According to SaasWorthy, "Sales enablement's presence correlates with a 31% improvement in supporting changes in sales messaging, with a 15% improvement in improving low-performing salespersons.
"Firms with sales enablement teams are around 52% more likely to have a sales process well aligned with the buyer's journey."
While enablement trends started with sales, the utility has since caught on to other departments. Better enablement programs will lead to faster onboarding of employees, align messaging and product knowledge across the revenue team, and integrate core company values and culture into the workstream from day one.
It's becoming more common to see enablement reach across marketing through customer success. In this market, customer success is getting more enablement attention than ever before, with "[o]ver 72% of the businesses surveyed by Forrester Research say that improving customer success would be their top priority."
Because business leaders have clear goals when hiring enablement professionals, it makes sense to set up a reporting structure that helps the enablement team prove those goals are being realized.
Onboarding efficiencies can be found through several approaches:
The one consistent area of measurement across all departments should be the time it takes new employees to complete administrative onboarding tasks. For example, validating all employees receive their laptops before their first day with the necessary software, having a guided onboarding session that walks through everything from email signature line setup to logging into your benefits portal, completing on-demand training around company policies, and documenting finalized benefits selections.
When it comes to revenue enablement, your metrics will be more variable. Some training sessions can be applied across the go-to-market team, while others need more specialized training. We'll overview some useful statistics to use for measuring a shorter time to productivity broken out by department.
Admittedly, marketing will be harder to measure because their work is spread across many systems, depending on their specialty. Your marketing leaders must monitor a demonstrated understanding of the core concepts covered in training. Critical areas of emphasis include target market knowledge, understanding of the pains and gains your product touches for your key personas, and messaging.
For marketing enablement, you may need to rely on training completion statistics to demonstrate speed to onboarding more heavily than other departments.
Individual performance has always been the focus of any salesperson, and we'll use variations of common performance indicators to gauge the effectiveness of your new onboarding program. These measurements should include the following:
The idea is to create a report that shows the historical onboarding of all existing sales representatives to develop a benchmark to show improvement over time.
Time to productivity can be more ethereal for account managers, but technical support is straightforward.
Account managers will be measured by how long they can assume a complete book of business from their hire date. We'll also need to determine whether managers shadow account managers in the early days to know whether time to independent call management is a metric we should include.
Technical support will be measured as productive by:
You may also consider layering on the complexity of tickets resolved.
Companies often first invest in enablement because they recognize their time to productivity is longer than they'd like. It's normal for companies to shift their focus to creating more consistent outcomes across departments once they feel their time to productivity is acceptable.
Once a training program is introduced to your marketing department, your business expects more consistent campaign performance across functional areas. An improved understanding of your customer should result in the following:
Once again, the nature of a salesperson's job makes measuring performance improvements very straightforward. Ways to measure impact include:
We'll measure several customer satisfaction metrics and time to value to understand the impact of customer success enablement. We should see the following:
You'll need to define what "value" means for your customer and create consistent customer benchmarks beyond the onboarding process. These should include product adoption metrics and satisfaction scores.
Enablement should positively impact your ability to retain your employees. Feeling connected to an organization can be difficult if you're a fully remote employee. Enablement tracks are a fantastic excuse to bring together remote employees for in-person training.
The goal is to measure whether more of your employees are sticking around during their first year of employment and beyond.
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To prove enablement efficacy, ask your enablement team and business leaders to define what they hope to get from the enablement program. They may be solely focused on decreasing the time from date of hire to fully productive, or their goal may be to elevate their average employee's performance. In either case, you can use several metrics for each department to measure gains in your go-to-market team's performance.
For a visual representation of how enablement effectiveness can be measured for your organization, check out our enablement scorecard template.
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