In the Sales Enablement Landscape Report 2024, we found that sales enablers and their leadership teams are usually not on the same page.
A whole 49% of our survey respondents said they were in disagreement with their leadership team on the metrics they should be assessed on as enablers.
So, as an enabler, how do you know what you should measure?
Which sales enablement KPIs should you prioritize? Which should you watch as key, topline figures that describe the state of your enablement success?
By the end of this article, you’ll know the answers.
We’ll discuss:
- What sales enablement KPIs actually are. (And why they’re not at all the same as sales enablement metrics).
- 4 Reasons sales enablement KPIs are important. (And how tracking them will turn you into an enablement superstar).
- 14 Shrewd sales enablement KPIs you have to track in 2025 and beyond. (If you want to make maximum impact in the new year).
- A simple, 4-step method for tracking, analyzing, and implementing sales enablement KPIs that’ll have your bosses begging you to let them pay you more!
What are sales enablement KPIs?
Sales enablement KPIs are performance metrics that tie your enablement efforts to a specific business goal. In enablement, this goal is usually improved selling performance.
Sales enablement KPIs, tracked across time, make it clear whether your enablement initiatives are working to improve that goal. Either in specific selling scenarios (for example, when going up against a particular competitor), or in general (meaning an improvement in topline sales performance).
The difference between sales enablement metrics and sales enablement KPIs
Metrics are just measurements, and sales enablement metrics are unit economics that relate to your enablement efforts. Any business metric you could influence as a sales enabler can be a sales enablement metric.
KPIs, though, are specific metrics that tie into key business or departmental goals. Sales enablement KPIs, then, are metrics you handpick to show, in black-and-white, whether your enablement efforts are helping the sales team be more successful.
Why are sales enablement KPIs important? (4 reasons)
Okay, so sales enablement KPIs are metrics that show how effective you’re being at helping your sales team close more deals.
But how do they benefit you and the business you’re a part of?
Here are four things they help you do as an enabler:
1) Optimize sales training and coaching
Choosing the right set of KPIs gives you an objective measure of your sales team’s performance, whilst telling you how much your enablement efforts are playing into that success.
And when things go wrong?
Those KPIs direct your attention to what needs fixing.
This allows you to optimize your training sessions and sales coaching programs. You can create new modules targeted at fixing rep weaknesses and improving confidence.
2) Make data-driven decisions
If you’re not having the impact you’d like, what’s the right approach to fix things?
Is it to flail around wildly? Guessing where to put your efforts and attention?
Of course not.
Having data on your side gives you the confidence to see through your decisions, and to justify them to stakeholders and superiors when you have to.
And from there?
You can monitor performance and track your efforts as they begin to pay off, making you more agile in your strategic decision-making.
3) Efficiently deploy resources
Just as data helps drive more effective decision-making, that smarter decision-making helps you more efficiently deploy resources.
This means having a stronger impact sooner.
And in turn?
You’ll create a reputation as someone whose initiatives pay off.
4) Cross-departmental Alignment
Struggle to get buy-in from other departments?
With data on your side, it’s way easier to bring people around to your line of thinking.
It’s hard to argue with cold, hard facts. With the numbers there in black-and-white, you’ll find it easier to persuade, and tell a story about what’s working and why.
Since you’ll also achieve more early success when you follow the data, you’ll have a stronger track record of success on your side when you finally request something from another department.
And when you have a track record of success?
Others will have more trust in your judgement, and you’ll have an easier time getting the go-ahead to execute on your ideas.
14 Sales enablement KPIs you absolutely must be measuring
For the fullest picture of the impact you’re having as an enabler, you need to know how your sales team is performing.
And you need to know in detail.
For that reason, many sales metrics make good sales enablement KPIs. You need to see that you’re driving performance improvements for sales. And you can only do that if you’re closely measuring sales performance.
The first handful of the KPIs on the list you’re about to read are all about sales success. Track these to paint a picture of sales performance over time. Then use the metrics discussed in the second half to tie that sales success back to your enablement efforts.
1) Win rate / conversion rate
First up?
The rate at which your sales reps manage to convert leads into paying customers.
