Securing resources for your sales enablement program can be quick if you show C-level executives the ROI of past enablement strategies. That’s what sales enablement metrics are for.
This guide provides an extensive list of sales enablement metrics to prove and drive B2B performance growth.
What are sales enablement metrics?
Sales enablement metrics are data points that measure the effectiveness and impact of sales enablement strategies. Measuring them gives you an insight into your sales team’s performance and lets you optimize your sales initiatives for the best output.
Importance of sales enablement metrics
Few reasons why sales enablement must be measured via metrics:
1. For more informed decision making
Key stakeholders analyzing sales enablement metrics can identify process roadblocks, trends, and strengths and highlight people’s weaknesses and gaps. Doing so allows them to make informed decisions about needed training, initiatives that need refinement, and more.
2. To help drive improvements
Unseen problems remain unsolved. So, measuring sales enablement metrics can provide insights about areas where performance lags and needs improvement.
3. To measure the true ROI
Metrics let you calculate a sales enablement program’s ROI and justify to key stakeholders the need for resources and spending.
Every business has unique needs. Some may need to measure employee efficiency, while others need more advanced measurements. So, we’ve divided our top sales enablement metrics into multiple buckets for easier understanding.
Core sales enablement metrics
The following are the must-measure quantifiable core sales enablement metrics to evaluate sales efforts:
1. Sales conversion rate
The sales conversion rate is the percentage of prospects converting to customers. It can be measured per sales funnel stage for better accuracy. For example, if out of 50 sales-qualified leads, about 10 result in closed deals, then the sales conversion rate is 20%,
2. Win rate
The win rate indicates the percentage of opportunities won out of the total number of opportunities. This core metric provides insights into sales processes that work, reps who are more likely to close deals, and other deal closure trends.
3. Average sales cycle length
The average length of a sales cycle measures the average time it takes for a lead to become a customer after the initial contact. This metric helps identify market trends and evolving buyer behaviors.
Via Databox
4. Pipeline velocity
This metric indicates the rate at which opportunities progress through the sales pipeline and start generating revenue. The calculation combines data points for opportunities, deal values, win rates, and sales cycle lengths.
5. Lead response time
This metric measures the average time it takes for a sales rep to respond to a lead. The longer it takes, the more likely a lead will lose interest in the business.
Advanced sales enablement metrics
The following advanced metrics provide a deeper insight into the impact of your sales enablement initiatives:
1. Sales qualified leads (SQLs)
SQLs are the leads meeting specific criteria and being passed on to sales for outreach from the marketing team. Measuring this involves assessing the number of leads converted from marketing-qualified to sales-qualified.
2. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
CAC is the total cost of acquiring a new customer. It includes all marketing costs and sales expenses.
3. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
CLV measures the total expected revenue from a customer throughout their relationship with your company. It involves several variables, such as their initial and repeat purchases, average order value, and duration of their relationship with the company.
4. Sales productivity
The sales productivity metric is used to calculate the ratio of revenue generated per salesperson. It is a critical quantitative benchmark to assess a sales rep’s knowledge and skills extensiveness.
5. Churn rate
The churn rate calculates the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service within a specific time frame.
6. Content usage and customization
If your goal is to create accessible content, you must also ensure it is actually used and customized for each sales rep. So, use this metric to identify whether your content is relevant and useful for each salesperson’s unique situation.
7. Upsell rate
This metric measures the percentage of current customers who purchase additional products or services. Monitoring this helps you identify opportunities to update pricing strategies and bundled services.
Employee and customer metrics
The below metrics guide you on tracking and analyzing the team’s sales performance and customer satisfaction:
1. Employee satisfaction
Employee satisfaction or net promoter score (eNPS) is a numeric value indicating job satisfaction. For example, an eNPS score of 40 is achieved when 50% of respondent employees are satisfied promoters, 10% are detractors, and 40% are passives.
2. Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT measures customer satisfaction with your product, service, or company. For example, you ask your customers to rate their product satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 5 and take the average value.
3. Retention rate
The retention rate is the percentage of customers successfully retained over a specific period, such as a particular quarter.
4. Customer engagement
Customer engagement is measured to gauge an average customer's interest in your products or services. It can be a sum of metrics, such as total active users, churn rate, email open rate, follow-up response rate, and frequency of product use.
5. Referral rate
Calculating the referral rate highlights the percentage of new customers acquired through existing customer referrals.
Performance metrics
The following metrics focus on the end results of sales enablement programs:
1. Revenue by product
This measures the total revenue generated from selling a specific product or product category.
2. Percentage of revenue from new business
The percentage of revenue generated from a new business indicates the proportion of total revenue from newly acquired customers.
3. Year over year growth
This metric indicates the percentage increase in revenue from one year to the next. It can also point to the rise in the number of customers yearly.
4. Revenue from existing customers
This metric calculates the revenue generated from your existing customers through upsells/add-ons or repeat purchases.
5. Market penetration
Market penetration shows the percentage of the potential market your company has captured and is waiting to be converted.
