If you are considering implementing sales enablement or have already done so you may be asking yourself how to tell if you’ve successfully implemented sales enablement and want to see how much it has improved your business. Like any implementation of changes within a company one of the first indicators of change is sales numbers. It is important to keep track of sales before during and after the implementation of sales enablement to determine if the implementation was successful or if something needs to be tweaked. In addition to looking at sales numbers an often-good identifier is to survey those directly benefitting from the sales enablement before, during, and after implementation. Below are descriptions of the ways to measure sales enablement success.
Sales
While sales numbers in general are a good indication of business success, sales numbers can tell you specifically how well sales enablement has helped your company. By looking at sales numbers before, during, and after you will be able to see an overall improvement in numbers. These indicators may be subtle at first during implementation but when you look at the sales number before and after 6 months of implementation you should see a clear improvement. Slight dips in sales during the process shouldn’t be taken as sales enablement not working as with any change, slight decreases in performance while in the learning stages is to be expected.
Surveys
Surveys are a very direct indicator to determine sales enablement success. Surveys are a more direct indicator as you are surveying the employees and consumers that are directly impacted by these improvements. When surveying employees, the objective is to see if they feel that the sales enablement has helped them. To determine this, you would need to send out a baseline survey before the sales enablement is implemented and then after to see if employees felt they got something out of it. With a well-executed sales enablement there should be a consensus that sales enablement made their jobs either easier or more streamlines. For customer surveys it is equally important to get both a baseline before implementation and after. This can be accomplished by giving customers the chance to complete a post call or messaging survey where they can rate their interaction with the salespeople. Generally, with all the training and additional resources salespeople get through sales enablement leads to better customer satisfaction after implementation.
Continued upward success
One key indicator of sales enablement success is continued success and improvements within a company beyond trainings and standard sales enablement. While sales enablement has normal avenues in which it improves a company one of the key indicators of success is continued improvements. This means that sales enablement has been instilled in the environment of the company facilitating further optimizations within the department. There is not truly an end point with sales enablement as there is always room to be better and to reduce inefficiencies. True success is determined by continued improvement within the company.
Overall there are many ways to determine the success of sales enablement. From tracking sales numbers, to collecting data via surveys, all the way to seeing continued improvement; there are countless ways to indicate the success of a sales enablement implementation. These indicators are indicative of how impactful and overarching sales enablement is. When you have a system dedicated to giving people the tools they need to succeed and flourish it is easy to see why sales enablement has such a widespread impact. To answer the question of how to know you’ve reached success can be answered by all the indicator above and most importantly by the increased prosperity of the company.