Not all sales and marketing collaboration moves the needle. That’s why teams must identify specific sales enablement key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progressive and scrutinize their strategy.
Alignment between sales and marketing is pivotal for effective storytelling. Bridging the gap between these teams leads to a deeper understanding of ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and buyer personas and, ultimately, gains unrealized revenue generation. The last thing you want is your teams wasting their time spinning their wheels on efforts that aren’t yielding returns.
Let’s dive into some of the sales-marketing enablement KPIs that will help your teams monitor collaboration and course-correct if needed.
Crucial Sales Enablement KPIs
If you want a baseline for your current sales-marketing team alignment, look at the following indicators:
- Lead Conversion Rates
- Marketing Qualified Leads
- Sales Accepted Leads
When these KPIs are high or increasing, it suggests both teams are working towards a common goal, sharing powerful insights, and strategically responding to those insights.
Lead Conversion Rates
The percentage of leads converted into customers is your lead conversion rate.
Sales-marketing alignment helps us understand the audience. Knowing the audience helps us be better storytellers of our solutions. Compelling stories give buyers vivid imaginations about your solution helping them. That imagination converts sales.
Lead conversion rates can be impacted for many reasons. A sudden dip or spike can signal changes in market demand, lead quality, or sales effectiveness. Teams should collaborate regularly to review these trends, discuss possible causes, and adjust their strategies accordingly.
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Leads deemed more likely to become buyers
Your typical buyers have specific traits, engagement levels and behavior. These identifiers help score leads in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to predict the likelihood of them converting in the future. For example, downloading a white sheet, attending a webinar, email open and clickthrough rate, and time spent on product pages.
When sales-marketing alignment is effective, the quantity and quality of generated leads increase, driving up the quality of the MQLs scored.
Segmenting MQLs allows marketing to provide sales with more detailed insights into each lead’s potential readiness to buy, allowing for more personalized follow-up strategies.
If MQLs are low or dropping, it suggests a disconnect and misalignment between how marketing generates leads and what sales really is looking for.
Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
Sales Accepted Leads (SALs): The number of leads accepted by sales as worthy of direct follow-up.
A high SALs rate indicates sales and marketing teams both understand what constitutes a qualified lead and indicates there is alignment on lead quality criteria.
Fine-Tune Your Team Alignment
From beginning to end, sales enablement is an all-around collaborative effort. And it requires input from both marketing and sales teams, from the logistical work simply to meet and communicate together, right down to the insights and how they are reported.
Measuring and monitoring the above KPIs helps gauge the alignment between sales and marketing teams. What’s funny is it takes sales-marketing collaboration to obtain the above KPIs and curate them into one place where they can begin offering insights into whether sales enablement is working.
Remember, sales-marketing collaboration is about creating a more cohesive and compelling narrative that drives the buyer’s journey and propels prospects to convert to clients.
Unlock Revenue Potential with So Good Digital
So Good Digital marketing helps enterprises and organizations get aggressive about sales enablement and confront awkward, clunky sales messaging.
Our professional marketing team has various backgrounds, allowing us to specialize in cross-team functionality and effectively close gaps and disconnects between the sales funnel and marketing voice.
Ready to activate your sales team? Schedule a discovery call.
