, you know you need to improve your sales enablement process.
7. Average win rate
The average win rate is very similar to the lead-to-customer conversion rate. The only difference is that it tracks the number of opportunities won as a percentage of total opportunities instead of the number of leads converted. The difference between leads and opportunities is their position in the sales funnel.
A lead is any potential customer at the top of the sales funnel. Opportunities are qualified leads who are likely to convert. The difference matters because it helps you determine where in your sales funnel the process breaks down, at the top or further down.
8. Average deal size
Average deal size—the total revenue from every deal during a set period divided by the number of deals—helps you evaluate things like how often added discounts are needed to close a deal and how well your sales teams upsell. The larger your average deal size is, the easier it will be to meet and exceed your revenue goals.
9. Internal sales team net promoter score (NPS)
Your internal sales team NPS is a metric for employee happiness and engagement. Employees are happier when they have all the tools they need to do their jobs effectively. Unhappy employees are less effective and more likely to leave.
When they’re happy and engaged, they’re also better advocates for your company and products. Unhappy employees are naturally less convincing when extolling the virtues of your brand and offerings.
10. Sales rep churn rate
Sales rep churn rate, the inverse of your employee retention rate, tracks how many employees will leave over a given period. High churn rates impact your bottom line by increasing training costs. Also, if you frequently need to train replacements for employees who left, your sales teams have less time to spend actually selling.
Think about it. If your employees last only a year on average and your onboarding process takes six months, they only have six months actually spent selling. If they last 18 months on average, they spend twice as much time actively trying to close deals.
Key takeaways
Many factors affect your chances of being a B2B revenue leader, from your sales team proficiency to your sales enablement process and employee engagement. There are dozens of KPIs and sales enablement metrics you could be tracking at any given time. However, these ten are the ones that will make the biggest difference.
These metrics provide a decent overview of all the most influential factors and help you identify where you could improve. When you keep up with these metrics and continuously improve them all, you should have a much easier time moving to the forefront of your industry.
If you want to learn how Docebo’s learning management software (LMS) can help you improve these metrics, then contact us today or book a demo to see what we have to offer. What do you have to lose?