This is a big, obvious top-line sales metric, but it makes sense as an enablement KPI, too.
The better a job you do of helping your reps succeed and win deals, the higher this number will go.
2) Average deal size
Here’s another sales metric you can use as an enablement KPI.
Often, the KPIs you choose to prioritize will depend on your business’ goals.
If your CEO decides they want to make it a key goal for the next year or so to break into the enterprise market, then you’ll want to see average deal size increase accordingly. This’ll show you that your reps are winning more of those big, valuable, enterprise deals.
Often, you’ll track multiple KPIs together, and use your analysis to tell a story. For example, an increasing average deal size combined with high adoption rates for a new type of content, specifically geared towards converting enterprise customers. Together, these two improving KPIs demonstrate your probable involvement in the sales team’s success.
3) Opportunities created
The number of opportunities your reps manage to secure should increase with good enablement.
The more you’re able to provide sales reps with:
- Personalized coaching
- Effective training
- Relevant, useful content
…The more effective they’ll be in any given conversation at persuading those on the fence to raise their hands in favor of your product.
4) Meetings set
Similar to “opportunities created,” the number of meetings your reps manage to set is a concrete indicator of their performance in the early-to-middle stages of the sales pipeline.
Like the other metrics we’ve discussed already in this list, your effectiveness as an enabler ties directly into the number of meetings and opportunities your reps manage to create.
Solving the problems and challenges they face in trying to do this is, after all, one of your most important jobs as a sales enabler.
5) Sales cycle length
A shorter sales cycle means greater sales efficiency.
The sooner a rep closes a deal, the sooner they can get onto working on the next deal in the pipeline. Plus, greater sales efficiency means more profit per customer.
So not only do you make more on each deal you close (thanks to lower costs), but your team also starts to close more deals each month, each quarter, and each year.
Since sales cycle length is all to do with rep efficiency and effectiveness, and you can influence both of these as the enablement rep, sales cycle length is a crucial KPI to track.
6) Quota attainment
Continuing the theme of sales performance, quota attainment rate is super important.
When your reps are hitting quota, they’ll feel motivated, capable, and confident.
But when an individual misses their quota?
This reveals a problem.
Perhaps they’re under-skilled in an area, and need more training.
Perhaps they need coaching to overcome a mental block.
Or, perhaps they don’t have enough specific knowledge about a particular competitor, and could do with a competitive battle card to help them overcome specific objections on the fly.
Whatever the answer, it’s your job as the sales enablement pro to help. And the better a job you do, the more reps you’ll find hitting quota for the month, the quarter, and the year.
7) Sales content adoption, usage, and engagement
Now we’re getting into the KPIs that really tie back to the work you do.
The enablement content you produce for your sales reps needs using.
If adoption and usage are low, the answer’s simple: Reps aren’t using it.
And if they’re not using it, it can’t have an impact.
Reps are going to use quality content that works. When it helps them close more deals, attain quota, and earn more commission, it’s a no-brainer.
So if content adoption is low, either the content isn’t helpful enough, or your reps aren’t convinced of its value.
Fix these things and watch adoption rates soar.
8) Tool adoption
It’s not just the content you produce for your reps that matters.
The tools you push them towards matter, too.
If you use a content delivery platform, for example, that centralizes and makes searchable all the content you use, it’ll often be quicker and easier to track reps’ adoption of the platform, rather than any individual piece of content.
9) User satisfaction
Do you know how happy your reps are with the work you do for them?
This includes everything you deliver:
- Training sessions
- Coaching conversations
- Topic-specific workshops
- Battle cards
- Customer-facing content
And this is just a partial list of the enablement deliverables you work on each day.
Knowing how happy your reps are with each deliverable gives you a clear indication of where you’re falling short.
Lidia Arshavsky
10) Time to productivity (time to first sale)
Time to productivity is an onboarding-related KPI.
As an enabler, you therefore have the power to impact it directly.
Part of enabling sales success means taking newly hired sales reps and getting them sales-ready as soon as possible.
A shorter, more efficient onboarding ramp means new sales team members start making the business money (rather than costing it money) as soon as possible after they’ve been hired.
