The PRO Guide: Business Impact of Sales Enablement

Welcome

Many practitioners can agree that one of the most challenging aspects of sales enablement is demonstrating the value that a formal sales enablement function brings to the table. Despite the challenge, doing so is essential to enlisting buy-in from stakeholders, securing a budget for sales enablement initiatives, and postiting sales enablement as a strategic consultant. Demonstrating ROI allows practitioners to build more effective teams, become a respected business partner of the organization, and ultimately earn a seat at the table. Learn how practitioners can quantify and prove impact through alignment, revenue enablement, and measurement.

Quick Links

Aligning to Core Initiatives

Enablement Impact on Revenue

Measuring Sales Enablement Success

Enablement Alignment to Core Objectives

Article

Sales Enablement Analytics: Cross-Functional Alignment is Key

Multiple Authors

4.6K Views | 10 Min Read

Positioned along the core goals of the business

Sales enablement relies on partners across the organization to accurately identify needs, design solutions, and deploy initiatives. As such, alignment is critical to enlist support and work effectively. Taking into account other teams’ goals, ideas, and problems demonstrates that sales enablement initiatives are working towards goals that aid the organization as a whole.

Alignment is important for sales enablement, not only for effectiveness and impact, but also for visibility. Sales reps can often feel like they are being pulled in many different directions. When sales enablement initiatives align with larger business goals, a clear direction is visible from the top-down.

Ultimately, demonstrating the impact of sales enablement on key business objectives ensures that enablement is seen as a strategic consultant—not a “fixer of broken things”. Identifying how sales enablement will play a part in reaching larger goals establishes sales enablement as a part of the solution, and added value to the organization as a whole.

Strategies

Try these strategies to ensure that sales enablement initiatives ladder into larger organizational goals and demonstrate business value:

Meet with Stakeholders regularly

Sales enablement is an inherently collaborative role. Practitioners need to be able to collaborate with teams across the organization to access resources, enlist buy-in, and ultimately help their sales teams. It is essential for sales enablement to be likable, and know how to get a message across to different groups.

Podcast

Episode 58: Jennifer Lopopolo on Defining Clear Foundations for Sales Enablement Deliverables

Multiple Authors

3.1K Views | 14 Min Read

Think holistically and strategically

By thinking outside the individual role of sales enablement and more holistically across the organization, you will need to influence other stakeholders to support your end goals, creating more vested interest in your programs from teams across the company. Demonstrate how sales enablement goals relate to your stakeholder goals by using the same language and clearly defining the benefit to each party.

Article

Best Practices for Cross-Functional Collaboration

Multiple Authors

4.7K Views | 10 Min Read

Get out of the tactical space

If your projects and programs don’t ladder up to a larger company initiative, take a step back and consider if they can, or if they should be discarded. While it’s easy to get consumed in tactical deliverables, they are not moving your business or your organization forward.

Podcast

Episode 76: Jessica Ryker on Aligning with Business Goals to Drive Sales Productivity

Multiple Authors

3.2K Views | 13 Min Read

Establish a formal charter

Establishing a charter can be useful to clearly define and communicate a mission statement for your sales enablement function. By outlining what sales enablement hopes to accomplish, and what steps it will take to get there, stakeholders are informed of the impact sales enablement will have on the organization.

Tool

Defining Your Purpose with a Sales Enablement Charter

Multiple Authors

8.7K Views | 9 Min Read

Enablement Impact on Revenue

Article

Know Your Customer: 4 Revenue Roles that Sales Enablement Serves

Multiple Authors

3.3K Views | 12 Min Read

Maximizing Buyer Interactions

In today’s world, the first sale is often only the first touch point with a buyer– in turn creating the need for post-sales teams to keep customers satisfied and seek opportunities for growth. Sales enablement is responsible for enabling the selling motion as a whole, ensuring that all customer-facing associates have the skills, knowledge, assets and process expertise to maximize every buyer or customer interaction. Business success is a combination of many factors, from retention to quota attainment and ramp time, but revenue is the thread that sews them all together, making it clear that revenue enablement is in fact a sales enablement responsibility.

Often sales leaders or business executives will identify goals for salespeople, such as increased revenue, improved sales productivity, or bigger deals. Sales enablement is responsible for identifying what those goals mean in terms of activity, and designing the programs to develop the micro-skills that produce those results. Helping translate organizational goals into tangible skills and activities to deliver results is critical to demonstrating the impact of sales enablement.

REVENUE ENABLEMENT FRAMEWORK

SIX STEPS TO CREATING A REVENUE ENABLEMENT FRAMEWORK

Combining the customer life cycle and your sales process can be useful to analyze your customers’ journeys through the lens of your customer-facing teams. Use this framework to identify where sales enablement can help ensure that all customer-facing associates have the right skills, knowledge, access to assets and process awareness to make every customer or buyer interaction a great one.

1. Define customer interactions

Map out all of the interactions that will take place throughout the overall experience, between buyer, customer and advocate. What are all the different ways and environments in which your buyer could interact with your business?

