Ongoing measurement is an important step in any revenue enablement program. When you track the right revenue enablement KPIs, you gain insight into how (and whether) your revenue enablement program is impacting sales performance and business outcomes.
When you can prove revenue enablement impact, you’re better positioned to retain your existing revenue enablement resources and potentially secure additional investments.
While proving the value of revenue enablement investments is important, it’s not always easy. Recently, we asked revenue enablement leaders from some of the most successful organizations how they prove ROI.
In this post, we’ll explore why companies invest in revenue enablement and how top organizations, including PayPal, Paytronix, and Webflow, prove enablement’s value.
Why businesses are investing in revenue enablement programs
It was once rare for an organization to have a dedicated revenue or sales enablement team. Today, it’s become the norm. Recent research found 84% of organizations invest in a revenue enablement team.
Revenue enablement ensures all revenue team members – including sales, marketing, and customer success – have the tools, resources, and information they need to deliver great experiences throughout the customer’s journey. When it’s done well, revenue enablement can have a big impact on factors including:
- Sales productivity
- Win rates
- Quota attainment
- Sales cycle length
- Customer retention
- Customer lifetime value
However, revenue enablement leaders must prove that their efforts are actually making a difference in order to maintain (or even increase) investments.
How top organizations prove revenue enablement ROI
Revenue enablement can have a big impact on business outcomes. But it can take time to prove revenue enablement impact.
Recently, Mindtickle asked enablement leaders from some of the world’s top organizations to share advice on proving revenue enablement ROI based on their real-life experiences.
One piece of advice we heard repeatedly is that it’s important to become data-obsessed.
“Begin by aligning your efforts with the metrics that truly matter to your stakeholders,” said Crystal Nikosey, VP, of Sales Transformormation at The Sales Collective. “Take a strategic approach, tracing back from these metrics through competencies and behaviors until you align them to your enablement programs. By being prescriptive in what you deliver, you establish a consistent guiding beacon to shape and assess your initiatives.
Mercy Bell, Revenue Enablement at Webflow, advised enablement professionals to ensure their activities are tightly aligned with revenue-driving activities. “Pinpoint critical metrics like sales conversion rates and deal velocity, directly impacted by enablement,” she said. “Craft initiatives that visibly influence these metrics. Implement robust tracking systems to gauge effectiveness — leverage data analytics to furnish concrete evidence of enablement’s revenue impact. Regularly communicate progress with clear benchmarks. By showcasing how enablement directly fuels revenue growth, you’ll clarify the value to leadership and get the headcount you need.”
Adam Whiddon, Sales Enablement Trainer at Paytronix, emphasized the importance of ongoing collaboration and communication with organizational leaders. “Double down on aligning with the leaders and teams you support and ask for honest, balanced feedback,” he said. “While in that process, dig deeper into the various metrics that your initiatives and programs are trying to support or improve, including your SVP’s/CROs top three metrics they’re tracking for the year, and correlate how you’re initiatives and training programs are impacting it, or if there is a need to adjust course.”
Aneet Narang, Head of Global Revenue Enablement at Paypal, reminded enablement professionals that a customer-focused mindset is essential. “One piece of advice for those struggling to prove ROI is to prioritize fostering a customer-centric mindset, particularly by focusing on sales managers and implementing data-driven decision-making processes,” she said. “By emphasizing the importance of delivering value to customers and leveraging data to drive strategic decisions, organizations can better demonstrate the impact of their initiatives on the bottom line.”
The challenges of proving the revenue enablement ROI
Proving the impact of your sales enablement program is extremely important. But for many organizations, it can be a major challenge.
Some common challenges include:
Not knowing what metrics to track
There are so many different revenue enablement metrics you can track. It can take time to identify the right ones to prove impact.
Focusing on the wrong metrics
All too often, revenue enablement organizations focus on vanity metrics. For example, they can quickly find out how many times a piece of content has been viewed by sales reps or how many sellers completed a recent training module.
While these metrics are important, they don’t convey these initiatives’ impact on business outcomes.
Not having the right revenue enablement tools in place
You may be using multiple disparate tools for different areas of business enablement, and each provides its own sales enablement analytics. But when using multiple point solutions, it’s difficult – if not impossible – to holistically measure the impact of revenue enablement.
Today, many revenue operations teams are streamlining the tech stack by investing in an integrated revenue enablement platform. That way, you can access all the revenue enablement data you need – all from a single platform.
Ready to get more insights from the revenue enablement experts?
Proving revenue enablement impact is key to maintaining your current resources – and securing additional resources. But it isn’t always easy.
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By Rahul Mathew
By Poornima Mohandas
