Four Ways to Analyze Sales Enablement Program to Improve Sales Success

How do you know if your sales enablement efforts are effective? It's important to not only deliver a variety of sales enablement resources, but to also circle back and analyze their impact on your sales team. There are a number of analyses you can do to get visibility into the results you are driving through your sales enablement efforts. By diving into these types of analyses, you can apply everything you now know about sales enablement materials, sales training, and templates, to improve your strategy. Based on your findings, you will be able to improve your sales enablement program, and help your sales team win more deals. Let’s take a look at how to conduct each analysis, and how each can improve your sales enablement strategy.

Funnel Leak Analysis

Having a clear understanding of your sales process and at which stage prospects are dropping off the funnel is crucial for sales enablement success. Depending on which parts of your funnel prospects are dropping off and becoming lost opportunities, you can make changes to your strategy.

If your prospects are falling off at the beginning of the sales process, and don’t even get to see a demo of your product, this is an opportunity to improve upon your outreach strategy. Train your reps by following a sales script, create email templates, and even have your reps follow specific email nurture campaigns to build a strong rapport with prospects from the very beginning.

If your prospects are receiving a demo from your sales team, but then choose to discontinue the relationship, this gives you an opportunity to work with your whole team, or an individual rep, to improve their demo strategy. Here, you can use talk tracks, visuals such as sales decks, and internal resources such as battlecards to improve your team's demo performance.

If your prospects are dropping off after learning about your product in and out, this is an opportunity for you to sharpen your sales teams skills overall. Let’s say you lost the deal because it was highly competitive. Implementing competitive sales trainings and sales quizzes, as well as arming your sales team with battlecards that live within your CRM can ensure that they’re ready to tackle the hard questions.

By analyzing which parts of the funnel are experiencing the most drop off and why, you can better arm your sales team with the resources they need to support prospects through the entire buyer’s journey.  

Sales Content Analysis

As a part of your sales enablement strategy, you’re creating a handful of beneficial tools for your sales team. Great! But, how do you know if they’re actually being used? This can be difficult, especially if your materials don’t live in one centralized location. To make it easier, store your tools in one location such as a company wiki, or even better, right in your CRM or centralized sales enablement platform.

Sales enablement tool usage rate is a measure of what percentage of your sales team is using each resource and how frequently. To do this, track your sales team activity or even survey your sales team about which employees use which resources or which resources they don’t. For example, if you’re using a platform such as Salesforce to host your battlecards, track the views for each battlecard, as well as the number of sales reps who use them. Based on what you find, you can improve upon specific sections of your battlecards, or give your intel a refresh.

If you’re creating materials that don’t seem to be getting used often, open up a dialogue with your sales team about what they need, what would be the most beneficial to their day-to-day, and how you can revamp current materials to meet those needs.

Understanding the why’s and why not’s of your sales content usage is critical to ensuring you are producing the most impactful sales content for your team.

Sales Cycle Analysis

The sales cycle begins with a potential buyer first engages with your company, and ends when that person either becomes a customer, or decides not to buy. The sales cycle length is the amount of time between that first interaction, to when the deal closes, whether that be closed won or closed lost. Many variables impact your sales cycle length, such as selling to multiple people from one company, budget and approval processes, and projected timeline for investing in your product.

To calculate how long your sales cycle is, analyze the time between the first contact between a prospect and your company, to the day that a deal is closed. Then, average all your deals together to figure out how long your average sales cycle lasts. To get started, you should explore the following questions:

• What is the average length of your sales cycle? Does this differ depending on the deal size?
• What factors are causing some deals to have shorter sales cycles? What about those with longer sales cycles?
• What is moving leads through the funnel?
• What are the conversion rates between each stage of the funnel?
• What can you give your sales team to help them shorten the sales cycle, close more deals, and bring in more revenue?

Having an understanding not only of the average sales cycle length, but the different pieces that impact your sales cycle, will allow you to better arm your team with the resources they need to win more deals. You can figure out which follow-up campaigns help convert prospects throughout the sales process, which types of content help influence those conversions, and which sales tactics result is shorter and more successful sales cycles for your team.

Win / Loss Analysis

Last but definitely not least, you will want to look at your win / loss rates. Your win / loss rate is the percentage of sales opportunities that are successfully won (or lost). It’s important for you and your team to understand where your sales team is performing well, and where they need help closing more deals. To discover where your team is winning, or losing, you want to calculate your win / loss rates.

You may also want to look at your win / loss rate specifically for competitive deals. When you’re going head-to-head with a competitor to win over a prospect, you’ve entered a competitive deal. You’re probably no stranger to your competition, so you know that there is a high chance a prospect is putting you and your competition against one another, and needs to be convinced that your company is the best fit for their needs. Analyzing your competitive deals and your competitive win / loss rate will shed light on who you come up against in the most competitive deals, but also give insight as to whether or not your sales enablement materials are helping your sales team beat the competition. Much like calculating your overall win / loss rate, use the same formula ( # of Won Opportunities / # of Total Opportunities), but only include deals where you went head-to-head with a competitor.

Knowing your win / loss rate and competitive win / loss rates are important, but it’s also critical to understand what pushed a deal one way or another. If you understand your win / loss rate as an organization, as well as at a per rep level, you can make overall strategy changes but also individual plans for reps. You want to analyze why you lost, as well as why you won. That way, you know where you need to invest more resources, which sales reps need specific trainings, and which sales enablement materials to refresh.

Now that you have a strong understanding of these fundamental analyses, you’ll be able to analyze your own sales performance and figure out how to best improve your sales enablement program so that you can ensure you are helping your sales team win more deals.