6. Average contract value
This metric highlights the average amount a customer spends per contract, so the higher, the better.
7. Deal size
Deal size indicates the average revenue generated by closed deals. Understanding the average deal size helps you plan your sales enablement strategy.
8. Number of deals lost to competition
This metric calculates the number of sales opportunities that slipped from your sales team to competitors. It can be used for better product positioning and sales process optimization.
9. Marketing collateral performance
This can track how well your marketing assets, such as the case studies and guides, contribute to sales conversion. It can be tracked through downloads, shares, and inquiries.
10. Quota attainment
Sales quota attainment is one of the key sales rep performance metrics that measure how close your sales reps come to meeting their sales target over a fixed time frame. A low rate indicates the need for training and support.
11. Calls to action (CTAs)
CTAs are prompts on your website or emails that guide potential customers through consecutive stages. You can measure the efficiency of these CTAs by counting the number of successful actions taken by website visitors or email recipients.
Proficiency metrics
Assessing your team’s competencies and skills is a must for sales enablement success. And proficiency metrics help you measure them with ease.
1. Time to ramp
This tells you the total time it takes for a new salesperson to become fully productive and independent from the day they were hired. You must aim for a shorter ramp-up time.
2. Time to first deal
This tells you the length of the period between when a salesperson starts their role and when they’ve successfully closed a deal. A shorter time shows your onboarding processes and resources are up to the mark.
3. Time spent in sales onboarding sessions
This metric helps keep an eye on sales reps exceeding the average onboarding time as it measures a new rep’s time spent in onboarding sessions.
4. Time spent on pre-boarding activities
Pre-boarding involves activities performed by sales reps before they start their role. Measuring the time spent on these activities will help reduce early attrition.
5. Time to first meeting
This metric calculates the duration between a sales rep’s role start date and their first prospect meeting. A shorter time points to a better grasp of sales processes.
6. Time to second deal
You can measure how consistent a sales rep is by calculating how long it takes for the rep to land a second deal.
7. Progress on rep goals
Monitoring reps’ progress on their sales goals helps you identify training opportunities and knowledge or skill gaps.
8. Call and chat evaluations
Call and chat evaluations assess the quality of conversations had with customers. It helps you identify reps’ strengths and weaknesses.
9. Time spent coaching
Measuring the time you spent coaching sales reps uncovers whether they receive adequate support to meet their sales targets and understand processes.
10. Frequency of coaching
This tells you the number of coaching sessions hosted within a specific period.
11. Cost of learning sessions
Here, you consider all expenses associated with training, coaching, and purchasing learning tools. This gives you an idea of how budget-friendly your training programs are.
12. Number of certified sellers
This measures the total number of reps who have successfully completed a format certification program and are ready to proceed to the next steps.
13. Competency improvement
Monitoring competency improvement gives you an idea of the consistently increasing skills and knowledge of sellers. You can calculate this by assigning a competency level to each sales rep.
Productivity metrics
The following productivity metrics help monitor how efficient your sales processes and teams are when it comes to selling:
1. Time spent on sales activities
This tracks the total time salespeople invest in actual selling tasks, such as activities directly linked to revenue generation.
2. Time spent looking for sales content
Your sales reps' time searching content or information indicates their productivity level. A digital AI assistant tool can minimize this time and allow more time for selling tasks.
Docket AI - a virtual sales assistant for quick information retrieval
3. Quantity of high-quality leads
Use this metric to measure the total number of prospects with the highest closing and revenue potential. The revenue potential is the amount of money the leads could generate over a period.
4. Time spent preparing for sales meetings
This metric indicates the total time sales reps spend on meeting preparation. It should be an average time, not too high or too low, as it can negatively impact deal closure.
5. Time spent on manual data entry
Use this to calculate the total time reps spend on manual data tasks. Reducing the time spent on such menial administrative activities leaves room to focus on actual selling.
6. Meeting completion rate
This tracks the percentage of scheduled sales meetings successfully completed and moved to upcoming stages.
7. Email open rate
Measuring email open rate lets you spot bad timing of email sends or poor content and subject lines that could hamper conversion.
8. Email response rate
This indicates the percentage of emails that received a response, such as subscribing, replying, clicking a link, downloading a lead magnet, etc.
9. Available selling time
Calculate this by monitoring the actual time sales reps spend on the phone or chat each day, week, or month. You could also use your CRM to track the number of calls reps can make in a specific time frame.
10. Sales Confidence
Measuring sales confidence lets you understand how prepared your reps feel before a sales pitch. You can measure this by running a survey in which reps rate their confidence on a scale of 1 to 10.
Wrapping up
Achieving these metrics and tracking sales enablement success can be daunting. That’s when getting AI help can make efforts seem more manageable.
AI-powered conversation intelligence and sales assistance tools like Docket can guide every sales rep's interactions with prospects and customers by providing instant answers to critical questions.
It cuts down onboarding, coaching, and ramp-up time, so reps have more hours to focus on actual selling.
