Glossary
Sales Enablement Analytics
Sales enablement in a nutshell is providing your sales and marketing teams with the resources and tools needed to do their jobs more effectively. It provides useful information in the form of case studies, research documents, and guides to help agents reach new audiences and close the deal.
Every business, whether it sells to individual customers or entire companies, needs to take advantage of sales enablement to ensure a steady stream of revenue. Changing customer needs and market demands mean that sales enablement will have to be an ongoing process that requires regular adjustments.
How does an organization know how to foster success in its sales representatives and marketing agents? The answer is sales enablement analytics, which empowers sales staff with data-driven insights and findings.
Why You Should Care About Sales Enablement Analytics
No one can improve the sales experience of an entire company overnight. It’s an ongoing process that requires regular decision-making and adjustments. The key to pushing your efforts in the right direction is to collect data, perform analytics, and generate insights into what needs to be changed.
Sales enablement analytics matters for this reason, and the main advantages of data-driven sales enablement are numerous.
- Monitoring engagement: How well are your efforts impacting your sales figures? Is the content you’re generating effective for educating and informing your audience? And are the training programs you invest in giving your agents the right skill sets they need?
- Shortening the sales cycle: Analytics tells you exactly how to accelerate the sales cycle and increase the rate and chance of gaining new conversions.
- Integrating sales and marketing together: Generating insights from data helps clear up exactly how sales and marketing work and enables both teams to work together to drive conversions.
- Continuous improvement: Marketing trends will always change as long as customer demand changes. Analytics ensures that your company reacts quickly to evolving market patterns.
Ultimately, a data-driven approach to sales enablement will empower your sales representatives to reach new prospects and generate more sales.
The Metrics and Factors That Deserve Your Attention
What metrics regarding engagement analytics should be focused on? Any sales enablement approach needs to keep track of statistics in order to measure progress and direct future efforts.
Basic Sales Figures
The most basic sales metrics that most of us are familiar with are total revenue in sales, conversion rates, and number of deals closed in a period. These measurements can be measured every month or year to see the progress over time.
But we can dig further than that and provide more details under the surface that can empower your business decisions in future quarters.
Client Information
No matter what market your business serves, boosting sales is all about understanding who your target demographic is. For each prospective customer, know the client’s industry or occupation, the buyer persona you apply to it, its specific needs and preferences, and a history of your prior interactions with that client.
Check which blog posts or eBooks of yours that the client has read in the past or whether the customer has interacted with your brand on social media or through other communication channels. Even past purchases can contain valuable information about what the customer expects from your business.
Call Center Analytics
A major touchpoint between your business and its clients are your contact centers and the sales representatives and agents who work there. A variety of sales enablement metrics can be found, including:
- How long customers spend in each stage of the sales cycle, and specifically how long contact center calls last.
- The amount of time it takes to convert a prospect.
- The content of the calls themselves, which can include keywords, general demeanor and sentiment, and responsiveness from the agent.
The challenge with measuring human interaction is that it’s rarely ever a structured and quantifiable data point. However, having the right sales enablement analytical strategy will enable you to learn from every interaction you make, even if not every prospect becomes a paying customer.
Content Effectiveness
Marketing teams publish all sorts of content online to promote their products and services. Content doesn’t necessarily have to be purely promotional in nature; it can include social media posts for boosting engagement or case studies and articles for educating clients about the industry to help them make better purchasing decisions.
Consequently, part of sales enablement is measuring the effectiveness of this content and how it’s impacting the prospects you communicate with. Sales representatives will benefit from knowing what’s working in the content space and how it’s impacting interactions with customers.
You can generally rely on tools that measure the persuasiveness and impact of a piece of content, from a blog post to a Facebook story.
Comparing Yourself to the Competition
Your customers aren’t searching for solutions in a vacuum; they’re looking at all their options on the market, which include yours as well as any close competitors you have. That’s why sales enablement needs to analyze your relationships with other service providers in the industry.
One example is competitive win rate. Win rate in general is the percentage of deals your agents manage to close successfully in a period. It can be calculated by dividing the successful conversions against the total number of opportunities given.
Competitive win rate calculates this metric and compares it to that of other competitors. If the numbers don’t look good, then it’s a sign to start giving your sales and marketing agents more resources and training to help increase that win rate.
Sales Agent Preparedness
The quality of the customer experience your sales and marketing teams deliver depends greatly on the expertise of your staff. That’s why companies always invest in sales enablement training, but did you know that analytics can also be applied to this area as well?
Virtual training analytics picks up on how effective your training programs are, whether they’re delivered remotely over the Internet or otherwise. Most employees easily forget much of what they learn, but you can fight against this problem by tracking knowledge retention in your sales representatives.
Agents should be knowledgeable not only in your industry but also in the specific selling points and features of your company and how they compete against other offerings in the market. It’s for this reason that training programs need to be tailored toward the company itself and why learning management and analytics need to be applied to check on the progress and effectiveness of sales training initiatives.
Invest in Sales Enablement Technology to Get the Most Out of Sales and Marketing
Like any data-driven business process, sales enablement analytics is empowered once you have access to the right technologies and software tools. Analytics are only useful when you can act on the insights you find through them. Being able to communicate your findings and coordinate future initiatives is key to building a stronger sales enablement strategy for the future.
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