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I recently chatted with my LevelJump colleague Adriana Romero, Director of Enablement Solutions, in a live webinar about which enablement metrics you need to be paying attention to in 2021. 

Here’s what you need to know.

We started by looking at some consumption metrics most enablement teams use, such as content views, video plays, course completion rates, quiz scores, and badges earned. While they all have a place in the enablement metric family, Adriana pointed out that they won’t tell you if someone knows how to overcome objections or position a value proposition. In other words, these don’t really nail down how much the needle moves. And that is what leadership teams want to see. 

How do we know if we are moving the needle? How is enablement making people productive? Look at the sales process and where enablement can have an impact. What did the managers want to impact?  Executives want to measure the time to revenue of a new hire and these were manageable metrics that create a solid overview of productivity.

If you are in sales enablement, you know that marrying your measures directly to revenue outcomes is a never-ending challenge. It is the number one question we get asked on our client calls at LevelJump. Here we break it down for you in four steps that any enabler can follow to tie the two together.

Sales enablement is a broad term that covers a wide gamut of efforts, ultimately aimed at driving more revenue. This includes stuff like tools and processes, but also content, coaching frameworks, and practice spaces for sales to get better at their jobs.

Last week I was lucky enough to sit down and “moderate” (read: shoot the breeze with some cool people) a panel discussion between Matt Biggerstaff, CSM at Gong, Adriana Romero, Sales Enabler at Clearbanc, and our senior CSM here at LevelJump, Becca Shaffer.

In our last webinar, we looked at some of the challenges of ramping reps in Q3 and Q4 to hit your annual quotas.

Here's a glossary of metrics to reference when thinking about assessing and measuring your sales enablement programs. When looking at data & analytics, be sure to understand what you are measuring, why you are measuring and to whom it matters.

Do you know how to measure training effectiveness metrics?

Do you know what needle you need to move to drive business impact?

You might have a long ramp time. Maybe you want to show that you're improving it, cutting it down. But you can't always wait six months to stand in front of your VP of sales to show, “Hey, our onboarding is getting better.”

So what do you do? Today, we’re going to give into how to measure training effectiveness metrics.

Any good sales rep will tell you – the most valuable resource they have is time.

Which is why it’s absolutely critical to both understand and improve your sales productivity.

And sales enablement is the team best poised to help.

What if you could improve ramp time by 5-20% next year? What financial impact would this have?

What metrics should you be measuring specifically to really determine if your sales onboarding program is actually succeeding?

All right, hear me out here. I am really tired of listening to sales enablement managers, or any sales leader for that matter, talking about certifications as the be-all, end-all of sales onboarding.

There’s such a thing as bad a sales enablement solution.

Sales enablement is fundamentally about getting more money into your pockets from the right kinds of customers, faster and more efficiently than before.

And each of those is fairly measurable. 

Which means... 

If your sales enablement solution isn’t tied to one of those, it’s probably not a very good sales enablement solution for actually enabling sales.

I’m shocked at the number of sales enablement professionals I’ve had conversations with who don’t  measure CRM-based sales enablement metrics or milestones for their onboarding and training programs.

So you’ve got a brand new sales rep.

Professional sales training doesn’t come cheap. A 2017 industry report put the cost of training at around $1,800 per person, which can be a hard figure to stomach if you have hundreds of sales reps.

You want your employees to be effective in their new roles as sales reps, but high training costs can leave you between a rock and a hard place.

When it comes to professional sales training, you know that sales reps who know their stuff are bound to be more effective at selling your product. Why gamble on the success of your business, especially given the rising average sales training cost. Investing in your sales team gives you higher levels of sales and loyal employees. The trick is to train your sales team in a way that doesn’t break the bank but does deliver results.

Read on to learn more about the ROI on professional training and how you can maximize the potential of your sales reps.