11 Most Effective Sales Enablement Metrics for B2B Tech Marketers

Action Metrics

These metrics are directly related to a call-for-action and measure how successfully you’re getting someone to do something.

Scheduled Demos

Introductory calls (or scheduled demos) happen when the baton is officially passed from marketing to sales. Your prospect is no longer just an impression, a click or a form-fill, but rather a real life human with a name…and an email address!

Tracking scheduled demos gives you a gauge on your prospect’s level of interest based on the marketing messaging they’ve been presented thus far. If you have a high number of people requesting demos, you can assume that the some portion of your marketing strategy worked. High-five!

So now, believe it or not, how well your intro call goes will tell you how well your marketing worked. Talk to sales and figure out which messages were clear to the buyer or if any were confusing to them. Use what you learn to improve your marketing messages earlier in the funnel and address any confusion up front.

Sales Conversion Rates

When a prospect finally makes it to the end of their buying process and chooses your company to partner with, that person becomes a sales conversion.

Your conversion rate, then, is your total number of deals closed divided by the total number of demos scheduled.

This metric will tell you the effectiveness of your selling process, and indicate whether sales was able to motivate your new customer to move from the demo stage to the sold stage. If sales had all the tools they needed to help buyers make a decision (ahem…provided by the marketing department), and prospects making it to the demo stage were highly qualified, this number should be pretty high. If your conversion rates are low, a sales enablement strategy can help bridge the gap to closing more quality deals. 

Don’t miss out on higher conversion rates because of lack of differentiation and positioning. Tech is a rapidly growing industry, ever-expanding and diversifying. Your key messaging matters now more than ever, and should be consistent from the first marketing touch point to the customer signing on the dotted line.

Upsells

In B2B tech, we often see service tiers offered to meet customer’s specific needs (and budgets). So, in times when increased revenue is a priority, look to up-sell value-added products or services that will increase the lifetime value of a customer.

Arm your sales team with materials allow them to justify the value of add-ons and make them a no-brainer to the customer.

Still not seeing the numbers you’d hoped for? That don’t necessarily mean that the customer doesn’t see value . Look at up-sell conversion rates to make sure your customers are actually being up-sold to. The number of customers who purchased additional services in an up-sell divided by the total number of customers who were pitched with an up-sell.

Remember though, the sales team needs to have the appropriate materials to confidently present an up-sell and make it a no-brainer.

Value Metrics

Value metrics are all about working smarter, not harder. The more revenue you can get from a single deal, the better. And the longer you can keep that customer, even better!

Average Deal Value

Average deal value takes the total value of deals for a given period divided by the number of deals for that period. Tracking this metric will tell you how effectively your sales team has up-sold or pitched higher tier products.

Though this metric is closely related to the up-sells metric which tells you how effectively sales is increasing customer total value, average deal value allows you to connect up-sell efforts to the top-line revenue. Share these metrics with execs when talking about increasing profits period-over-period.

Retention Rate

It’s one thing to close a deal, but it’s quite another to build brand loyalty for the long-run! Your retention rate measures how well your product (and sales promises!) delivered messages that caused prospects to convert in the first place. Retention rate looks at existing customers (minus new customers) for a given period divided by the number of customers at the beginning of the period.

If your retention rates are low, dig into some different factors find out why.

• Was there an introductory special for new customers that brought them in?
• Is there high competition in your vertical with a lot of similar products available?
• Is your customer not getting as much value as they would have hoped out of your product or service?
• Are there bugs or issues still being worked through in the systems or the product itself?

These are just a few examples of why retention might be low. A deep dive or marketing strategy adjustment could help you address customer retention issues.

Cyclical Metrics

Sales Cycle Length

Sales cycle length looks at the number of days it takes to close a deal. This important metric tells you how much time it takes sales to close a deal, plus, it helps you manage sales projections, forecasting, frequency of sales trainings and meetings, sales resources needed, product management, media scheduling, among a laundry list of other factors. Calculate this metric by adding up the number of days it took to close all deals divided by the total number of deals for that period.

You can take this metric at face value…or, use it to optimize internal processes to improve overall efficiency. Sales cycle length provides less insight on how well marketing works, but sheds more light on how to better manage internal resources to avoid bottlenecks. How quickly (or slowly) deals are getting closed could depend on resource availability.

Efficiency Metrics

It’s nice to have tangible sales and revenue numbers in front of you. But, it’s also important to pay attention to how well teams function. These metrics will help you find opportunities to improve internal processes.

Quota Attainment

Many B2B companies set sales quotas to ensure that reps are hitting the numbers necessary to keep the lights on, and then some. While some salespeople can consistently hit quotas, others just barely meet requirements. It’s crucial to a company’s success to understand who’s hitting the mark, and who’s falling short.

This metric should be monitored to know when to hire, fire and train reps, but also to keep an eye on industry trends and fluxes. When digging into this metric, take a step back and look at your overall funnel and your reps’ capacity.

• Is seasonality affecting anything? Consider staffing adjustments or repositioning.
• Is the quality of the lead traffic decreasing? Do a gut check on marketing message fatigue and explore the customer concerns discovered in the demo stage.
• Is there an overwhelming amount of new business in the pipeline and reps can’t juggle all of these incredible new leads? (Hopefully!)

Consider all of this and don’t forget to zoom out to the macro level after examining this metric.

Time Allocation

However your sales team keeps track of their time, it’s important to look at where they’re spending their time. It’s estimated that sales reps only spend about 36% of their time actually selling! To find out if this is you, see if you check any of the boxes! Also, make this the first topic of discussion at your sales enablement kickoff meeting. Understanding where everyone’s time should be spent will aid in the success of both sales and marketing when dividing and conquering the process of turning strangers into raving fans.

Measure…Measure…Measure.

As marketers, measuring success has been drilled into us. Not only do we have to prove the value of our efforts, we also need to gather as much data as we can get out hands on to make intelligent, informed campaign decisions over time.

Businesses are moving away from just handing off qualified leads to the sales team and, instead, working through sales enablement strategies to ensure the entire marketing and sales process is aligned, cohesive and consistent.

So, now that you understand why and how marketers should track sales metrics, have fun and happy tracking!