Oct 5, 2021
There’s no doubt you’ve heard the old adage that it “takes a village to raise a child.” Well, it also takes a village to improve sales performance. But the reality is, no improvements can be made without proper measurement.
Today, a growing number of organizations are investing in training and enablement programs to get their teams ready to sell. Per a report from CSO Insights, just over 61% of organizations had sales enablement in 2019. That number has likely grown since then.
But all too often, organizations use a one-size-fits-all approach to enablement and readiness. Sellers are set up with the same standard content and information, hoping knowledge sticks (and is applied in the field). As a result, it also becomes difficult to measure how much these initiatives impact sales readiness – if at all. In fact, the same CSO Insights report found that a mere 24% of enablement teams are actually able to measure the ROI of their programs. That’s a really big problem. After all, nothing can be improved unless it’s measured.
Let’s be real, CROs care about sales performance, not adoption
Without consistent measurement, it’s impossible to understand how your enablement and training programs and initiatives are (or aren’t) driving business outcomes – and bringing your organization closer to true sales readiness. And it’s impossible to pinpoint areas that need improvement in order to make sales readiness a reality.
Sure, many organizations claim to measure impact. But oftentimes, this involves monitoring vanity metrics like adoption and engagement that are easy to track and prove.
Adoption is certainly a great place to start. But on it’s own, it’s not enough. For example, your entire revenue team may have consumed a specific training module or even taken an assessment on it. But if they don’t remember what they learned – and don’t apply it when interacting with prospects – that adoption metric doesn’t mean much; it didn’t have any real impact on sales readiness.
5 key sales performance dashboards for CROs
CROs, CSOs, and sales leaders want to fully understand how their teams (and even individual sellers) are moving towards true sales readiness (e.g. is a new team or rep ready to talk to prospects, what are the top skill gaps in the organization, what do most reps do wrong in discovery conversations, etc.). In order to derive such insights, they’ve got to have the right data at the ready – visually presented in a way that’s easy to consume and take action on.
Though the sales performance metrics tracked vary from organization to organization, these are five key data reports all CROs need to improve sales performance.
1. Ideal rep profile (IRP) competencies dashboard
The majority of companies have an ideal customer profile (ICP) to qualify leads. But it’s just as important to have an ideal rep profile (IRP).
What exactly is an IRP? Essentially, it’s a documented set of competencies and skills a rep must have to regularly close deals.
But creating a list of key competencies and skills isn’t enough. Instead, organizations must regularly measure reps’ skills and their lagging indicators like quota performance against the IRP.
An IRP competencies visualization makes it easy for CROs to do just that. Such dashboards allow CROs to compare the competencies of teams and even individual reps with that of top performers. This is a great way to uncover skills gaps – and provide the right training to close those gaps at the team or individual level.
2. Overall sales readiness dashboard
The goal of any training or enablement program is to ensure reps are ready to sell. As such, all CROs must have access to a high-level snapshot of their organization’s sales readiness. In order to make this happen, readiness solutions need to distill down all training, reinforcement, and quiz performance into a single core metric that the CRO can track at the organization, region, or rep level.
A readiness score is based on how sellers are performing against the IRP. Sellers can be assessed based on product knowledge, competitor intelligence, customer personas, objective handling, value articulation, etc. Enablement leaders and frontline managers can then create custom programs and coaching plans to address every rep’s skill gaps against those areas.
CROs need visibility into readiness across the selling organization. An example would be an average readiness score or index (typically, out of 100) for the organization – as well as how that score is trending over time. For example, a CRO can see that their team’s current average readiness score is 75, which is five points higher from the previous month.
CROs can then dig deeper to identify the top and bottom performing teams and their respective readiness scores. They can zero in even further to determine the top and bottom performing reps – and the readiness scores for each.
3. Program completion time vs. ramp time dashboard
The purpose of hiring new sellers is to close more deals and grow revenue. So ideally, every CRO wants to get new reps ramped and ready to sell ASAP.
Of course, new sellers don’t go into the field on their first day. Instead, they typically go through an initial onboarding program that includes some combination of live sessions (either in-person or virtual), on-demand training, practice, assessments, and coaching (among myriad other components). In fact, according to the Sales Management Association, the average new seller spends 10 weeks in training.
CROs need access to a data visualization that helps them understand the correlation between program completion and ramp rep time. Ideally, as program completion rates increase, ramp time decreases. But remember: true readiness goes beyond a seller checking off all of the onboarding boxes.
4. Key competencies dashboard
Many organizations invest time and resources into developing training to get reps ready to sell. But completing the appropriate training doesn’t guarantee a rep’s success. After all, people forget 75% of the information they learn in training after just six days.
Instead, reps must master certain competencies in order to succeed. CROs must understand which competencies are strong at the organization level – and which need extra attention.
The right data dashboard can help CROs understand the organization’s overall top and bottom-performing competencies. This can shed light on opportunities to enhance training to strengthen key competencies in the field. The CRO can then ensure that their direct reports – enablement teams, front-line managers, and revenue ops teams – can deliver personalized solutions to teams and reps.
5. Conversation intelligence metrics dashboard
Delivering engaging training that sellers retain is important. But in-field performance is where the rubber meets the road. It doesn’t matter how great a training module is if sellers aren’t applying what they learned when interacting with prospects.
But let’s be real: sales managers don’t have the time to sit in on every single call their reps have to gauge performance. That’s where conversation intelligence comes in. Conversation intelligence tools analyze sellers’ calls so managers can get a clear picture of what’s going right – and what’s going wrong. They can use those insights to provide appropriate coaching to improve future outcomes.
It’s key for CROs to have access to a data visualization that provides insight into how sales calls are going. The visualization should measure several key metrics across all calls, including the use of filler words, questions asked from reps, questions asked from customers, and length of monologues – among others. And clicking through from any of these dashboards should land the CRO into direct visibility of any conversation moment.
Access the insights you need to improve sales readiness
Measuring adoption of training and enablement matters to an enablement team – but it’s just the tip of the iceberg from the point of view of sales leaders. CROs must be able to understand how (or if) these initiatives are impacting sales readiness and business results. Doing so requires keeping a constant pulse on myriad key metrics.
With Mindtickle, CROs have access to all of the performance dashboards they need to understand the impact of training and enablement on overall sales readiness – and take action to make data-based improvements. In fact, Mindtickle Insights provides the right role-based reporting to every member of the “village” responsible for optimizing sales performance – from sales leaders to enablement to frontline managers. Because we all know it takes a village to drive revenue.
