The Complete Guide to Sales Enablement KPIs

When sales enablement was in its infancy, organizations that adopted it often failed to measure its impact. A 2019 report found that a mere 25% of organizations measured sales enablement impact by using leading and lagging indicators.

In other words, organizations developed and delivered sales enablement initiatives – but dropped the ball on tracking sales enablement KPIs.

That approach won’t cut it anymore.

Modern revenue leaders know that tracking sales enablement KPIs is a must. They understand that regularly tracking goals is key to determining how well their programs are working and where there are opportunities to improve and increase impact.

When it comes to sales enablement KPIs, you may have questions like:

  • What are they?
  • Why is it important to track?
  • Which do you need to measure?

We’ll answer all of these sales enablement KPI questions (and more) in this guide.

What are sales enablement KPIs?

Key performance indicators—or KPIs for short—are metrics used to measure performance. Tracking KPIs helps businesses understand whether they’re on track to meet their goals.

Sales enablement KPIs are key performance indicators that gauge sales productivity and help revenue teams understand how (and whether) sales enablement programs and initiatives are helping them meet their sales enablement goals.

By leveraging sales enablement analytics software, revenue teams can determine how well their enablement programs empower sales reps to effectively and efficiently engage with buyers and close more deals.

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Why are sales enablement KPIs important?

Tracking KPIs is a crucial component of any business strategy. Sales enablement is no exception.

If you don’t track sales enablement metrics, it’s impossible to determine how (or whether) your sales enablement efforts are improving business outcomes and delivering ROI for your organization.

In the best of times, businesses aim to invest in programs and initiatives with the biggest impact. This is especially true in today’s uncertain economy when many organizations face flat (or even reduced) budgets.

Tracking sales enablement KPIs is key to demonstrating the value sales enablement delivers to the business. When you can prove impact, it’s much easier to maintain the budget and resources you have and potentially secure additional budget and resources.

Monitoring KPIs also helps you understand where there are opportunities for improvement. Then, you can make data-driven optimizations to improve your sales enablement programs’ effectiveness and sales rep performance.

Why you need to track sales enablement KPIs

Tracking sales enablement KPIs is a critical step in any sales enablement program, and it’s well worth the effort. Organizations that regularly track KPIs experience some significant benefits. Let’s look at what regular tracking can do for your business.

Improve cross-functional alignment

Modern B2B customers expect excellent, seamless experiences across the purchase journey. Multiple teams, including sales, marketing, and customer success, play a role in delivering these experiences.

Often, these teams work in silos. This results in disjointed buying and selling journeys.

For example, a marketing team may build new campaigns that increase leads. While their campaigns generate a high volume of leads, the leads aren’t high quality. Therefore, sales reps waste their time on leads that’ll never convert.

Establishing sales enablement KPIs is key to ensuring all teams understand sales enablement goals and their role in achieving those goals. When teams are aligned, outcomes improve.

Properly allocate enablement resources

If you’re not tracking sales enablement KPIs, it’s impossible to know what kinds of sales enablement programs and initiatives you need to build. As such, you may scramble to build many different programs and initiatives and hope that something works.

You can identify the most effective ways to support your revenue teams when tracking the right metrics. Then, you can allocate your enablement resources appropriately.

Optimize your sales enablement strategy

Regularly tracking sales enablement KPIs helps you understand if you’re on track to meet your sales enablement objectives. It can also help you identify where there are areas for improvement. Then, you can make data-based optimizations to your sales enablement strategy and programs to improve ROI.

Deliver data-driven training and coaching

Each sales rep has unique strengths and weaknesses. Delivering generic sales enablement to every member of the team isn’t an effective approach.

But this one-size-fits-all approach is more common than we’d like to think. A recent report found that only 40% of C-level executives can identify sales rep strengths and weaknesses for customized training.

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Monitoring sales enablement KPIs provides insight on overall sales performance as well as the performance of specific teams. You can also drill down further to understand the strengths and weaknesses of each sales rep. Armed with these insights, sales enablement teams can deliver targeted training and coaching that address the needs of each seller. That way, every sales team member will have what they need to be effective and efficient in their roles, and they won’t waste their time on irrelevant training and coaching.

