Measuring Seller Readiness

Sales Enablement Seller Readiness

A modern business is deeply data-driven. Once you have your sales enablement solution in place, you are ready to analyse and optimise your sales process.

With respect to sales enablement, there are three main areas to apply data-driven methods:

In this chapter we focus on seller readiness.

Sales Team Readiness Overview

There are ten reports that will allow you to analyse and optimise your training investments. Each one answers an important business question. Together, they paint a complete picture of the training that you have, how it is being used, whether it is effective, and how much business value you are getting from it.

Whole Sales Lifecycle

If you can’t analyse the effect of training on the entire sales life cycle, you can’t answer crucial questions.

• If you don’t know which deals the seller was involved in after training, you can’t measure revenue influenced and business impact.
• If you don’t track performance after the training, you can’t measure impact on turnover and on how long it takes a seller to become effective in their role.

Activity and Business Impact

The ultimate goal is to measure the return on your training investments. Training is expensive — you need to develop the courses, deliver them, and pay the opportunity cost of putting your sellers in a training session instead of having them focused on selling your products. You’d like to be able to say, “I spent $X on having this seller trained and it generated $Y in additional revenue.” Your sales enablement system can answer that question, but it will also provide intermediate metrics that yield additional key insights.

Activity metrics help you diagnose why you aren’t getting the business impact you want. You might not have the training that your employees want. They might not know about the training that is available. It might not be effective, and everyone avoids it because it is a waste of time. Each of the ten reports gives you insight into one particular area of training performance, and together they let you understand the whole picture and dig down as needed to understand where the problems are.

Segmentation

Top-level reports will give you some important information about the effectiveness of your training. However, you’ll often need to go deeper into the data by segmenting it in various ways. Here are some common ways to segment readiness data:

The Purpose of Analysis is to Drive Action

The goal is to use training as a way to make your sales team more effective and engaging with customers and increasing revenue. Each of the ten reports answers an important business question, identifying key issues and opportunities so that you know how to act.