Is Measuring ROI the Holy Grail of Sales Enablement? | Mindtickle

Is Measuring ROI the Holy Grail of Sales Enablement?
By Nick Salas
Nov 1, 2022
Given how much investment companies make in coaching sales reps, it’s not great to know that, commonly, 20% of sellers generate 80% of sales. Imagine the ROI that could be achieved if every seller were empowered to reach their monthly sales quota. This is why you’ve invested in sales enablement.
Simple calculations aren’t enough to determine if your investment in sales enablement has been worthwhile. To get a real grasp on sales enablement ROI, you’ll need a comprehensive look at the impact sales enablement has on your company.
3 best practices to get a holistic view of your sales enablement ROI
Traditional ROI calculations don’t give the full picture of how sales enablement impacts your profit.
That’s because sales enablement creates an ecosystem that impacts different stages of the sales cycle, which all have different effects on ROI.
From the performance of sales content to the quality of deal negotiations or the ramp-up time of new sales hires, sales enablement provides insights and tools that streamline processes and optimize practices to continually improve sales results.
Listed below are metrics that affect the ROI of your sales enablement tool.
Sales and performance metrics
About a quarter of organizations measure the impact of sales enablement using productivity metrics and milestones. But to calculate the ROI of sales enablement with sales and performance metrics, you first need to understand how sales enablement improves these metrics.
Sales enablement improves performance metrics by enabling insights and seller development. These platforms use data from past deals to provide insights into what aptitudes and selling approaches generate the highest number of wins.
In turn, sales reps are able to use these insights to concentrate on developing skills that impact their sales quotas and improve overall ROI.
Measure the following to understand the ROI of your sales enablement platform:
MQL to SQL conversion rate: How has sales enablement increased the marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) pool and quality of leads?
Length of a sales cycle: Has the sales cycle shortened between an SQL and a closed deal?
Win rates and quota achievement: Have win rates and overall average quota attainment improved?
Sales readiness and course completion: For sales reps who have completed their sales training , how has their personal win rate improved compared to those who haven’t completed sales training?
Average purchase value: Has the average purchase value increased thanks to behavior insights provided by your sales enablement platform?
Forecast accuracy: Has your company been able to forecast with higher accuracy and better manage quarter objectives and budget thanks to sales enablement insights?
To continually improve your sales enablement performance metrics, invest in your team’s skill development to create stronger sellers that meet the qualities outlined by your IRP and reach sales quotas. This snowball effect of leads’ learning and developing produces a sales team that is optimized against market changes and agile enough to learn new skills that benefit the company’s profitability.
Content metrics
Half of all prospect engagement is generated by just 10% of content. And sales enablement is the tool that helps you pinpoint and magnify that 10%.
With sales enablement, your content ROI increases as it tracks content engagement and performance. In turn, you can replicate selling material and improve content conversion metrics continually.
For the best ROI, you need quality sales leads that convert into customers. And to convert leads, you need to optimize content with personalization and engaging features. You need sales enablement for both, and those features affect the health of your sales.
Content metrics you should be tracking are:
Engagement rate: How much time does the prospect spend with optimized content? What actions do they perform afterward?
CTR for next steps: How have sales enablement platform insights improved content clickthrough rates (CTRs)? This is important, as clickthroughs often lead to requests for appointments, more information, or demos.
Bounce-through rate: Understand how sales enablement improves the quality of your content and decreases bounce rates.
Content attribution: Understand how your team uses content to complement their sales approach.
Sales enablement platforms help improve these content ROI metrics by providing a centralized hub for sales and marketing to share and distribute materials. As such, each piece of content generates its own analytics to track performance and engagement.
Staff onboarding and adoption metrics
It’s clear that time is money and when it comes to ramping up new hires to their full sales capacity, the faster a new sales hire is able to capture new leads, the quicker ROI will be reached.
