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Sales Enablement
Sales Leadership
In today’s economic environment, business hinges on measurable value.
This applies across all realms of business—and is notoriously difficult to directly apply within my realm of expertise: enablement. I’ve spent 23 years in marketing and communications, and nine of those years leading enablement teams. Great enablement is absolutely essential to driving business results—and it’s not at all straightforward to measure its value.
The main reason it’s difficult is because the true business value of enablement is represented in lagging indicators—metrics like new hire ramp time, new revenue growth, competitive win rates, and customer retention. Because of how long the lag is between enablement sessions and those results, organizations tend to focus exclusively on leading indicators, and fail to connect the dots with ultimate OKRs.
Measuring enablement is broken. But it can be fixed—and here’s how.
Partner with your revenue strategy / operations teams to align on company goals
Companies in different circumstances have different goals—goals which should define your framework for evaluating enablement success.
To name just a few examples, your most pressing goals might be:
- Generating revenue for a new product
- Increasing pipeline for your core product
- Improving competitive win rates against a market incumbent
The list of potential goals is endless, but in just these three, you can intuit how an enablement function would have to modify their approach based on which is most pressing. The only way to conduct targeted enablement sessions, and therefore win Enablement a seat at the decision-making table, is to know which targets the company is aiming at.
Devise an enablement plan based on those business objectives
Let’s say your goal is the third one: improving competitive win rates against a market incumbent. Some things your sellers would need in order to execute against this objective:
- A rich understanding of the competitor’s value offering, including strengths and blind spots
- A clear idea of how your product differentiates against the competitor’s
- Succinct talk tracks to summarize that differentiation
- Slideware to illustrate that differentiation
- External-facing thought leadership content—blogs, one-pagers, etc.—to describe differentiation
You’d need to partner with your product and marketing teams to get the intel, to ensure you understand key differentiators, and to develop collateral sellers can use in real-time. The resulting plan would consist of:
- People you’d need to talk to (and meetings scheduled)
- Collateral you’d need to develop
- Timeline for delivering and enabling sellers on new competitive intel and take-out strategies
Determine which leading and lagging indicators will measure success
The last piece of that plan—significant enough that it deserves its own section—is picking metrics for evaluating success.
A few leading indicators you might choose:
- Messaging/playbook adoption
- Content engagement
- Sales competencies
And lagging indicators:
- Competitive win rates
- Pipeline
- Rep productivity*
*Rep productivity should be part of every success model and a north star success metric of all GTM organizations.
Execute, measure, and iterate
Once you’ve established your business goals, devised an enablement plan, and established success metrics, it’s just a matter of execution, measurement, and iteration. Having data on both leading and lagging indicators will give you a sense of whether your plan is strategically sound—and if not, how to adjust it.
Important note: What I’ve written here isn’t the end-all, be-all for measuring enablement success. It’s a framework you can apply under any circumstances to give yourself coordinates for making the most of your enablement programs.
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