Your marketing and sales efforts are heavily dependent on each other. Many organizations have both teams on their staff and some more than others are working separately to reach individual department goals.
Sales Enablement is a term that gets constantly brought up in many organizations, but is usually a concept that gets either pushed to the wayside or lost in the shuffle. Its potential benefits to your organization however, need to be considered, pursued and implemented to further improve your sales and marketing efforts.
Whether you are just getting started with a sales enablement platform or strategy or looking to improve your current efforts, there needs to be an accurate way to measure your success over time and learn new ways to continue helping your prospects down the funnel to becoming customers.
So how do you measure your sales enablement efforts effectively and successfully? Take a look at these ways to get you going on the right path:
1. “Ask Why”
In order to begin measuring your sales enablement efforts, we need to get back to why we are implementing or have implemented this type of strategy to our organization.
For you, it could mean that marketing is providing a consistent amount of leads and traffic, but your close rate after they’ve been handed to sales is low. Or, your looking to get a better handle on your marketing efforts and what is working with your sales team.
Take a look at the visualization at how sales enablement sits within the modern day sales funnel:
Implementing or improving on your sales enablement strategy or function can change the overall focus of your organization and move it from a very operational focus of days past to a very strategic focus.
Organizations with an effective sales enablement function were:
Demand Metric and HubSpot Joint Study 2013
By looking back at the question of why, you can begin brainstorming the key measuring factors to create and further move your efforts down the funnel.
2. Measure Effectively
You’ve gone back to analyze the why in your strategy and can now begin to put together the pieces to measuring the successes of your strategy. Your results can always can be sent back to a handful of metrics (Conversion Rates, Clickthroughs, Time to Quota), but that’s not the only piece you should be considering.
When looking at sales enablement (and with most launches of new initiatives), there needs to be a gradual approach to success. Trying to implement a sales enablement solution with a one-time initiative will never work and will most certainly fall to the wayside after a couple of weeks. Condense your efforts into multiple steps for an increased success rate and to keep it constantly on the minds of your sales and marketing teams (chat clients, email addresses set to sales and marketing only and other internal systems are great ways to keeping all of your feedback in one place).
HighSpot has a great five-stage maturity model to getting started at measuring your organizational success. This is a great example to see where you are at now and to better understand where you need to go. Although this doesn’t cover everything involved with the sales enablement process, it touches most of the points you’ll need to look at for success.
HighSpot’s 5 Stage Maturity Model
A great way of getting started is sitting in on these conversations (as marketers) or listening to recordings of these conversations or email chains to find out exactly what types of questions your prospects are asking. From here, you can identify frequently asked questions as potential places to begin supplying content to your reps.
3. Analyze and Refine On Your Results
Now that you know the why and the what should you be measuring for continued success, now you need to know what to do with this data once it starts coming in from your organization.
What is the feedback you are receiving from your sales reps? Are they even using the tools you are providing? Better yet, how are your prospects doing post-marketing handoff? By asking these types of questions to your sales teams, you can begin to refine your approaches to what’s working and make improvements to what’s lacking and not working in your approach.
In the end, implementing a sales enablement strategy is an ideal approach to improving your sales efforts and aligning your marketing messaging and efforts with your organization. With the measuring in place, you can begin to show actionable results to help propel your results into the stratosphere.
Are you utilizing sales enablement efforts for your organization? If so, what are some ways you’re currently measuring your success?
