How to Use Data to Drive Your Enablement Programs in Five Steps

Organisations are prioritising enablement programs for their sellers now more than ever. According to Gartner, organisations putting a significant focus on revenue enablement were at least 75% more likely to exceed performance targets - and this will only continue, with sales enablement budgets to increase by 50% by 2027.

Despite this, enablement teams across the board struggle to demonstrate their impact on business outcomes and metrics, despite spending ample time developing robust enablement programs. This puts the discipline at risk of not being able to articulate what good looks like to business partners, and gives minimal insight into which enablement initiatives are impacting business outcomes - and, importantly, which aren’t. In this article, I will lay out steps on how enablement teams can avoid falling into this trap and start using data to drive enablement programs, link these back to revenue attainment, and elevate program results to gain a seat at the revenue-generating table.

Step One: Know What To Measure.

Take a ‘stock check’ of what to measure, and how these measurements fit into the wider business strategy through initiatives. These metrics can range from onboarding metrics, ongoing sales metrics, and wider organisational metrics. When you have reviewed the metrics to track (we’d suggest focusing on a maximum of four initially), consider the past and future trajectory of these metrics, and develop an enablement hypothesis. Is performance where it needs to be to ensure these targets are met? If not, what needs to happen? How can enablement programs support these goals?

When gathering metrics you would like to start measuring, consider the balance of leading vs lagging indicators. Leading metrics look forward to predict future outcomes, while lagging indicators examine  what has taken place already, and how sales teams have performed in the past.

EXAMPLE: You review the metrics and have noticed a gradual decrease in the average deal size amount across your sales organisation. This would be a leading indicator and a great metric for an enablement initiative to target.

Step Two: Know What The Business Wants To Measure.

After we have highlighted metrics to measure, it is important to consider the link between these and business priorities, and start speaking our stakeholders’ language. Our stakeholders may be mildly interested in course completion as a statistic, but they will be even more interested if we show revenue attainment as a result of course completion. Reporting program progress to the business, using metrics the business cares about, can elevate enablement to be trusted advisors here when it comes to future planning. For example, reps that complete training courses in Highspot engage with buyers 15% more often and report a 22% increase in average deal size.

EXAMPLE: After deciding to focus on the ‘average deal size’ metric, you see a clear link between improving this and contributing towards your organisation’s goal of 10% revenue growth this year. You bring this to the Q3 prioritisation meeting with your stakeholders and they agree that this is a priority, and a good area to target enablement on.

Step Three: Consider the concept of ‘enablement events’.

Once you’ve decided - with your business partners - the metrics you should be measuring, think of the ‘how’ - the enablement that could take place to influence them. Whether this is a program launch, a coaching model application, or a workshop, consider event topics that have a link to the business metric you’re focused on improving. If the business wanted to focus on retention improvement, as an example, a series of trainings and virtual sessions around negotiation at renewal time would be an “enablement event” that would link to this. Look at the retention rate before, and then check again six weeks later. What has improved? What hasn’t improved? Have certain groups responded better to this, which may indicate proof of frontline manager reinforcement? How can we crunch the numbers and show the true impact of enablement events?

EXAMPLE: After stakeholders agree that ‘average deal size’ is a priority metric for Q3, you decide on a series of workshops to deliver this initiative. Sales teams will be enabled on how to whitespace to understand account opportunity, and will practice negotiation techniques to help position larger deals with customers. You take a ‘snapshot’ of the metric before this program is rolled out, and continuously review the metric throughout the program to see how it is being influenced.

Step Four: Aim to measure long-term behaviour change first and foremost.

Enablement needs to support long-term skill development and behaviour change, and data can be a great way to show trends and indicators of this happening. The last thing you want is for hard work to go into building a session or program, and for it to not have a long-term impact - we want sales teams to be continuously improving and developing their skills. Think through how you can impact this through enablement - and who can help support this beyond enablement. Empowering your frontline managers to coach their reps and reinforce learnings can be a great way to land long-term behaviour change and skill development, as an example. In fact, this year’s State of Sales Enablement Report shows that when managers coach reps to reinforce desired behaviours, sellers are 40% more confident in their performance and report 14% higher win rates.

EXAMPLE: After the ‘average deal size’ enablement program has ended, reps are putting larger opportunities into their pipeline, and seem more confident in negotiating after you’ve listened to their calls. Now is the time to keep up the momentum by empowering your frontline managers to continuously coach their reps before negotiations to keep this behaviour change front of mind.

Step Five:  Keep reassessing.

Having a data-driven approach to enablement is not a “one and done”, and nor should it be. Use tools and technology to help you continuously predict trends and keep refining your enablement outputs and focus areas. To make this easier and to fit into your workflow, we would suggest automated data collection and analysis platforms - such as Highspot! - to help with this, as well as data visualisation tools such as Tableau to make complex data easy to manage.

EXAMPLE: Six months on from the ‘average deal size’ initiative, you have seen a continuous, long-term increase, and data from your tech stack shows that on average, teams are surpassing the Q3 ‘snapshot’ metric. However, one team is not doing quite as well as the others. This would be a good opportunity for further assessment of team performance and a reinforcement of the enablement delivered.

With these five steps, you will be well-equipped to start weaving data points into your enablement programs to showcase the revenue influence of enablement to your business partners and organisation. Furthermore, by continuously checking the metrics you are measuring and how the business is performing against these, you will ensure that your enablement continues to contribute to long-term revenue improvement aligned with organisational objectives.

Originally posted on LinkedIn, as part of my enablement role at Highspot