Sales enablement is the process of helping sales sell more by providing the team with information like consumer demographics and insights into buying motivation along with various other KPIs that provide data on consumer behavior. When sales has this data, they can better build trusting relationships and maintain top-of-mind awareness with consumers, and sell more effectively after appropriate nurturing programs have been applied before leads reach the sales-ready stage.
Here are 3 Important KPIs for Sales:
1. Close rates
While consumers have become more intelligent about making well-informed purchasing decisions, they are also providing key information to marketing that enable sales to pinpoint specific areas of need to increase the closing rate at the sales-ready stage and beyond. For example, by using consumer behavior to better understand the purchasing process, marketing allows sales to produce more personalized follow-up messages based on information gathered during specific marketing campaigns. When sales is benchmarking closing rates with each new quarter, they are using intelligence about consumer behavior to increase the closing rate.
2. Length of sales cycle
Marketing uses the sales funnel in order to have access to metrics and data about prospects at each stage of the sales cycle. Marketing asks: “where did the inquiries or marketing-ready leads come from? What lead nurturing programs worked and what content triggered certain behavior?” Marketing is able to focus on the length of the sales cycle from inquiry to sales-accepted lead and shorten this stage-by-stage process until a lead is transferred to sales for the win. Furthermore, marketing and sales have to work in an effort to shorten the sales cycle at the closing stages and this is done when the marketing team applies more effective nurturing campaigns while sales responds to consumer needs as a result of understanding prospect behavior.
3. Sales Enablement Tools and Marketing automation technology
A Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) enables marketers to deliver and track collateral that is sent to sales. For example, branded email templates that sales send to prospects are transferred from a MAP to the CRM. A CRM, in turn, includes all contact records that give sales fast access to their prospect’s online activities and behaviors in intuitively illustrated graphs. Marketing is easily able to share information with sales on prospect activity and interest this way. Sales reps. are also armed with information about hot prospect visits to a website or forms that have been filled out in real-time while gaining access to details on pages visited, length of the visit and search terms used to gather more information by the prospect.