Sales enablement catalyzes ROI by decreasing onboarding time by 40-50%, which generates revenue faster. The amount of time saved, and revenue generated, must be taken into account when measuring the ROI of a sales enablement platform.
With sales enablement platforms that offer proper onboarding, new hires will strengthen the skills needed to succeed in their roles, and future sales quota attainment will be impacted. Reports show proper tools will improve win rates by 7% .
To calculate your ROI, take into consideration these onboarding metrics:
Average onboarding cost, time, and resource management: How has sales enablement lessened onboarding time and saved management time to onboard new hires?
Ramp time: Understand the time saved for a new hire to start winning deals independently.
Average time to reach sales quota: How long did new sales hires take to reach their monthly sales quotas?
Sales rep retention: How many sellers stay or leave after six months, a year, and three years? A 2017 report found the average cost of turnover per employee is $97,690; that’s a hefty loss per salesperson.
Sales training efficiency: Determine how well-prepared your sales reps are by comparing them to your IRP and sales readiness chart.
Sales enablement platforms help improve these metrics by providing new hires with real-life examples and best practices. Moreover, by comparing their attributes to those of an IRP, sellers can work toward the skills and practices with the highest win rates.
You can improve your sales enablement platform’s ROI with a personalized onboarding program and deal coaching to develop a sales team that meets your company’s standards and expectations. Moreover, with constant career development and support, sales reps are more likely to be engaged and remain in your company for longer.
One benefit of measuring sales enablement ROI is the opportunity to rethink the sales approach
ROI is an insightful metric to understand which procedures and tools are positively or negatively affecting your company’s bottom line. It helps you understand if strategy and content could be improved.
The ability to attribute which measures directly influence the success of a sales strategy is a powerful tool that allows you to continually optimize your sales force for the better. In terms of sales enablement, the precise insights and data will help you understand which areas of your sales enablement strategy need improvement.
Measuring every aspect that contributes to sales enablement ROI gives a clear path to reaching quarterly KPIs and objectives. The data pinpoints what content needs to be updated and which skills need to be developed to reach that quota.
Not all benefits can be measured in terms of ROI
There are certain factors that, by nature, aren’t as easy to include in the ROI calculation. However, it’s important to keep them in mind, as they benefit the health of a sales cycle and quota achievement.
Uncovering the investment in team development: The investment in sales enablement tools isn’t just about purchasing a platform. It’s an investment in the development of your sales team’s skills, which makes them strong sellers and improves their engagement in continually developing their sales strategies.
Realizing the positive impact on the buyer journey: Sales enablement gives the insight needed to adjust strategies according to buyer behavior. In turn, the buying experience for the prospect runs more smoothly and improves the overall view of the company, which affects the level of trust and commitment between the company and the prospect.
Acknowledging the alignment between sales and marketing departments: Sales enablement data and insights align the marketing and sales departments to work together and unify their revenue efforts. The centralized location for information and material combines the knowledge and strategies of the two departments. This saves costs arising from misunderstandings or lost information.
Recognizing the importance of a strong brand identity: The company’s brand identity is reinforced because of the sales enablement platform’s ability to centralize material and create a baseline communication strategy that is proven to be successful. This way, the company’s core values, and objectives are echoed in every sales and marketing interaction, building a strong brand identity. In turn, the brand impacts the level of affinity customers feel toward a company.
Now that you know your sales enablement ROI, here’s what to do next
Once you measure your ROI, the real strategy begins. It’s important to keep an eye on all the metrics that contribute to ROI on a monthly basis to be able to improve or test new strategies continually.
Use the data from sales enablement to pinpoint what skills need development, what content needs to be repurposed, or how to switch up the sales strategy. You will need to be able to compare monthly data to understand what improvement looks like.
Not only that, but improving your sales enablement ROI will also mean an improvement in onboarding, content management, and sales strategies to maintain goals and improve ROI in the future.
Want to keep a helpful sales checklist at hand for a future quarterly meeting? Here’s our free checklist .
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