When I first started out in sales enablement, the CEO of my company walked over to my desk, sat down on the corner and said to me:

So Christi, how are you going to measure this?

Of course I, brand new in sales enablement, meekly responded with:

Umm…quota attainment?

I remember what happened next vividly.

He took my mouse, grabbed my laptop, and started building a presentation on my computer on how I needed to be measuring enablement – it was kind of terrifying!

I don't remember exactly what he created on my laptop, but the point that stuck with me is this: metrics matter.

The C-Suite cares. Executives care. Leaders care. Investors care. As a result, we as enablement practitioners have got to make that a priority.

There are a lot of thoughts and opinions out there on how to measure sales enablement – and I'm going to throw out a potentially unpopular opinion and say that some of them?

They're kind of BS.

We can measure sales enablement metrics like training sessions or courses completed, tool and system usage, maybe content that we create alongside marketing, but all that's doing is quantifying our activities, not necessarily the result.

The only result that matters is revenue: Did you hit your numbers?

So why would we claim success when we're actually just quantifying our enablement busyness?

We can also look at sales metrics. I'm sure everyone reading is very familiar with the list above, you're probably measuring some or most of these items already.

But here's the underlying, BS problem with these numbers.

There are so many factors that go into sales performance, and so many elements that impact a seller's success.

For example, what about a rep's territory?

  • Has it already been built out?
  • What about competitors in the space?
  • Are they concentrated in a certain region?
  • What about the lucky reps who walk into a new company and into opportunities that are just a few steps away from the finish line?
I'd say it's almost impossible to claim that "we have the most amazing sales enablement programme and that's why we're hitting our numbers".

So that begs the question: What are we to do? How do we know that our activities are actually truly impacting revenue?