How To Focus On The Sales Enablement Metrics That Matter

The traditional business mindset has always been, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” There’s no doubt a correlation between powerful sales metrics and overall revenue. As Klipfolio puts it, a business metric is a quantifiable measure that is used to track and assess the status of a specific business process. And there are numerous measurements you can use to track your sales team’s activity like demos pitched, follow up emails sent, calls made, repurchase rates, etc. But all of these metrics usually have one thing in common – they are just numbers that lack insight.

Every business has some sort of accounting system to track what it makes, how much it costs, what it sells, and how much profit or loss it incurs. That is essential. What is also essential is making sure current customers are satisfied and potential customers are intrigued. Without customers, you would have zero business. So why doesn’t every business have a sales enablement system? And of the ones that do, why do they use systems that can be so complex and elaborate that no sales person has the time to constantly update them?

Sales enablement systems should not only provide meaningful analytics but also be easy to use for everyone. These systems will be used by sales and marketing regularly so they need to provide valuable insight into customers and prospects. Marketing can’t provide great sales tools for sales without great data. Think about how much time your marketing team spends putting together an infographic. Now think about how often your sales people actually use it – doesn’t add up, right? Sales people don’t use these tools because they have to spend time searching for content in a complicated system or maybe the sales tools aren’t meeting the needs of the customer. Talk about a “wasted time” metric.

So What Should You Really Be Measuring To Lead Your Company To Long Term Growth With A Powerful Sales Team?

First, step out of the “I need to measure everything” mode. It can be inefficient and cause teams to focus on the wrong things. What’s worse, your sales team will despise it. They will fear getting scrutinized and you could end up hindering their growth. No one wants to live like that. Not everything can be measured, like a breakthrough idea or an awesome contagious attitude. Remember the key is meaningful data stored in a central place accessible by all. This gives your teams visibility so they can track themselves, and in turn, spur a healthy competitive mindset that will inspire them.

Once you’ve abandoned those fluffy metrics, focus on the ones that provide insights into optimizations that will actually drive sales. Total sales per period time, sales by lead source, customer retention rate, ROI, and lead-to-customer conversion rate are some major ones. I’m going to focus on the last two and display how Bloomfire impacts the bottom line to provide real insights into a company’s strengths and weaknesses, while highlighting opportunities for improvement.

ROI

It’s extremely rare that a single sales tool or whitepaper is driving up revenue on its own. Potential customers are exposed to multiple touch points, often making it difficult for marketing to measure which ones are effective. Wouldn’t it be helpful to see your content influence on percentage of closed deals? With our Sales Empowerment tool, you can create a room, add your content, and measure prospect engagement. You can then drill down and see how your content is influencing win percentage since you know what content was shared during each deal. This will lead to a better understanding of your content effectiveness and you use this knowledge to inform your content roadmap and create play books for your reps.

Content Influence On Lead-To-Customer Rate

At every stage of the funnel some deals will be lost. Closely monitoring the funnel will show patterns or common points where prospects drop off. Tracking content given to prospects at different stages is especially helpful here because it will empower sales and marketing teams to view each piece of contents’ overall influence on win percentage. For example, you can track how Case Study X does in comparison to Case Study Y. Do more prospects click on Case Study X? During which stage do they engage with Case Study X the most? These insights will help you understand what content will help propel deals to close by sharing the right content at the right time.
At the end of the day, meaningful quantitative data should help you see into which activities are impacting your bottom line. Use sales enablement metrics that focus on improving sales team efficiencies for the long haul.