Top 10 Metrics That Matter for High-Performing Sales Teams

I love getting out to see customers and learning about their business and how they measure and track success in their organization from the boardroom to the field. In these meetings I literally feel that I pick up their energy and develop a drive that carries me through and motivates me to do my best, as well as to inspire my teams to do their best for the customer. What is particularly interesting to me though is how often business unit executives and managers struggle to articulate how their specific group measures success that ties to the overall corporate objectives, and if they can even articulate the three to five metrics that matter to the overall organization. We use a workshop format during our discovery process with new customers to help them share and identify these 'metrics that matter'. We also apply learning form our AI engine that is powered by insights from tens of thousands of high-performing sales leaders and teams to identify metrics that they may not have yet correlated to their objectives.

As the leader of Marketing & Customer Success in my current role @SalesHood I am very focused on the full lifecycle experience of our customers, from when they are still prospects through to when we onboard, train and support them to achieve, sustain and grow their value objectives. The more we can stay focused on identifying metrics that matter for our clients, and aligning sales enablement plays that support them in their attainment of those metrics, the faster they achieve success. And because we often start our customer engagements working to support the sales or sales operations objectives we get a chance to see how these organizations measure and track success and we align their sales enablement team to metrics that matter for them.

As sales enablement professionals, they need to have crystal clear clarity around what problems they are solving and what sales metrics are most important to their business. Access to performance data and transparency around sales metrics helps in getting aligned with senior leaders. It stops the team from doing busy work versus the work that really matters. 

• How can we make executive level recommendations and decisions without factual data?
• How do we deliver shareholder value if we do not understand the growth levers?
• How can we do our jobs if we are not armed with the right data?

Here are the top ten sales enablement metrics we often suggest to use in high-performing sales enablement programs (Link to Blog Article with more detail)

 Sales Enablement Metric #1: Quota Attainment

Sales Enablement Metric #2: Distribution of Quota Attainment

Sales Enablement Metric #3: Win/Loss Rates 

Sales Enablement Metric #4: Sales Cycle Time

Sales Enablement Metric #5: Deal Size 

Sales Enablement Metric #6: Time To Ramp 

Sales Enablement Metric #7: Employee Attrition

Sales Enablement Metric #8: Employee Engagement

Sales Enablement Metric #9: Content Effectiveness

 Sales Enablement Metric #10: Customer Facing Selling Time 

Once our clients have a clearer understanding of the metrics that matter, they are better prepared to have data driven enablement conversations to drive their enablement strategies and tactics. I believe that every enablement strategy meeting should start with a review of the metrics. Have the data handy and be ready to look at attainment and productivity results by team. I would even come prepared with a printout ready for everyone to review and discuss together. Having this data will elevate your game. There is another benefit of mastering the data and promoting the results: You’ll get universal buy-in for your sales enablement initiatives.

If you'd like to set aside some time to discuss your corporate and sales objectives and how your enablement priorities are aligned to support them click here to arrange a meeting.