Increase the effectiveness of sales content

The right sales content is key to closing deals, but certain types of content are more effective than others.

When you regularly track sales enablement KPIs, you can understand how sales reps and prospects use sales content and how it’s influencing sales outcomes. You can use those insights to optimize your content strategy properly. For example, you can invest more in the types of content tied to closed won deals, and you can eliminate unused assets on the shelf.

Then, you can use a sales content management solution to help sales reps find the right content for any sales scenario.

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Optimize the sales cycle

The shorter the sales cycle, the faster your business can make money. Monitoring sales enablement metrics provides insight into where sellers are having problems. Revenue teams can then work to provide the tools, training, and resources to help sales reps overcome their challenges.

What sales enablement KPIs do you need to measure?

Now that we’ve explained sales enablement KPIs and why it’s important to monitor them, you may be wondering which specific metrics you need to track.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, it’s important to determine which sales enablement KPIs are appropriate for your organization.

However, some common examples of sales enablement KPIs include:

Sales enablement aims to improve sales reps’ productivity. As such, measuring sales enablement metrics that shed light on seller productivity is key. A number of different metrics provide insight into sales productivity. One such metric is the time a rep spends on each deal.

You can determine the average time your top reps spend on deals and use this as a benchmark. Then, you can measure all reps against this gold standard to identify areas for improvement.

This measures how long it takes to guide buyers through the entire sales cycle. It includes every step—from initial contact to signing the deal. This sales enablement KPI provides insight into how effectively your sellers guide buyers through the sales cycle.

In addition to measuring the length of the entire sales cycle, you can also measure the length of each step of the sales cycle. This can provide insight into which stages of the sales cycle reps may be struggling with.

This is a calculation of how much it costs to acquire a customer. It’s calculated by dividing sales and marketing expenses by the number of new customers you’ve acquired over a set period.

The lower the CAC, the more money you’re making.

This sales metric measures the percentage of leads that become customers. It provides insight into whether sales reps have what it takes to close deals.

In addition to measuring the overall conversion rate, you may also want to track the portion of prospects who convert at each stage of the sales cycle. If you see a big drop-off at a certain point in the sales cycle, you may be able to deliver additional training and coaching.

This is the percentage of opportunities won by the sales team. Win rate is another sales metric that provides insight into your reps’ ability to close deals.

It makes sense to measure average win rates. Breaking it down by factors like industry and company size can provide even richer insights. For example, you may find that your win rate in the medical device industry is significantly lower than all other industries. Here, there’s an opportunity to develop targeted resources for sales reps working with medical device industry prospects.

Your churn rate is the portion of customers who stop doing business with you during a specified period. There are a number of reasons why customers churn. One may be that the product wasn’t the right fit for the buyer. If this is the case, there may be an opportunity to develop additional training and enablement to improve reps’ qualification skills.

B2B customers have high expectations. They expect outstanding experiences throughout their entire relationship with your organization and won’t hesitate to switch to another company if their expectations aren’t met.

It’s essential to track customer satisfaction and the percentage of customers who stick around long-term. Then, you can discover opportunities to better enable your customer-facing teams to deliver outstanding experiences.

This sales enablement KPI is closely related to customer satisfaction and retention. It’s the total value of a customer for the entire period they do business with you.

A low customer lifetime value may indicate problems with customer satisfaction. This is an opportunity to empower your entire revenue team with the right tools and resources to deliver satisfying customer experiences.

Chances are, sales content is part of your sales enablement strategy. It’s essential to track how (and whether) sales content is being used by sales reps and customers – and how it’s impacting deals.

These sales enablement KPIs provide insight that can help you optimize your sales content and deliver training so your sales reps know how to use it.

For example, when you start tracking sales content consumption and effectiveness, you may notice a certain content that’s not used often. But when used, it has a large, positive impact on deal outcomes. This is an opportunity to provide additional enablement to ensure sales reps know where to find this asset and how to use it in deals.

These sales enablement KPIs allow you to understand how sales reps engage with the training and enablement you deliver. For example, you can track what percentage of your sales reps have completed a specific training or the average score for an assessment at the end of a training module.

