What Shifting to Revenue Enablement Can Do for Your Organization

In short:

• B2B buyers are changing the way they interact with companies, disrupting the buying and selling landscape.
• To reduce complexity spurred by this disruption, sales leaders must consider transitioning to a revenue enablement model, which expands supported roles, prioritizes end-to-end metrics and technology, and consolidates functions.
• This ultimately provides the consistency, alignment and visibility necessary to enhance the modern buying and selling experience.

Evolving B2B buyer preferences and selling processes are driving companies to increase alignment between customer-facing functions. Disjointed messaging and operations across sales, marketing, service and other customer-facing roles create barriers instead of growth. Plus, the increasing number of customer touchpoints means different functions are working against different KPIs, which causes chaos and poor performance.

To combat this disruption, sales leaders must expand enabled roles, prioritize end-to-end revenue metrics and technology, and centralize enablement support. The solution? Revenue enablement. 

Download now: How to Build an End-to-End Revenue Enablement Strategy

The impact of revenue enablement

“Revenue enablement connects enablement efforts and uses shared technology, tools, data, analytics, processes and KPIs to reduce the complexity of the modern sales ecosystem,” says Doug Bushée, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner. “It provides buyers and sellers with a seamless and more effortless experience.”

Revenue enablement expands sales enablement’s purview from sales-only to supporting all revenue-generating channels and customer-facing, revenue-generating roles. It leverages revenue technology and uses data and analytics throughout the entire customer journey to create and improve enablement efforts.

Download now: Guide to Motivate and Retain Your Sales Team

Revenue enablement vs. sales enablement

While sales enablement focuses on only the sales organization, revenue enablement is about improving workflows within all customer-facing functions in service of streamlining the purchase process. This includes ensuring those involved in the entire revenue life cycle have the training, content and tools to be successful. Those roles include:

• Inside sales teams (including sales and business development reps)
• Channel managers
• Channel partners
• Presales teams (like solution architects and system engineers)
• Offer specialists
• Customer success teams

The advantages of revenue enablement

There are three main advantages to transitioning to a revenue enablement model:

1. Consistency: All customer-facing roles leverage consistent customer messaging, similar technology and data, and sales motions that reduce friction in traditional handoffs between functions.
2. Alignment: Marketing, sales and customer success work together to improve end-to-end revenue generation. They either collaborate cross-functionally on efforts that support the entire customer buying journey or come together under one revenue enablement function.
3. Visibility: There’s visibility throughout the customer buying journey, making it easier to optimize enablement efforts to improve revenue.

Design an effective revenue enablement organization

A well-designed revenue enablement organization includes two key areas: role-focused program management and production-focused enablement operations.

Role-focused program management

Role-focused program managers are enablement generalists responsible for supporting specific roles within the business (that is, SDRs/BDRs, direct sales, presales, indirect sales and customer success). Their specialization is in the domain expertise of what is required to succeed in the roles they support, and they are responsible for tailoring enablement programs to the needs of those roles.

Production-focused enablement operations

This group has the skills to power enablement programs at scale using technology. 

• Digital engagement specialists optimize content and manage systems to coordinate enablement activities.
• Data analysts provide strategic analysis and deliver insights to program managers to drive data-driven decision making.