Great training during the onboarding process, and a solid understanding of the most common pain points your reps experience, is essential for improving this enablement KPI.
11) Sales confidence score
A sales confidence score is a measure of how confident your sales team is in its ability to sell particular products and services while going head-to-head with various competitors.
Sales confidence scores can be specific, or they can be non-specific.
In other words, your reps can be confident in general in their ability to generate opportunities and sales for the company, no matter what they’re selling, or who they’re up against.
Or, they can be confident in their ability to sell particular products or services in specific scenarios.
Of course, as their sales enablement professional, you’ll want to improve both.
The team’s overall sales confidence score matters as a high-level indicator. But drilling down into where your team lacks confidence will be incredibly useful for improving your other sales enablement KPIs.
Russell Zack
12) Sales team churn rate
If your reps don’t feel supported, they’ll fail to reach targets, underperform, and lose confidence.
While your sales confidence score KPI ties into this, the ultimate indicator is staff churn. If you’ve got a lot of reps leaving, there are things you can do as their enablement rep to better support them.
Help your reps win, and they’ll feel happier and more content. Remember that hiring is expensive, and involves onboarding new reps. Reducing staff churn directly saves the business money, and the best way to get there is to help your reps win. Do this, and you’ll have proven yourself hugely valuable to the business.
13) Buyer content adoption
Not all the content you produce will be for your sales reps themselves. Sometimes, you’ll work with other departments to produce public-facing content that helps communicate a product’s value, get a point across, or make the sale.
If your sellers present buyers with this material, but they don’t use it, it won’t do any good.
Just like internal content adoption rates, it’s useful to track how (and how often) buyers use your public-facing content, too.
Where adoption is low, you know there’s an issue. Where this KPI is weak, use it as a trigger to dig deeper into what could be wrong with your buyer content.
14) Time spent selling
Reps that are burned out or poorly motivated will procrastinate and spend less time selling.
Similarly, inefficient deal logging processes and bad tool selection will slow your reps down.
It’s down to you to:
- Develop effective sales coaching programs for reps
- Work with reps to uncover inefficiencies in processes, and work with your sales operations team to make improvements
- Work with your RevOps team to create effective sales compensation plans that motivate and incentivize your reps to push themselves to maximum productivity without burnout
Do all these things effectively, and your time spent selling KPI will improve.
Looking for next steps?
So you know how to perform sales enablement in principle, but do you have a strong enough mental model of the function to navigate its challenges with confidence?
Our eBook guides you through the core pillars of sales enablement. Check it out. 👇
The Core Pillars of Sales Enablement
Our free eBook lets you dip your toes into an ocean of enablement knowledge, examining the core pillars of the function.
Discover:
- Exactly what sales enablement is (and what it’s not), so you can start doing it the right way. ✅
- The five core pillars of sales enablement (plus a special bonus pillar that’ll help you to work faster and more efficiently). 🔑
- A simple-to-understand mental model of the sales enablement function, giving you clarity and confidence as you navigate enablement challenges. 💡
Qualitative vs. quantitative sales enablement KPIs
All the KPIs we discussed in the above list are quantitative metrics.
They’re countable. This makes them objective and easy to measure.
But you can’t count every useful sales enablement KPI there is. And you might want to incorporate some qualitative KPIs into your sales enablement reporting.
Qualitative metrics tend to be more subjective. While this might seem like a downside, qualitative feedback is essential for filling in the emotional gaps and questions the numbers leave you with.
For this reason, it’s worth conducting check-in surveys with your reps.
You can tie these in with quantitative KPIs, like sales confidence scores, to uncover the stories and reasons behind those scores.
Consider this example:
Sales confidence scores for going head-to-head with a competitor are low.
Why?
One possibility: The competitor is new. Your reps lack the information they need to speak authoritatively about their product.
Another: Prospects come up with unique objections your reps don’t have good stock answers for.
Digging deeper into the qualitative, subjective aspects of sales reps’ performance will make you a more effective enabler. It’ll give you a more holistic view of your sales team’s performance, and the improvements you could help them make.
