7 Metrics to Measure the Success of Your Sales Enablement Efforts

Whether you’re a marketer or a sales manager, there are innumerable ways you can empower sellers to do their jobs more effectively.

You can provide content that helps them personalize emails. You can provide tactics that help them overcome objections. You can provide intel that helps them win competitive deals.

Sales enablement comes in all shapes and sizes—which means there are dozens of metrics you can use to measure the success of your efforts. This blog post is about seven of them:

1. Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
2. Win rate
3. Competitive win rate
4. Average selling price
5. Sales cycle length
6. Quota attainment
7. Content adoption

For each of these, we’ll tell you what it means and why it’s a good way to measure success.

1. Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate

What technically qualifies as an opportunity will vary from company to company, but in general, we can think of it as a prospective deal that has a relatively strong chance of closing—relative to your average lead, that is. As you can probably guess, this metric tells you the percentage of leads that are converting into opportunities.

Why this is a good way to measure success

Oftentimes, an opportunity is created when a seller gets one of their leads to agree to some form of an introductory meeting (e.g., a discovery call). If your lead-to-opportunity conversion rate is improving, it’s a sign that your sellers are getting better at delivering the right messages to the right people.

2. Win rate

Different sales teams will have different ideas of what qualifies as an opportunity. But no matter where you work, a win is a customer’s signature at the bottom of a fresh contract—and your win rate tells you the percentage of opportunities that are converting into signatures.

Why this is a good way to measure success

Although an increase in win volume is never a bad thing, it’s not necessarily attributable to sales enablement. More people on the sales floor will translate into more deals, but that has nothing to do with efficiency gains. If, on the other hand, your win rate is improving, it’s a sign that your sellers are getting better at demonstrating value to the prospects they get on the phone.

3. Competitive win rate

A lot of things can get in the way of a win: budget constraints, priority changes, stakeholder buy-in issues—and, of course, competitors. This metric tells you the percentage of competitive opportunities (prospective deals that involve at least one competitor) that are breaking your way.

Why this is a good way to measure success

Given that 84% of businesses say their market is more crowded than ever, it’s safe to assume that your sellers are increasingly going head-to-head with rivals—which means the number of competitive deals they’re winning is probably going up. Again, this is independent of your team’s effectiveness. But if the rate at which they’re winning competitive deals is going up, that means they’re getting better at positioning your solution as the leader in the clubhouse.

4. Average selling price

Conversion rates are extraordinarily useful—especially when you align them with the stages of your funnel—but they’re not the be all and end all of sales enablement reporting. Average selling price tells you how much your customers tend to fork over when they buy your solution.

Why this is a good way to measure success

In the world of sports, a win is a win—but in the world of B2B SaaS, things aren’t so simple. Obviously, a $10K deal is better than no deal at all. But a $10K deal that could’ve been a $25K deal? That stings. If your average selling price is increasing, it’s a sign that your sellers are getting better at demonstrating the full value of everything your solution has to offer.

5. Sales cycle length

Unless your business model is highly transactional, a lot goes on throughout the process of turning an opportunity into a customer: demos with users, calls with decision makers, free trials, etc. The length of your sales cycle tells you how long, on average, it takes to close a deal.

Why this is a good way to measure success

Sometimes, prospective deals are slowed down by factors completely outside of your team’s control—the departures of key decision makers, for example. Other times, however, things move slowly because your sellers are either (1) not creating senses of urgency within their prospects or (2) not empowering their prospects to create senses of urgency within their bosses. If your sales cycle is getting shorter, it’s a sign that your sellers are getting better at conveying your solution as an absolute necessity.

6. Quota attainment

As your sales organization grows and splits into more and more teams, different people will be held to different standards in terms of how much they need to sell in a given month or quarter. This metric tells you the percentage of sellers who are hitting their respective quotas.

Why this is a good way to measure success

A better win rate. A higher average selling price. A shorter sales cycle. Although each of these is cause for celebration, they can be deceiving when taken out of context—that is, they can give you an inflated sense of how your sales organization, as one whole unit, is performing. If, for example, a handful of sellers get on an incredible hot streak, your metrics will improve—but the improvement won’t be the result of sales enablement. Alternatively, if quota attainment is on the rise, that means everyone is being empowered to do their job more effectively.

7. Content adoption

To keep track of this final metric, you’ll need some form of digital content repository: Seismic, Highspot, or—if we’re talking about battlecards—Crayon. Content adoption can refer to either (1) the percentage of sellers who have leveraged a given asset or (2) the number of times a given asset has been put to use.

Why this is a good way to measure success

Whether it’s a case study, a one-pager, or a feature comparison sheet, there’s no way to assess the usefulness of a piece of content until it’s been put into the hands of your sellers. It couldn’t be simpler: Stuff that makes it easier to sell gets adopted; stuff that doesn’t, doesn’t. If overall content adoption is increasing, it’s a sign that the assets you’re creating are making a material impact on the day-to-day lives of your sellers.

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