5 Key Questions for Measuring Sales Enablement

One of the best approaches for ensuring more consistent progress with sales enablement efforts is to set KPIs (key performance indicators). You can then set goals, establish how to measure your pursuit of those goals, and have robust historical data to gauge moment-by-moment growth and trend lines. Whether you combine this tried and true approach with SMART goals — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound — or take a different approach, it’s essential to measure your sales enablement initiatives from multiple angles to get the most accurate view. According to research from Gartner, measuring seller behaviors, not conventional conversion statistics, can give you the best insights.

As you set up your goals for the new year or the new quarter, consider these five behavioral aspects:

1. Is Your Library of Knowledge Growing and Being Actively Maintained?

Conventional sales enablement relies on having a solid body of knowledge about your organization’s products and policies. But recent statistics show that “42% of sales reps feel they don’t have enough information before making a call.” That need has remained in today’s organizations, but modern tools make it much more achievable in a fast-paced sales environment. Enable your salespeople with a living resource full of product release details, active promotions, and answers to common client questions at every stage of the sales process. This information makes in-office and remote salespeople more confident and faster. Your organization’s sales managers and RevOps leaders can continually cull old information and add new details, so everything stays up-to-date and accurate.

The Goal: The library (whether it’s a Google Drive, an AI-enabled internal chatbot, or a folder in your CMS) should continually have new documents, SOPs that are reviewed frequently, and no documents that aren’t revised or archived within the past year. Set specific goals for your sales enablement team and decision-makers.

The Method of Measuring Sales Enablement: You can audit the library, regularly request feedback from users about the helpfulness of the library, and test your salespeople about details through AI-enabled simulations. (That last method gives you insight into the quality of your information and how often salespeople use it.)

Related: 4 Reasons Why You Need a Sales Enablement Platform

2. Are Your Sales Reps Actively Engaged With Coaching and Learning Resources?

The strongest sales organizations don’t settle for passive sales enablement, such as email for new products and promotion details. They hone everyone’s skills with ongoing training, coaching, and practice sessions. With AI-enabled sales coaching tools that create personalized micro-lessons, salespeople can benefit from a curated curriculum that targets their weak points and growth goals. But this resource is only helpful if people use it. When you’re building up your training program with a platform, look for options that include these vital features:

• AI-based feedback and scoring mechanisms that can provide objective information for salespeople to grow with
• Micro-lessons are between five and ten minutes long, so training doesn’t disrupt sales activities
• Personalized learning courses so novice salespeople don’t get left behind, and experienced salespeople aren’t stuck covering the same ground
• A focus on conversation and soft skills, which are critical for building rapport with clients in oversaturated, competitive markets
• In-depth analytics that supports constructive criticism for salespeople and helpful profiles for managers, team leads, and the VP of Sales

An AI sales training solution with these features is much more likely to be adopted by every level of your sales team immediately and in the long term. Combine providing the resources with setting objective usage goals to see radical improvements in sales performance.

The Goal: set specific goals for both scores and time spent on training for each of your sales reps. This measures improvement and effort, and that dual set of objectives is helpful. After all, struggling salespeople who continue to put time and effort into learning new skills can be just as valuable (or even more) as less motivated salespeople with more natural talent.

The Method of Measuring Sales Enablement: AI-based sales coaching platforms gather lots of raw data that the suitable algorithms can measure, analyze, and assess, giving you:

• Suggestions for areas of focus
• More personalized courses for sales reps
• Performance overviews for internal performance reviews
• A “conversational IQ” (C-IQ) score that dives into a salesperson’s emotional intelligence and ability to build rapport, something that’s virtually impossible to measure with conventional training

3. Is Your Team Taking Action on Common Knowledge Gaps and Problems?

A bit of meta-analysis for your sales enablement initiatives will go a long way in paving the path to success. A robust AI coaching platform can train your representatives on sales tactics, conversational cues and redirections, and everything. It can even point to common areas of misunderstanding or weak points that several reps struggle with. But your sales managers and RevOps leaders need to be the ones to use these insights to correct these common failures proactively. Do all of your sales reps use outdated phrasing that used to be required in an old promotion? Is it clear that a pocket of new hires missed a vital email or informational resource from three months ago? By examining the connections between remedial lessons and low scores, you can help your team spend more time enhancing their skills instead of having to relearn company information.