Sales coaching is an important component of a sales enablement program. It’s important to track sales enablement KPIs related to coaching, like how many coaching sessions sales reps are receiving and how many of those sessions are deal coaching versus skills coaching.

Of course, simply “checking the box” when delivering sales coaching isn’t enough. You must also track how these coaching sessions improve reps’ behaviors and sales performance.

Do you have the right tools to track your sales enablement KPIs?

When done well, sales enablement can significantly impact sales rep performance. It’s no wonder many organizations are investing in sales enablement tools, strategies, and teams.

The right sales enablement analytics are key to any sales enablement strategy. Without measuring sales enablement metrics, it’s impossible to know how you’re progressing toward your sales enablement goals and where there are opportunities for improvement.

Measuring a whole host of sales enablement KPIs can seem daunting. This is especially true if you use different solutions to power different components of your sales enablement program. For example, if you use different tools for training, ongoing learning, coaching, and sales content management, it can be challenging to cobble together metrics in a way that makes sense.

There’s a better way.

An integrated revenue enablement platform like Mindtickle incorporates all of the key elements of sales enablement – including sales training, enablement, sales content, and call insights – all in one platform. Mindtickle also features robust sales enablement analytics that provide a holistic look at the impact of your programs. When you’ve unlocked these insights, you can make data-based optimizations that’ll improve the effectiveness of your sales enablement programs and drive sales success.

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Customer Enablement: The Secret to Increasing Customer Loyalty and Retention 

Customers are the lifeblood of any organization. Without customers, you won’t make any money or be in business for long.

Modern B2B customers have high expectations. Businesses must prioritize meeting these expectations across the customer lifecycle.

Establishing a solid customer enablement strategy is key to ensuring that your customers are happy and that they’ll stay long-term.

But what is customer enablement? You’ve come to the right place if you ask yourself that question.

In this post, we’ll answer all of your burning questions about customer enablement, including:

  • What is it?
  • What are the top benefits?
  • What’s the difference between customer enablement and sales enablement?
  • What does a customer enablement manager do?

What is customer enablement, and why is it important?

In B2B, the word “enablement” comes up a lot. You’re at least somewhat familiar with concepts like sales enablement, revenue enablement, marketing enablement, and others.

But what about customer enablement?

B2B buyers expect a lot from B2B businesses. If you deliver outstanding experiences before purchase, a prospect is more likely to convert. If you continue to provide the right tools and experiences post-sale, your customer retention rate will grow.

It’s key to making that second part possible.

Also known as client enablement, it’s a business practice focused on improving customer experiences. It’s focused on improving customer experiences and ensuring each customer has the tools and resources they need to get the most from your product or service.

Why does customer enablement matter?

Customers’ satisfaction increases when they have what they need to succeed with your product. Happy, satisfied customers are more likely to stick around long-term – and refer your business to others in their network. As a result, your revenue will grow.

What are some customer enablement examples?

These initiatives can take a number of different forms. Initiatives vary based on factors including:

  • Your goals
  • Your customers’ needs
  • Your budget

For example, an organization’s customer enablement strategy may be to provide new customers with a named customer success manager (CSM). A large enterprise customer may even have a dedicated CSM. The CSM will schedule recurring calls with the customer to get them up to speed with the platform, answer their questions, and provide ongoing support and information to ensure they get the most from their investment.

Customer education is another example. For example, a B2B SaaS company may create a customer webinar series that shares best practices for using the SaaS solution. Some organizations even offer formal training courses, and customers can receive certifications for completion and mastery.

Customer feedback is another common component of a customer enablement program. Asking for feedback is the only way to know whether your products and experiences are meeting a customer’s expectations. If there are problem areas, you can work to improve – and increase the customer’s satisfaction and likelihood of retention. Customers may also share feedback that can help inform future product developments and enhancements.

What are the benefits of customer enablement?

When it’s done well, customer enablement can deliver some big benefits. Let’s look at some of the top benefits.

Better customer experiences

Modern B2B buyers have high expectations for great experiences. Furthermore, experiences have a large (and growing) impact on customer conversion and retention.

