Data is often the key to unlocking future possibilities in today’s digital world. Without it, leaders and executives wouldn’t be able to make strategic and informed decisions that can ultimately drive significant growth for a business.
However, if organizations apply an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to making sense of their data, it can cause too much of a good thing. Data overload can cause an organization to be essentially data-rich but insight poor. For enablement teams, tracking key metrics to indicate performance over time can help secure buy-in to scale programs effectively.
“The main purpose of sales enablement is that we need to gather the input from different departments to improve the selling experience in the end,” said Yohan Labesse, senior director of commercial excellence at Bureau Veritas Group. “The easy way to align our goals with the other stakeholders is first to ask the other stakeholders what they need, what their KPIs are, their goals, and where we can help.”
Identifying the metrics that best illustrate enablement’s impact on the priorities of key stakeholders can help ensure that programs in the future have a demonstrable effect on the organization. Developing a performance scorecard can effectively streamline enablement data by providing a snapshot of the metrics that move the needle in helping to grow the business. Below, learn more about the benefits of maintaining a scorecard and download our template to begin tracking the metrics that demonstrate enablement success.
The Benefits of Developing a Performance Scorecard
Creating a scorecard that reflects the goals of an entire team may take some time, but the payoff is worth it. A scorecard helps leaders and their teams quickly identify what is going well and what needs to be improved based on established metrics that demonstrate the performance of specific objectives over time. The metrics a team may choose are likely the ones that align well with the overarching strategic vision of the revenue-facing organization.
“If we’re all aligned, and we know that there’s an initiative and one of the important metrics that we need to hit for Q1 is based on X number of people onboarded or people that should be following a new playbook or people that should be following some new activities, if enablement doesn’t have skin in the game, you will fall into enablement doing analysis paralysis,” said Adriana Romero, senior manager of productivity at Salesforce. “But if you have skin in the game, you’re oriented, and you’re aligned with the sales leaders, you have the buy-in from the floor, and you drive a sense of urgency out of your enablement team.”
To demonstrate enablement’s impact across the organization, keeping an updated scorecard that accurately reflects performance can help enablement make its efforts visible to key stakeholders and increase analytical efficiency across the board so that leaders can make data-driven decisions. The scorecard can provide real-time analysis to help decision-makers be more proactive in shifting strategy or adapting to changing priorities where needed.
“I always feel that clean data is where you start from and a clear understanding of what your metrics need to be,” said Nia Barnabie, vice president of revenue operations at OneWeb. “Once you’ve got that, you need to communicate often and have real visibility into what’s happening [within the sales organization].”
Building Out a Performance Scorecard
When building a scorecard, it can be helpful to think through three key pillars: understanding the intended audience, keeping the format uniform and cohesive, and being concise on what to include and track within the scorecard.
1. Understand the Intended Audience. Different enablement programs may require different audiences. The scorecard should speak directly to enablement’s key stakeholders with metrics that they care about to clearly demonstrate impact.
“My mindset has always been team first so I really take that approach when I’m developing processes or putting the KPIs in place,” said Sidd Hora, senior sales and marketing operations manager at Super.ai. “Whenever it comes to new processes, I try to interview the team, I try to interview the stakeholders involved in that process, and try to understand what exactly is the pain point.”
Creating a scorecard that helps communicate the insights on the performance of any enablement effort to the right stakeholder can help safeguard and ultimately grow support for future initiatives.
2. Keep the Format Uniform. To help streamline the maintenance of updating the scorecard, it can be helpful to create an easy-to-follow format that can be repeated. For example, think of creating a color coding system that shows where certain metrics fall in the actuals stacked against the target goal. This can mean using green to signal the metric has met or exceeded the target, yellow to signal the metric is well on track to meet the target, and red to signal that the metric has not met the target goal and requires attention. This helps illuminate which metrics are on track to achieve desired outcomes and where others may be falling behind to quickly course-correct.
3. Be Concise with the Data. At the heart of any data analysis are clarity and brevity. It can be helpful to clearly establish with key stakeholders what metrics are the most important in helping to influence revenue and impact performance for the overall organization. The scorecard can, at a glance, help tell a larger story on how the most critical and insightful metrics impact overall performance.
Once the scorecard is created, it’s time to start pulling the numbers regularly. Think about how often the enablement team should report the scorecard results to stakeholders — such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly. For example, this could become a component of regularly scheduled business reviews conducted with key stakeholders, or communicated separately on a more frequent cadence depending on the goals included and the priority initiatives for the business. Then, review it often to start identifying patterns or discrepancies.
Consistently keeping track of the KPIs within the scorecard can guide teams to make strategic decisions to drive better business results. The scorecard’s snapshot makes it easier to pinpoint a metric potentially causing an issue. This enables a team to drill down, examine the cause, and try a new approach to drive better results for the business and demonstrate enablement’s impact across the organization.
Download the Enablement Performance Scorecard Template