How to track, measure, and analyze sales enablement KPIs (Simple 4-step method)
Now you know:
- What sales enablement KPIs are
- And which ones you should track
But how exactly do you start using these KPIs to help you direct your enablement efforts?
And how do you do so in a systematic way?
Here’s a simple, four-step process for tracking, measuring, analyzing, and implementing KPIs into your enablement program:
1) Set up KPI tracking
Once you’ve decided on a shortlist of KPIs you want to measure, it’s time to create a system.
This system needs to efficiently track each KPI.
That efficiency is important. If you’re manually rifling through seven different platforms to report on five different figures, you don’t have an efficient process.
The point is to free up mental bandwidth so you can spend time thinking strategically.
This could involve setting up reminders in your project management software to hold regular check-in surveys and sit-down interviews with your reps to check on sales confidence.
Or automatically pulling close-rate and content adoption data from your CRM and CMS.
Most likely, you’ll have to combine measures and set up integrations with all the relevant tools in your sales enablement tech stack.
2) Define KPI benchmarks
Setting up efficient KPI tracking is the first, and most important, step.
Once you’ve done this, you can largely forget about tracking and just focus on the numbers themselves, and your strategy to improve them.
But in order to improve them, you have to know what good looks like.
That means defining KPI benchmarks and targets to work towards. This gives you fast feedback on how well your approach is working.
But know this: You won’t always get your targets or benchmarks right.
Sometimes, they’ll be far too ambitious. Other times, you’ll nail them effortlessly.
There’s a careful balance to strike between setting KPI stretch targets that push your team, and setting targets you’ll never hit.
Missing targets month after month is demotivating and counterproductive.
Use industry standards and past performance to set targets that are sensible, achievable, and motivating.
3) Analyze the data to draw actionable conclusions
Once you’ve got data coming in, and you have benchmarks against which you can measure performance, it’s time to start teasing out conclusions.
These conclusions will inform your strategic decision-making, and orient your enablement efforts.
All it takes is a glance to see which targets you’ve hit and which you’ve missed each month.
But when you dig a little deeper into the stories behind the numbers, you’ll start to get a very good idea of what’s working and what’s not. Remember to lean on qualitative info to fill those stories in.
Because if you don’t get an accurate view of the data, you risk poor conclusions. Exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to achieve by setting and monitoring enablement KPIs.
Your analysis should give you a good idea which of your enablement efforts are paying off.
For example, if your user satisfaction score and content adoption rate are high, you know that reps are using your content and they like it.
That’s half the battle.
But if there’s no correlation between reps using your content and their ability to close deals (e.g. by tracking which deals reps use particular content pieces for in your CRM), then it might not really be having the impact you’d like.
Diving deeper into what it is about your content that reps find useful and their specific pain points while selling, might uncover a disconnect.
For example, they might use your content because they enjoy the format and presentation, and it gives them confidence to have content to rely on. But your content might not effectively convey the emotional benefit of your product to your prospects.
Analyzing the numbers is the first step in fixing what’s broken and gaining the confidence to double down on what’s already working.
4) Turn conclusions into action points
Ready for the final step?
Once you’re clear on what the data means for you and the business, it’s time to put your conclusions into action.
This is exactly what it sounds like.
You’ll break down the steps required to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
Put each of those small steps into your project management tool.
Each small task needs a deadline and an assignee. You’ll also need to write up all the information these people will need to complete the tasks you’ve assigned to them.
This might sound laborious, but you’re really building your project piece-by-piece.
Once you’ve done this, the cycle continues. Your new projects and initiatives, informed by the data you’re tracking, should start to pay off and influence those numbers.
You continue tracking them, monitoring performance, and periodically make new conclusions. This directs your efforts over time, putting you on track to become a superstar enabler in no time.
Still looking for next steps?
Don't worry, our eBook isn't going anywhere.
But a few clicks are all that separate you from discovering:
- Exactly what sales enablement is (and what it’s not), so you can start doing it the right way. ✅
- The five core pillars of sales enablement (plus a special bonus pillar that’ll help you to work faster and more efficiently). 🔑
- A simple-to-understand mental model of the sales enablement function, giving you clarity and confidence as you navigate enablement challenges. 💡
Discover the pillars now. 👇
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