According to Salesforce, eight in 10 customers say a company’s experience is just as important as its products or services.

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B2B companies must prioritize consistently delivering experiences that meet (or even exceed) customers’ expectations. Improving customers’ experiences is a key goal of any strategy or initiative.

Increased retention

Acquiring new customers is important. But it’s equally important to retain the customers you have. After all, acquiring a new customer is significantly more expensive than retaining an existing customer.

Successful initiatives boost customer satisfaction. Happy, satisfied customers are more likely to renew.

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can lead to a

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Even a small increase in retention can positively impact revenue. Research tells us that even a 5% increase in retention can increase revenue up to 95%.

Upsell and cross-sell opportunities

When customers are satisfied with their experiences, they’re more open to hearing about additional product offerings. So, by prioritizing customer enablement, you can increase upsells and cross-sales.

More referrals

Successful initiatives boost customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are more likely to refer your product or service to others. In fact, 85% of business buyers have recommended a company to others based on service.

Research tells us referrals convert 30% better than leads generated elsewhere. Plus, they have a 16% higher lifetime value.

Actionable insights for improvement

Customer feedback is an important part of any program. Asking for feedback is an important way to show your customer that you truly listen and value their input.

The feedback you receive provides insight into what a customer is happy about and where there are opportunities for improvement. Then, you can step in when necessary to help improve the customer’s experience. This will increase their satisfaction and decrease their likelihood of canceling.

It’s also important to look for themes in customers’ feedback. These themes can shed light on opportunities to enhance existing products or services or even develop new ones.

Customer enablement vs sales enablement: What’s the difference?

They are certainly related. But they aren’t the same thing.

Sales enablement aims to ensure sales reps have the training, tools, content, and information needed to engage prospects and close deals. Enablement professionals leverage sales enablement analytics software to understand how their initiatives are (or aren’t) impacting sales performance.

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On the other hand, customer success enablement is focused on improving customer experiences and ensuring each customer has everything they need to be successful with your product or service.

They are both key ingredients to customer satisfaction. Sales enablement ensures prospects have great experiences during the sales cycle. Customer enablement ensures they have great experiences after they’ve signed on the dotted line.

Customer enablement vs. sales enablement: What’s the difference?

Customer enablement Sales enablement
Goal Improve customer experiences to increase customer retention Ensure sales reps have the tools, training, and information they need to be effective and efficient in their roles.
Audience Existing customers Go-to-market teams (sale reps, AEs, BDRs, customer success, etc.)
Stage of customer lifecycle Post-sale Pre-sale
Examples of KPIs Customer satisfaction, retention, referrals, and lifetime value New rep ramp time, quota attainment, sales cycle length, average deal size
Examples of initiatives Named customer success team, webinars, training, best practices guides Sales onboarding, ongoing training, role-plays and other practice opportunities, sales coaching
Primary responsible party Customer enablement manager/customer enablement team Sales enablement manager/sales enablement team
Other key teams Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Product Sales, Marketing, Sales Ops, and Customer Success

Roles and responsibilities of a customer enablement manager

It isn’t the responsibility of a single person. Instead, it’s a team effort.

The team must collaborate closely with other key functions, including (but not limited to) sales, marketing, implementation, and customer success. The manager leads the charge.

The responsibilities of a manager vary from organization to organization. However, their responsibilities often include:

  • Collaborating with key teams – including sales, marketing, and customer success – on an ongoing basis
  • Creating strategies that increase product adoption and boost customers’ success
  • Developing training, which may include a mix of formats like webinars, recorded videos, and written materials
  • Leveraging tools to create and implement initiatives and measure their impact
  • Analyzing usage data to understand how customers are currently using the product and where there may be underutilized features and functionality
  • Developing relationships with customers and soliciting feedback that will help inform future programs and initiatives
  • Making continuous optimizations to the strategy and program based on data and feedback
  • Leading a team

How customer enablement managers measure success

Clearly, customer enablement managers have a lot of responsibilities. How do they measure success?

