If you had to pick just one (1) KPI to use when selecting sales enablement software, what’s the single most important thing to measure?
Now, I know that’s an unfair question – there’s no way to boil a decision down to just a single number. But when speaking with sales enablement professionals I consistently hear a focus on increasing prospect activity and engagement as the number 1 thing buyers are looking for.
Many Sales Enablement platforms promise drastic increases in prospect and customer engagement through a variety of features and capabilities that will be sure to raise your revenue. And external prospect engagement is incredibly important – but I’d like to point out something a little more impactful: Your Sales Reps’ Adoption.
Engagement vs. Adoption
Adoption and Engagement can be seen as incredibly similar, so let’s go ahead and define some terms:
Engagement is external activity, or how your prospects engage and interact with your sales material
Adoption is internal activity, or how your sales and marketing teams are actually using your sales enablement platform
And, while engagement is a crucial piece of any enablement software, adoption is the ultimate decider of your ROI on a given platform. Consider a software that nets you a 100% close rate, but is so difficult to use that it gets 0% adoption – it’s worthless.
User adoption, while important, can also be measured in multiple ways. Let’s take a look at a few of the features within the Enablix Insights Portal, and discuss how seeing software from the point of view of raising sales adoption can drastically change what becomes important when selecting a vendor.
Measuring Your Users’ Activity
The first thing to consider when measuring adoption is incredibly simple: are people using the platform?
Consider the following graph of user logins over time. Does anything stand out?
Right away, we can see a few things:
- There is definitely one salesperson making the most use of the platform, accessing hundreds of pieces of content and logging in dozens of times
- There are a handful of power users that make frequent use of the platform
- There are a couple of members of the sales staff that don’t seem to log in at all
What if we viewed some activity – such as the number of times a rep added content into the portal?
That’s interesting – it looks like very few reps are adding content. But are they looking for content? What if we looked at searches?
This gives us a clearer picture of adoption – we see a more distributed view of who is searching and finding content, but with more sales staff never searching for anything.
Enablix Insights have already shown us a few clear trends:
- Nearly all sales reps log in to the system – this is great news, as it would indicate that adoption is very high
- Very few reps add any content. This could be good or bad depending on the organization – are you depending on rep-generated content to fuel your sales cycle?
- Half of our sales reps search for content often, and half never search for anything
So it seems like we have a pretty clear picture of adoption, but with a single question left:
What Do Reps Look For?
Many of our users’ favorite feature is the ability to see what their sales teams are looking for – this influences their marketing roadmap and helps them understand what’s working and not working. As an example, let’s take a look at a foundational insight: all of the recent searches in the platform:
You can see in this example that our reps are looking for analytics, integrations with loom, and sample buyer questions… but there’s a problem. Our user that searched for ‘loom’ wasn’t able to find any results. Is this a common issue? Let’s specifically search for terms that get 0 results:
Here we have an incredible look at how our users are adopting the platform – all of the things that reps are searching for where we have NO results. This gives us two takeaways:
- The terms for which marketing needs to create more collateral (potentially ‘privacy’ and ‘loom’)
- Terms for which we have marketing material, but need to better label our content (‘stats’ and ‘searchable’)
So What?
The key to any successful sales enablement implementation lies in the ability for sales and marketing to easily adopt and use the platform. Although we’ve covered Enablix-specific features in this post, the need for marketers to understand rep behavior and adjust to the data within the platform is universal. Use these tips when implementing your enablement tool to raise your sales adoption and nail your goals.
