One of the many perks of attending our live sales enablement events is that you get to ask your questions to some of the industry’s biggest names in real-time. Whether it’s been a question you’ve been itching to get an answer to for a while or a spur-of-the-moment curiosity, you have the opportunity to find out what our speakers think.

We’re rewinding to last May’s Sales Enablement Festival and the discussion around the key metrics to unlock your sales enablement success.

The panel was led by our expert enablement panel of Julie Greenfield, Head of Revenue Enablement at Central Square Technologies, Carly Lehner , Head of Revenue Enablement at Andela, and Uttam Reddy, VP for Global Sales Enablement Strategy at Rackspace.

The panel covered everything you need to know about to see tangible sales enablement results, including:

The full event replay, with every single second, is available with an SEC membership. Sign up today and get access to replays, exclusive content, discounts, and more.



Q: What does success in enablement look like?

Uttam:  “Since I've been at the company, it’s about the success of our customer-facing reps.

“What that means is: ‘are we having our sellers do their best work and be the most productive in terms of generating the revenue and outcomes that we expect?’

It's really about whether I am letting them do their best work, am I enabling them?”

Carly: “One of the important things for enablement is to align enablement success metrics to the goals of the overall company.

“Enablement typically aligns really closely to the revenue target. So, how are we going to reach our revenue target?

“If we're adding more reps, how quickly can our reps be effective when they start? So ramp-up time is a good way to look at the success of enablement.

“If we're expanding our product and services offering it's about the uptake of new products within the field. How quickly are we getting to our desired targets for those products and services?”

Q: How are expectations communicated across your organization?

Julie: “It's not just about the sales organisation, expectations need to be communicated, understood, and set across the board. Why? Because that drives our behaviors.

“If I'm being measured with a very specific measurement, and my colleague in another department doesn't understand the behaviors I'm doing, why does it matter?

"We're going to have some conflicts because there's a different understanding of what's a priority, and that's when we see those silos.”

Carly: “It's obviously super important to be transparent with any revenue employee about what they are expected to do, otherwise, it's hard to hold them accountable to any sort of performance metric.

“In my previous company, we were very regimented about saying on a consistent basis that you need to bring in two deals a month, you need to have four qualified pipeline opportunities added to your pipeline, and you need to have 25 client meetings in a month.

What we would do is every month, we had an all-hands meeting, where we would highlight the top 10 people in each of those metrics.

"People knew exactly what they were supposed to be achieving every month, and we would celebrate it.”



Q: What are the key metrics to focus on in enablement to drive up performance?

Uttam: “We're trying to triangulate outcomes to enablement.

“So is there a correlation between the people that are more successful, and being tied to the enablement assets?

Are they consuming all the different things that we put in front of them? Are they using them effectively? Is it reflected in their performance?

“We have amazing sellers, and we don't want to take credit for someone selling something, but what we are trying to do is find those threads of correlation that show that the sellers that are taking advantage of the different enablement assets we’re creating for them are translating it into outcomes.”

Carly:

“Onboarding metrics. I like to measure time-to-first-sale, but also time-to-second-sale. When a new hire starts, sometimes they'll inherit opportunities from their predecessor. While it's great to get a win, I also want to know when their first truly generated sale from themselves is.

“I've seen new hires get a sale within like their first like five days when typically our sales cycles are like 30. It's great to have that right off the bat, it builds learner confidence. But it's not necessarily a good leading indicator, because sometimes we get lucky. So I like to measure a second sale as well and see if it's following the average deal time.

One of the things that I really like from an ongoing rep performance perspective, is this metric of consistency of contribution.

“We can look at quota attainment, and that's a fairly obvious one. What percentage of our reps are meeting quota? Is this individual rep meeting quota? If they are, that's great.

“But if the expectation is that rep should sell five deals a month, how consistently are they hitting that expectation? Because in a quarter, a rep could meet quota by selling 15 deals in one month, even though the target is five for every three months.

“I want to know how consistently they are contributing to the revenue.”

Julie: “I think looking at continuous improvement is important. The piece that I start to really get nuanced and specific with sellers is time between stages.

“That's where we're really able to identify that this seller is having trouble because they're stage of discovery is longer than their peers, and then going back historically, and looking at the data to find trends.

Then we can go and develop programmes around skills development specifically in those areas.

"That can go across the board. It's not necessarily our new hire, it could be somebody who's been here 3 to 6 months, even longer, and it’s negotiation and close where we see some trouble happening.

“So time between sales stages, that's a metric that we start to look at as we look at more of a maturity model.”


Looking to become an enablement metrics whiz? Our Enablement Metrics: Masters course is made for you.

Master the metric mindset with this course and propel your sales enablement activities and impact to new heights.

Elevate your enablement.