A key part of modern sales organizations is the recurring specification, asset creation, and deployment of scaled sales enablement and effectiveness programs.
Atrium is a critical part of this recurring process, whereby Leadership, Enablement and Operations use Atrium to ensure managers and leadership can measure that the inputs and outputs associated with the enablement program - whether prospecting, pipeline generation, pipeline hygiene, and so on - are indeed happening, and where they can be improved.
Above is a conceptual schematic of how this can be done in practice, where the CRM is used to define the "work to be done" (e.g., Accounts for AEs to prospecting into), the Content for executing the programs are housed in an enablement resource (e.g., Highspot or Seismic) or a Sales Engagement resource (e.g., SalesLoft or Outreach), while the Measurement of the program, per rep, per manager, and at a bird's eye view, is authored and housed in Atrium.
Priority Alignment
The first step is a successful performance management enablement program is align all relevant stakeholders on the performance priority in question. If everything's a priority, nothing's a priority - so important to ensure that sales management, operations, and enablement - and potentially other parties - are aligned on the topic in question.
Often these topics arise as an outcome of quarterly business reviews or annual planning.
This might be something like the need to enhance the Account Executive team's per rep bookings performance through enhance cross-sell of a new product.
Or a need to enhance the Account Executive team's bookings performance through additional self-sourced pipeline via AE prospecting activity.
Or a need to enhance the Account Executive team's bookings performance through enhanced win rates driven by better multi-threading in their open opportunities.
Or a need to enhance the productivity of the SDR team whose email engagement rates have declined by adding a calling component.
Whatever the topic is, there should be alignment on what the organization is seeking to improve performance on via directed enablement.
Success Metric Agreement
Next, there needs to be a way to know "How do we know we were successful? How do we know we're on the right track?" for the initiative in question.
This will mean designating the relevant success metrics, with a particular emphasis on leading indicators, intermediaries, and of course outputs.
That is, we can't just say "We want to have more bookings per rep by selling more of our shiny new Product Excelsior". That would also mean instrumenting the inputs, and intermediaries as well - like "We need to see X amount of new opportunities with Product Excelsior added as a product line items per quarter, and Y amount of pipeline with Product Excelsior added as a product line item making it to Stage 3 - Value Proposition, and finally, Z amount of bookings per rep
By selecting metrics on inputs, intermediaries, and outputs, not only will the business be able to see early on (leading indicators) if something isn't going right (e.g. "No one has any new opportunities with Product Excelsior added to them...") it will also be able to see where in the process issues may be showing up ("Everyone is getting a bunch of new opps with Product Excelsior on them...but Jeff is somehow never getting any of that pipeline to Stage 3 - Value Proposition - even through everyeone else is.")
This is where sales performance management tooling like Atrium can be extremely helpful by providing an easily configurable and customizable library of metrics that can be aligned to any performance management case.
Other examples might be:
| Initiative | Output | Intermediary | Input | |
| AE Team | Raise bookings through better multi-threading | Bookings Per Rep | Win Rate | Unique Contacts Engaged Per Open Opp |
| AE Team | Raise bookings through better pipeline coverage augmented by AE self sourced pipe |
Bookings Per Rep Self-Sourced Bookings |
Self-Sourced Pipeline Self-Sourced Pipeline Reaching Mid-Funnel |
AE Prospecting Email AE Prospecting Accounts Touched AE Self-Sourced Opps |
| SDR Team | Raise opportunity creation via cold calling | Incremental Opportunity Creation | Call Connects | Call Activity |
Enablement Deployment
Once priorities and metrics have been aligned on, the next step is deploying the enablement in question. Typically this requires heavy management and rep engagement.
Operations Efforts:
Enablement Efforts:
Management Efforts:
Content. Ops needs (accounts, tooling). Coaching plans. Certification.
Progress Measurement
leading, intermediary, lagging
Atrium goals.