It varies from organization to organization. However, some metrics teams must track include:

  • Adoption of training and other programs
  • Customer satisfaction
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer retention rates
  • Lifetime value
  • Referrals

Boost loyalty and retention with customer enablement

Today’s B2B buyers have high expectations. Businesses must make it a priority to deliver outstanding experiences across the entire customer lifecycle.

Sales enablement ensures sales reps have the training, tools, and information they need to engage buyers before purchasing. However, customer enablement is key to ensuring your customers have outstanding experiences after they’ve signed on the dotted line.

Customer enablement ensures customers have the right tools, information, and support to get the most value from your solutions. It sets your customers up for success, which increases satisfaction. These happy, satisfied customers are more likely to be long-term customers and spread the word about your solutions to others.

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Is Measuring ROI the Holy Grail of Sales Enablement?

Given how much investment companies make in coaching sales reps, it’s not great to know that, commonly, 20% of sellers generate 80% of sales.

Can you imagine the ROI that could be achieved if every seller were empowered to reach their monthly sales quota?

This is why you’ve invested in sales enablement.

Simple calculations aren’t enough to determine if your investment in sales enablement has been worthwhile. To get a real grasp on sales enablement ROI, you’ll need a comprehensive look at the impact sales enablement has on your company.

3 best practices to get a holistic view of your sales enablement ROI

Traditional ROI calculations don’t give the full picture of how sales enablement impacts your profit.

That’s because sales enablement creates an ecosystem that impacts different stages of the sales cycle, which all have different effects on ROI.

From the performance of sales content to the quality of deal negotiations or the ramp-up time of new sales hires, sales enablement provides insights and tools that streamline processes and optimize practices to continually improve sales results.

Listed below are metrics that affect the ROI of your sales enablement tool.

Sales and performance metrics

About a quarter of organizations measure the impact of sales enablement using productivity metrics and milestones. But to calculate the ROI of sales enablement with sales and performance metrics, you first need to understand how sales enablement improves these metrics.

Sales enablement improves performance metrics by enabling insights and seller development. These platforms use data from past deals to provide insights into what aptitudes and selling approaches generate the highest number of wins.

In turn, sales reps are able to use these insights to concentrate on developing skills that impact their sales quotas and improve overall ROI.

Measure the following to understand the ROI of your sales enablement platform:

How has sales enablement increased the marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) pool and quality of leads?

Has the sales cycle shortened between an SQL and a closed deal?

Have win rates and overall average quota attainment improved?

For sales reps who have completed their sales training, how has their personal win rate improved compared to those who haven’t completed sales training?

Has the average purchase value increased thanks to behavior insights provided by your sales enablement platform?

Has your company been able to forecast with higher accuracy and better manage quarter objectives and budget thanks to sales enablement insights?

To continually improve your sales enablement performance metrics, invest in your team’s skill development to create stronger sellers that meet the qualities outlined by your IRP and reach sales quotas. This snowball effect of leads’ learning and developing produces a sales team that is optimized against market changes and agile enough to learn new skills that benefit the company’s profitability.

Ideal rep profile competencies

Content metrics

Half of all prospect engagement is generated by just 10% of content. And sales enablement is the tool that helps you pinpoint and magnify that 10%.

With sales enablement, your content ROI increases as it tracks content engagement and performance. In turn, you can replicate selling material and improve content conversion metrics continually.

For the best ROI, you need quality sales leads that convert into customers. And to convert leads, you need to optimize content with personalization and engaging features. You need sales enablement for both, and those features affect the health of your sales.

Content metrics you should be tracking are:

How much time does the prospect spend with optimized content? What actions do they perform afterward?

How have sales enablement platform insights improved content clickthrough rates (CTRs)? This is important, as clickthroughs often lead to requests for appointments, more information, or demos.

Understand how sales enablement improves the quality of your content and decreases bounce rates.

Understand how your team uses content to complement their sales approach.

Sales enablement platforms help improve these content ROI metrics by providing a centralized hub for sales and marketing to share and distribute materials. As such, each piece of content generates its own analytics to track performance and engagement.