2. Identify all customer-facing personas

Who are all the people who could interact with your customer, from marketing, to solution specialists, to channel partners. Identify at what point in their experience customers will encounter these personas.

3. Map competencies for all customer=facing personas

Utilize a trusted sales enablement practice, competency mapping, to identify what each personas needs to know or be able to accomplish in each stage of the sales process.

4. Align assets for all customer-facing personas

Think about asset management for all customer-facing personas just as you would for salespeople. Identify what kind of assets will work at every single stage for both your internal and external audiences, and how you can deliver this content to customer-facing teams effectively.

5. Inform Communications for all personas

6. Measure Quality & Performance

Avoid focusing on the lagging indicators, and identify the things that enablement can control: Quality & Adoption. These two metrics must be evaluated in order to determine whether your employees actually enjoy what you give them, and if they use it.

Poll

Besides your sales reps, who are your buyers most frequently interacting with?

Anyone who faces the customer should, at the very minimum, be able to understand our universal qualifying criteria, deliver our basic value proposition, and understand how they contribute to customer growth

Peter Ostrow

Vice President of Sales Enablement Strategies, Forrester

Learn more about creating your own revenue enablement framework:

Watch the Video

Hear from our experts

Emily Garza

Director of Account Management
Fastly

Episode 44: Emily Garza on Enabling Post-Sales Roles

3.2K Views | 17 Min Read

Cameron Tanner

Senior Director, Global Enablement
Cisco

Episode 1: Cameron Tanner on Measuring Impact on Revenue

3.6K Views | 10 Min Read

Caroline Holt

VP, Revenue Training and Enablement
Bonterra

Episode 74: Caroline Holt on Maximizing Collaboration with Revenue Enablement

3.7K Views | 21 Min Read

Measuring Sales Enablement Success

The Importance of Sales Enablement Data

In order to demonstrate the impact of sales initiatives and your sales enablement function overall, put results in a language that always resonates with stakeholders: data. Effective sales enablement leaders know how important it is to be able to determine the ROI of their efforts; therefore, they make the relevant metrics to be achieved (i.e., stakeholders’ expectations to be met) a priority rather than an afterthought.

Measuring the impact of sales enablement is essential to prove how sales enablement has helped reach company goals, increase revenue, or retain salespeople. Demonstrating the potential ROI for sales enablement initiatives, or the concrete impact of concluded sales enablement projects, can help secure buy-in and establish sales enablement as a strategic business partner. To uplift the authority and importance of sales enablement as an industry and within organizations, sales enablement practitioners must work collectively to establish robust sales enablement analytics in the areas that are proven to drive significant business impact.

In some shape or form, all sales enablement teams should track metrics relating to productivity, learning programs, onboarding, and sales rep competencies, however deeper metrics should vary based on your organization’s objectives and processes. Learn how to identify and measure key metrics to demonstrate the business value of sales enablement.

Trending Sales Enablement Metrics

Download the 2019 Sales Enablement Analytics Report to learn how establishing enablement analytics can elevate business impact.

	of organizations are now tracking customer-centric values, like NPS, as core sales enablement metrics.
	Companies that measure seller competencies report win rates that are 6 points higher than companies that don’t track seller competencies
	Sales enablement teams that measure the influenced revenue of their content report win rates that are 12 points higher than organizations that don’t track this metric.

Podcast

Episode 45: Kristen McCrae on 5 Steps for Data-driven Sales Enablement

Multiple Authors

6.9K Views | 19 Min Read

Use data to tell a story

When presenting results to stakeholders, quantify the current state and compare these to your baseline metrics. Contextualize analytics to demonstrate growth, and how your measurements reflect your sales enablement program.

Without deep insight into key metrics tied to sales enablement at your organization, it is impossible for stakeholders to confidently ascertain what success means, or how your sales enablement team is achieving results.

Learn more about metrics:

Episode 31: Imogen McCourt on Key Metrics for Sales Enablement

3K Views | 18 Min Read

Sales Enablement Analytics: Competency Metrics Matter

5.5K Views | 11 Min Read

Metrics That Drive Bad Sales Behavior

3K Views | 56 Min Read

Poll

What key metrics does your sales enablement team measure?

Ask an Expert

What are some core KPIs or metrics that enablement should be reporting back into their organization to prove business impact?

“Sales enablement has to fully understand the business that they’re in. And once they do, then they can put context to those analytics. It’s really going to be about picking the ones out that are meaningful to those senior stakeholders that they want to know about their piece and marrying that into a story that also is grounded in good business sense. And then keep that set as small as possible, because you can get into the same overload in analytics and metrics as with anything else, and spend a lot of time.”

–Mike Minchew
Head of Global Sales & Marketing Enablement, DXC Technology

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The PRO Guide: Business Impact of Sales Enablement

Learn how to convey the importance of a sales enablement strategy in order to drive business value for your organization.

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Enablement Alignment to Core Objectives