The Goal: Set aside time every month or quarter to review team-wide trend lines and focus on the negative. Address common misunderstandings with correction emails and announcements on Slack, as well as by correcting information in the resource library.

The Method of Measuring Sales Enablement: You can measure activity at these meetings and the achievement of new resources and communications based on the trend lines. You can also see if knowledge gaps or wrong answers disappear across the next month or quarter.

4. Is Coaching and Training Interrupting Work and Client Outreach?

So far, you’ve measured passive resources, active training, and information improvement. The fourth smart way to measure sales enablement is to see if functional training and coaching should take less time away from work. This is a common issue with conventional training approaches because:

• Group training sessions can take up a whole day: Dedicating blocks of time to training exercises used to be a necessary evil. Whether it was a single day, a half-day, or the better part of a week, training managers used to have to take teams aside for informational meetings, training, and practice sessions. This would leave salespeople scrambling to catch up at the end of the day or significantly delay communications with hot leads.
• Training managers were too busy to provide individualized attention or review assessments: One-on-one sessions are precious. But a training manager can only commit to so many a day, and that meant reps would receive personalized sessions infrequently, if at all. Busy sales managers also can’t dedicate time to assessing the training results and providing detailed feedback that could push employees to the next level of performance. 

However, this is no longer the case. AI coaching platforms can provide completely personalized lessons and objective feedback for all your salespeople at any time. Dozens of salespeople can complete different types of training throughout the workday and immediately receive feedback or even get in-the-moment prompts. It’s a better way to train. Your sales managers can spend more time analyzing the collected data and putting salespeople in the positions that fit them best, setting goals, and improving resources.

Short lessons that can be completed within five to ten minutes whenever an employee has a slow period is even more beneficial—and impossible in a traditional setup where they’d need to track down a training manager and hope their schedule is empty.

The Goal: Set goals for how many lessons need to be completed within a set window or what level of training each sales rep needs to reach. Because the assignments can be completed within the regular workday and throughout their daily workflows, there’s no reason why each salesperson can’t attain these completion-based goals. 

Set a secondary measure: See if there’s a drop-off in client-facing production or revenue goals. This should be different with readily available micro-lessons, but you can use this data to revise how ambitious the progress goals should be.

The Method of Measuring Sales Enablement: Use analytics and completion reports from the AI platform. You can generate reports to see who has finished their sessions, who need to catch up, and who failed to meet their goals.

Related: Crucial Metrics You Need to Include in Your Sales Team Evaluation to Measure and Track Performance

5. What’s Each Rep’s Conversational IQ?

The conversation is the key to good sales. You can build rapport with hesitant leads, get to the heart of existing pain points or pricing questions with key client accounts, and ensure customer satisfaction to maximize lifetime customer value. But measuring conversational capabilities is tricky: how does a training manager measure something as undefined and seemingly unobjective as conversational skills? 

Today, AI can get it done. Look for an AI training resource that’s robust enough to measure hundreds of small, nearly invisible conversational cues that determine whether or not a sales conversation is “good.” Taking a deeply analytical approach, instead of just a results-based one, is significantly more efficient when identifying solid points and better salespeople.

The Goal: Set a flat minimum score or an improvement percentage for each sales rep. Creating customized goals based on possible growth keeps motivation (and results) high.

The Method of Measuring Sales Enablement: Measuring conversational IQ requires having the right platform to measure and grow sales professionals’ C-IQ.

Start Measuring Sales Enablement and Reaching Your Objectives With Quantified

Our AI-powered Quantified platform makes sales enablement easier — and more straightforward to measure — than ever before. Power your understanding of your team’s skills, sales enablement efforts, and more with a platform that creates personalized lessons and objective feedback. With our signature C-IQ measurement capabilities, we can help your organization zero in on the right seller behaviors for any niche or buyer persona. Contact us today to learn more about our solutions or to schedule a demo.