Mindtickle Asset Hub

Customer highlight

Within months of launching, the Menemsha Group completely overhauled its go-to-market strategy with Mindtickle, training hundreds of reps at a time rather than a few dozen at most. The business has evolved from one-off workshops to a fully-transformed SaaS model that provides onboarding, training, and ongoing enablement. Using conversation intelligence and coaching, Menemsha Group enables companies to track rep engagement and how knowledge is being applied in the field—packaged up in one efficient program.

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Staff onboarding and adoption metrics

It’s clear that time is money and when it comes to ramping up new hires to their full sales capacity, the faster a new sales hire is able to capture new leads, the quicker ROI will be reached.

Sales enablement catalyzes ROI by decreasing onboarding time by 40-50%, which generates revenue faster. The amount of time saved, and revenue generated, must be taken into account when measuring the ROI of a sales enablement platform.

With sales enablement platforms that offer proper onboarding, new hires will strengthen the skills needed to succeed in their roles, and future sales quota attainment will be impacted. Reports show proper tools will improve win rates by 7%.

To calculate your ROI, take into consideration these onboarding metrics:

How has sales enablement lessened onboarding time and saved management time to onboard new hires?

Understand the time saved for a new hire to start winning deals independently.

How long did new sales hires take to reach their monthly sales quotas?

How many sellers stay or leave after six months, a year, and three years? A 2017 report found the average cost of turnover per employee is $97,690; that’s a hefty loss per salesperson.

Determine how well-prepared your sales reps are by comparing them to your IRP and sales readiness chart.

Sales enablement platforms help improve these metrics by providing new hires with real-life examples and best practices. Moreover, by comparing their attributes to those of an IRP, sellers can work toward the skills and practices with the highest win rates.

You can improve your sales enablement platform’s ROI with a personalized onboarding program and deal coaching to develop a sales team that meets your company’s standards and expectations. Moreover, with constant career development and support, sales reps are more likely to be engaged and remain in your company for longer.

Rethink your sales approach

ROI is an insightful metric to understand which procedures and tools are positively or negatively affecting your company’s bottom line. It helps you understand if strategy and content could be improved.

The ability to attribute which measures directly influence the success of a sales strategy is a powerful tool that allows you to continually optimize your sales force for the better. In terms of sales enablement, the precise insights and data will help you understand which areas of your sales enablement strategy need improvement.

Measuring every aspect that contributes to sales enablement ROI gives a clear path to reaching quarterly KPIs and objectives. The data pinpoints what content needs to be updated and which skills need to be developed to reach that quota.

Not all benefits can be measured in terms of ROI

There are certain factors that, by nature, aren’t as easy to include in the ROI calculation. However, it’s important to keep them in mind, as they benefit the health of a sales cycle and quota achievement.

The investment in sales enablement tools isn’t just about purchasing a platform. It’s an investment in the development of your sales team’s skills, which makes them strong sellers and improves their engagement in continually developing their sales strategies.

Sales enablement gives the insight needed to adjust strategies according to buyer behavior. In turn, the buying experience for the prospect runs more smoothly and improves the overall view of the company, which affects the level of trust and commitment between the company and the prospect.

Sales enablement data and insights align the marketing and sales departments to work together and unify their revenue efforts. The centralized location for information and material combines the knowledge and strategies of the two departments. This saves costs arising from misunderstandings or lost information.

The company’s brand identity is reinforced because of the sales enablement platform’s ability to centralize material and create a baseline communication strategy that is proven to be successful. This way, the company’s core values, and objectives are echoed in every sales and marketing interaction, building a strong brand identity. In turn, the brand impacts the level of affinity customers feel toward a company.

Now that you know your sales enablement ROI, here’s what to do next

Once you measure your ROI, the real strategy begins. It’s important to keep an eye on all the metrics that contribute to ROI every month to be able to improve or test new strategies continually.

Use the data from sales enablement to pinpoint what skills need development, what content needs to be repurposed, or how to switch up the sales strategy. You will need to be able to compare monthly data to understand what improvement looks like.

Not only that, but improving your sales enablement ROI will also mean improving onboarding, content management, and sales strategies to maintain goals and improve ROI in the future.

How are you measuring sales enablement?

Mindtickle can help you better measure your sales enablement efforts and impact on revenue. 

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This post was originally published in November 2022, updated in September 2023, and again in June 2024.