Sales Enablement is a sales strategy that companies are investing in more and more. The reason for this rising popularity is simple: sales enablement increases the performance of sales teams and therefore their output. In its 2021 Sales Enablement Report, Hubspot states that 65% of sales teams that exceeded their goals include a person or team solely dedicated to Sales Enablement .
Integrating one or more people to promote Sales Enablement in your company seems to bring added value, but how do you evaluate the return on investment of such a measure? To ensure the profitability of your Sales Enablement team and make the necessary adjustments, you need to monitor several KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
What is Sales Enablement?
Definition of Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement refers to all techniques that facilitate and increase the performance of sales agents . Sales Enablement is essentially about training, organizational optimization processes and the creation of sales support content. Investing in hardware or software is also a solution to consider to increase sales performance.
It is a true sales strategy whose goal is to give the agent the right resources in the right format so that they can use them at the right time to win over a prospect. In addition to increasing the sales performance of the teams, Sales Enablement has the advantage of increasing their skills.
The benefits of Sales Enablement
When properly implemented and applied, a Sales Enablement strategy has directly measurable effects, starting with a reduction of certain hidden costs and an improvement in the quality of sales agent performance. The benefits of Sales Enablement can be measured in concrete terms:
- more time dedicated to sales: salespeople have the resources they need to make more appointments and therefore more sales;
- efficiency of work tools;
- performance of content created and used for sales.
- The company's attractiveness is enhanced by the use of the latest methods and effective training for its sales force.
What KPIs are used to measure Sales Enablement?
To ensure the effectiveness of your Sales Enablement strategy, there are some key performance indicators to watch out for.
1 - The time spent between the sales opportunity and the closing
Profitability is not only achieved by increasing sales, but also by reducing certain costs. One of these is the average cost of customer acquisition. The shorter the time between the sales opportunity and the conversion, the lower the customer acquisition cost. One of the objectives of Sales Enablement is to significantly reduce this time.
For a more detailed view of the operations that lead to the conversion, it is possible to segment the time that the conversion takes into several subdivisions. Thus, we will note the time spent for :
- the establishment of the estimate ;
- negotiation;
- closing;
- the discovery call;
- the demonstration proposal.
2 - The time sales teams spend on selling
If it is impossible to expect sales teams to spend 100% of their time on sales, Sales Enablement can still increase this figure. Indeed, side tasks often interfere with the teams and sometimes significantly reduce the time they spend on sales. Monitoring this KPI is as important as it is challenging, as it involves counting the sales activities of each of your sales people in order to know :
- how many calls were made ;
- how many emails were sent;
- how many customer appointments have been made.
This data is essential to determine the effectiveness of your sales teams and your sales enablement strategy in general. So any variation in these numbers is significant!
3 - The conversion rate
The conversion rate indicates how many prospects have passed the stage of a sales agreement and have become customers. This data is extremely important and has a direct influence on the sales performance of a team. The key is the transition from MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). Communicating the details of these qualified leads is critical. The more data marketing teams provide to sales teams about why a sale was not closed or closed, the more refined the sales enablement strategy can be. Similarly, feedback from sales to marketing teams allows them to better identify which strategies are working and which ones need to be reviewed. This is why the collaboration between marketing and sales is so important!
4 - Retention rate
The equation is simple: the longer an individual remains a customer of a company, the more profit the company generates for a low acquisition cost. It is always more profitable to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. Moreover, a loyal customer holds more opportunities for a company than an occasional customer. Indeed, it :
- will tend to talk about the company to his relatives;
- requires little time on the part of the marketing teams, since they are already convinced;
- is a privileged source of feedback on your company, since he has known it for a long time and can give information on the perception he has of it in terms of evolution, image and general satisfaction. Just remember to ask for their opinion!
5 - The success rate of upsell sales
Upselling is a sales technique aimed at increasing the cost of the average customer basket by offering a product of higher quality and price than the one they are about to purchase. The margin realized by the company on this commercial act is more important, so the success rate of such a sales technique is a KPI to analyze.
6 - The success rate of cross-sell sales
The cross-sell also aims to increase the cost of the average basket, but by offering the customer one or more products that complement the product that was the initial object of the purchase. It is therefore about taking advantage of the opportunity of a simple purchase to increase the number of items in the basket. As with upsell, the success rate of the cross-sell is an important KPI to get an idea of the progress made by Sales Enablement.
Sweet Show: the solution to easily monitor critical KPIs
Sweet Show is an application designed to help companies carry out their marketing and sales actions jointly in order to harmonize the follow-up of files and to gain time and efficiency. The Sweet Show solution offers many advantages, including:
- centralization of information on each client to keep files always up to date.
- the collection of data and its relevant exploitation.
- Reducing the time spent by salespeople on non-sales tasks.
- a real harmonization between the marketing and sales teams.
- Facilitation of both up-sell and cross-sell.
- a better understanding of the customers and therefore a better chance to retain them.
Designed to help companies better think through their Sales Enablement strategy, the Sweet Show app allows them to monitor important KPIs and discern changes to processes that are not profitable enough. Find out more about the app's other features, request a demo!
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