In order to improve your sales enablement strategy and ensure that your sales team is clear about the strategies that will be used to measure their performance, it’s critical to have sales enablement goals that are designed to help not only increase sales, but also provide the support your sales team needs to excel.
However, often, setting those goals effectively is more challenging than you initially thought. If you want effective sales enablement goals that will allow you to meet your quotas each sales cycle, take a look at these key elements of sales enablement goals and how you can ensure that they are working for you.
1. Assess Your Current Position
Before you can start setting sales enablement goals, you need to start with a look at your current position. How are your salespeople currently performing? What does your sales process look like? Are there places where you may need to improve it? When you take a solid look at your current position, you can get a better feel for not only where you are now, but where your team may need to go.
As part of that assessment, make sure you are talking to your sales management team or to your salespeople directly. They often have a much better view of what the team is actually accomplishing, how they are able to connect with customers, and other key details that can help them provide better insights into what your brand needs to accomplish in order to achieve your goals.
2. Set Clear Metrics
As part of your sales enablement process, make sure you set clear metrics that will give you a better idea of what you need to measure and how you can be sure you have accurately assessed the sales team’s performance and your future needs. You may want to track metrics like:
- The length of your sales cycle
- Win rate
- Lead conversion rate
- Overall sales
- Ability to meet quotas
In addition, you may want to track metrics pertaining to your sales team, including the onboarding time for new employees, the time to productivity for employees who are getting a feel for your sales process, or the turnover rate among employees, all of which can provide you with a better gauge for what your company is offering your employees and how it may impact employee retention.
3. Create Specific, Measurable Goals
As you assess your goals for your sales enablement training, you need to ensure that you select data-driven KPIs and measures that will allow you to achieve your goals.
While your sales reps can work toward a goal of improving win rates or increasing lead conversion rates, ultimately, they will get a better feel for your goals and be more likely to reach them when you empower them with specific, measurable goals that they are likely to be able to achieve.
A focus on SMART goals—goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound—can help you achieve that.
By setting specific, measurable goals, you can guide your sales team toward the outcome you’re looking for. Lay out specific increases you would like to see, based on current performance, the size of your sales team, your product and customer base, and the other elements that naturally contribute to your sales numbers.
4. Make Sure Your Goals are Realistic and Achievable
As part of creating SMART goals, it’s critical to ensure that your sales enablement goals are both realistic and achievable. While it’s fine to create stretch goals or to push your sales team to new heights, you must take into account the specific elements related to your business that can impact those goals.
For example, if you have a naturally long buyer’s journey due to elements outside your control you may struggle to substantially shorten your sales cycle:
- a high purchase price for key items;
- a tendency for your target market to do long research;
- an approval process within companies that extends the time needed to close deals;
Likewise, if your key performance indicators have shown low performance for quite some time, you cannot expect a new sales enablement program to automatically and immediately achieve much higher performance.
Work with your team to create goals for your sales enablement efforts that are realistic and that your team can reasonably attain.
5. Set a Timeline for Reaching Your Sales Enablement Goals
As you create your sales enablement plan, try to create a clear timeline for reaching your goals.
Your timeline may depend on a number of factors unique to your business, including your sales cycle length, the people on your marketing team, and how quickly your sales enablement team is able to enact your new training programs.
However, by clearly laying out your timeline, you increase the odds that your sales team will reach those goals in a timely manner. Take a look at niche case studies and examine how other teams have performed to get a better idea of a realistic timeline for your new sales operations goals.
6. Select the Right Sales Enablement Tools for Your Needs
In order to make sure that your sales enablement initiatives are successful, it’s critical that you start with the right sales enablement tools.
Not only does that include a CRM solution that will allow you to track customer connections and increase engagement with each customer, you need a sales enablement platform that will help guide you through your new plan and provide the support and sales enablement content your team members need to excel.
Make sure you also have a clear idea of how you will implement training, what content is needed for your salespeople to close deals more effectively, and any places where your team might need additional support to achieve your goals.
Furthermore, make sure that your team has the right tools to streamline the sales process and guide customers through the buyer’s journey. That may mean:
- Clear buyer personas that tell your team who they’re trying to reach and what sales content is needed
- Automation tools that will help streamline customer communications and free up the sales team’s time to take on other tasks
- A playbook that will provide essential insights into how team members can improve sales performance, achieve revenue growth, and improve quota attainment
- Email and conversation templates that will give your team a better idea of what they can expect during customer interactions and how they can improve them
With the right sales enablement software, you can focus on equipping your team with the skills they need to achieve their goals.
7. Craft Clear Messaging Around Your Goals
Not only is it critical that you develop clear goals for your new sales enablement process, you want to ensure that you are prepared to communicate those goals to the members of your team.
Through your communication efforts, you can get buy-in from everyone from the members of the sales team to key stakeholders across the organization. Not only do you want your salespeople and new hires to actively participate in sales training, you want them to engage with customers, improve workflows, and enhance the customer experience—and you want them to take pride in your business and their work as they do it.
With the right messaging around your goals, you can improve perspective and allow your team to experience and understand the full benefits of sales enablement.
8. Create Plans for Potential Barriers
An effective sales enablement strategy does not just incorporate the goals and materials you think your sales team will need for success.
It also includes the tools and plans necessary to work around potential barriers as they come up:
- Barriers regarding sales tools, including inability to purchase the tools you need on your current budget
- Pushback from sales representatives who do not want to make changes to their current processes
- Inability to meet revenue goals due to outside challenges, including a slow market
- Departmental silos, which could prevent all team members from accessing the same content and receiving the same guidance as they move through the program
When you have a plan in place to deal with those barriers, you are better positioned to move forward with your sales enablement goals and ensure that your team continues to thrive.
9. Utilize Data and Feedback to Refine Your Goals and Approach
When you first implement a new sales enablement plan, you may find that it does not go as smoothly as you had initially anticipated—or, on the other hand, that you are able to achieve more than you originally thought as your sales team excels in their pursuit of those goals.
Use your key performance indicators and feedback from your sales team, including your sales managers, to further refine your goals, improve your approach, and, ultimately, make it easier for you to improve your revenue.
With the right data-driven strategy, you will often see improved performance across the board.
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Having the right platform is crucial for sales team training. Docebo’s LMS offers the necessary tools and templates for top-notch sales training, boosting your team’s customer engagement, sales, and goal achievement. Learn how Samsung trained over 1100 sales professionals in 3 languages using Docebo. Discover the advantages of our training solutions by booking a demo today.
