Sales Enablement: what are the most important KPIs to measure?

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How do you assess the ROI of your Sales Enablement solution? What are the best metrics and KPIs to track to spot the best practices and make the necessary adjustments? In this blog post, Touch & Sell outlines the key Sales Enablement KPIs to track based on your business objectives. Let’s get started!

#1 I want to reduce the average customer acquisition cost

In order to become more profitable, you need to reduce the amount of resources allocated to acquire a new customer. Sales Enablement helps you save your salespeople’s time to reduce this particular expense and improve profitability. There are two KPIs to measure your Sales Enablement solution’s ability to achieve this goal:

  • Average number of days from opportunity (Sales Qualified Lead or SQL) to close, also known as Sales Velocity. Make sure that the definitions are harmonized between your different salespeople. The term “Opportunity” or “SQL” must mean the same thing for the entire team. So, make sure you are comparing apples to apples.
  • If you want to go further, you can keep an eye on the duration (in number of days) of each step of the SQL journey: quote formulation, negotiation, closing, discovery call, demo, etc.

#2 I want to increase my sales team’s activity

It’s obviously the number one goal of all sales managers, and for good reason: salespeople spend a lot of time “around” sales. According to CSO Insights, Sales people spend 33% of their time actively selling. How do you monitor active selling time? Logged sales activities are the only quantifiable measure of time spent engaged in active selling activity: how many calls are made per day, how many emails are sent, customer appointments, etc. You have two options:

  • Set up your CRM to include all logged sales activities and generate detailed reports;
  • Ask your sales team to track all logged sales activities diligently. This might feel like micromanagement and it can be difficult to get buy-in. Make it clear to your salespeople that you are simply trying to clear the path for them to get the job done.

The increase in the number of logged sales activities (calls, emails, appointments) is a great indicator of the performance of your Sales Enablement program.  For example, the Touch & Sell platform allows you to save up to 1 year of man-days on the optimization of document search by sales people.

#3 I want to assess the impact of coaching and training on sales

Your salespeople must improve their skills on an ongoing basis in order to achieve their goals. They must be up to speed on selling techniques as well as understanding your clients’ needs (business sector, challenges, expectations, etc.). This is an absolute prerequisite for engaging buyers and driving conversion.

The sales department must provide salespeople with training adapted to their individual level. It is important to include team leaders in the design of coaching and training programs as they have a good understanding of each salesperson’s background, strengths and weaknesses.

The next step is to assess the salespeople’s buy-in and how they actually use the learning resources provided to them. Your Sales Enablement platform allows you to track each salesperson’s progress through the training process to make the right decisions. Once the training course is complete, you can simply compare your salespeople’s performance with the pre-training sales benchmark.

#4 I want to improve the onboarding process for new hires

Sales Enablement can (and should) reduce the amount of time it takes a new salesperson to complete training and reach full productivity (Ramp-up Time). You can monitor two key KPIs:

  • The time it takes for each new salesperson to make their first sale on his/her own.
  • The time it takes for each new salesperson to achieve sales objectives without assistance.

Again, you’ll need to compare the results with a benchmark from before the implementation of a Sales Enablement program. Our customers report that their onboarding process is twice as fast since they implemented the Touch & Sell platform.