The end of each year is a time to both reflect on the past and prepare for the future. For any business leader, this means evaluating what investments to keep, add, or adjust based on past performance and future needs. To secure a place for sales enablement people, programs, and tools in the budget, you need to champion their value with your leaders. How can you build a business case for enablement that justifies investment?
The key is to measure your direct impact on priority initiatives and correlate those to the business results that matter most to your C-suite. In doing so, you can convey how investing in enablement helps leaders realize their business goals. By demonstrating how adoption leads to improved performance, leveraging analytics to prove how your programs drive sales outcomes, and highlighting stakeholder feedback, you can create a compelling business case for enablement.
Here are data-driven tips to champion sales enablement investment and maintain buy-in from your C-suite.
Boost Adoption and Correlate Impact on Sales Results
Adoption of your enablement tool is key to prove it’s a worthy investment – especially when you can correlate high adoption with high performance. To get the most out of your investment, make it easy for reps to use the tool and ensure they understand how it can help them. The more reps use your enablement platform, the more they’ll realize its impact on their productivity, and the more leaders will see its value in driving sales outcomes.
TIP: Gather champions in your organization who can speak to the value of the tool and advocate for its continued investment. By highlighting examples of how reps have leveraged the tool to improve their performance, you can motivate adoption. To measure the impact that enablement has on the organization, leverage both leading and lagging indicators and show how high adoption can boost sales results. Since implementing Highspot, customers report a 2.3x increase in platform adoption and a 16% increase in win rate.
“Highspot’s heavy adopters [within our organization] become the above-average performers for pipeline generation and conversion,” said Alessandro Canzian, head of group go-to-market at Vodafone Business.
Leverage Analytics to Prove What’s Working
In addition to adoption, enablement teams need data-driven insights to track how their programs are landing with reps and prove their value on the business. With a unified platform, you can learn how content, guidance, training, coaching, and engagement efforts impact rep behaviors and drive sales performance. You can also use analytics to hold reps accountable to adopting your key initiatives and hold managers accountable to coaching to the critical skills to drive them. Armed with compelling insights, you can show leaders how your programs boost sales outcomes and secure executive buy-in.
TIP: Use Reports and Scorecards in Highspot to understand what’s working and what’s not and demonstrate the impact of your programs. For example, the Rep Scorecard gives managers insights into seller activities so they can identify winning behaviors and deliver targeted coaching that boosts buyer engagement. In fact, customers who adopt the Rep Scorecard experience 1.2x higher buyer engagement. Using analytics to prove how your efforts are impacting sales outcomes will help you advocate for continued investment in enablement.
“It’s about being able to prove value back to my boss,” said Allyson Moellenhoff, director of product marketing at Kalderos Inc. “I use the [Highspot] analytics dashboard and say, ‘We’ve made an impact this year as a team. Look at how these metrics are increasing.’ That’s how I justify not only the contract value, but how my boss then sees my performance.”
Highlight Feedback From Enablement Stakeholders
While data is useful to prove the value of enablement, qualitative feedback is just as important. Strengthen your argument by supplementing your quantitative data with anecdotal evidence from sellers on the value they’ve experienced with enablement programs and tools over the last year. Gathering proof points will add more context to any quantitative insights you highlight to paint a fuller picture of enablement’s impact.
TIP: To bolster your findings, collect feedback from cross-functional teams that partner with enablement, including marketing, sales operations, and services. Understand how each team benefits from enablement programs and technology, and ask what value would be lost if you didn’t continue investing in those resources. This will help illustrate the impact of enablement across the organization and strengthen your business case with executives.
“We actively seek feedback from our sales and marketing teams,” said Tony Summers, sales training manager at Hunter Douglas Inc. “This includes gathering input on usability, content relevance, and the overall impact on their day-to-day workflows. High adoption rates and positive feedback from users indicate that the platform is delivering value by making their jobs easier and more productive.”
Demonstrate the Impact of Your Enablement Investment
Effectively demonstrating the impact of sales enablement can make or break an organization’s investment in the function. By maximizing adoption of your tech, using analytics to prove enablement’s impact on business outcomes, and showcasing stakeholder support, you can effectively champion sales enablement investment with your C-suite – and secure the budget to be successful in the new year.
If you’re a Highspot customer, unlock more enablement insights like these by joining our exclusive customer community, Highspot Spark Community!
This blog post is part of Highspot’s new research-backed blog series, Highspot Insights. With the help of our research teams, we provide data-driven best practices for sales enablement. If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you.
