Revenue enablement vs revenue operations (RevOps): What’s the difference?

While revenue enablement and revenue operations (RevOps) have similar-sounding names, similar overall goals, and often collaborate together - how each team operates to meet that shared objective is different.

Understanding what separates the two functions can be the difference between achieving your organizational goals, and not.

What is revenue enablement?

Revenue enablement is a strategic function dedicated to supporting all revenue-generating teams to help them perform efficiently and effectively. That includes sales, marketing, customer success, and product.

An evolution of sales enablement, revenue enablement teams give revenue-focused teams the resources, tools, and training to succeed in their roles and provide an excellent, synchronized experience at every step of the customer’s journey.

Revenue enablement’s strategic goal is to align the tools, resources, and training provided to these revenue teams to ensure that no one team is siloed, and that everyone is working towards the same goal - generating revenue in the most efficient way possible.

Without revenue enablement, it’s possible for the marketing and sales teams to be providing prospective customers with different messages, or for the sales to customer success handover phase to be muddled and confusing, for example.

These issues create a disjointed customer experience, and can have a big impact on lead conversion rates and cross- and up-sell potential.

Benefits of revenue enablement

Adopting revenue enablement into your organization (whether by evolving a sales enablement function, or starting one from scratch) brings a whole host of advantages - especially when it comes to how your revenue teams think about the customer journey.

Benefit #1: Increased alignment between revenue-generating teams

Rather than have teams being trained in silos and using separate data, revenue enablement works as the glue to hold revenue teams together.

Benefit #2: Allows you to focus on big-picture strategy

With each team being focused on the same objectives, your enablement can spend time focusing on achieving wider business goals, as opposed to dedicating too much time to small departmental issues.

Benefit #3: Creates a cohesive buyer journey

When marketing, sales, customer success and beyond are all speaking the same language, prospects won’t receive mixed messages, and their journey to becoming a customer will follow a consistent path. Revenue enablement involves enabling every team and individual involved in the revenue cycle. This even involves enabling buyers themselves.

Revenue enablement key responsibilities

Revenue enablement’s overall goal is to provide revenue-generating teams with the resources, tools, training, and processes they need to succeed in their roles. Think sales, marketing, customer success in particular - three functions that have frequent touchpoints with prospects as they move through the customer journey.

As a result, revenue enablement’s key responsibilities involve:

Designing training and content so that marketing, sales, and customer success are delivering the same value proposition to customers.
Putting processes in place that ensure every revenue team’s goals are aligned with overall business objectives.
Aligning revenue teams and breaking down silos through effective stakeholder management.

And a lot more - if it involves revenue teams and the customer journey, then revenue enablement should be on hand to offer training and strategic support.

What is revenue operations (RevOps)?

Revenue operations, on the other hand, is also driven by a desire to align sales, marketing, customer success, and other revenue-generating teams into one centralized unit.

But while revenue enablement focuses on resources, training, and tools, RevOps’ primary focuses lie in the areas of data, tech stack, and processes.

Historically, sales operations, marketing operations, or customer success operations teams would work with their own data, tech, and processes, supporting their specific arms of the business. Revenue operations involves taking a more modern, holistic approach.

With the older approach, operations teams can get absorbed in their own short-term goals, making alignment challenging. While these functions might attempt to work toward a common goal, they can unknowingly slow progress by moving in unsynchronized directions.

RevOps steps in to promote a unified, long-term approach to revenue generation across sales, marketing, and customer success functions. This means each team is working from the same data, towards the same goal - total alignment thanks to revenue operations.

Benefits of revenue operations

Benefit #1: Predictable business growth

When marketing, sales, and customer success data is shared transparently, it becomes easier to make accurate predictions for the future.

Benefit #2: Better management of company resources

If every team is on the same page and using the same tools and tech, there’s less wasted budget. Sales and marketing won’t be using two tools to do the same thing, for example.

Benefit #3: Improved customer transparency

With a single source of truth, and one team managing the organization’s revenue tech, you’ll have a 360 degree view of the customer journey and their touch points across teams - great for highlighting strengths and weaknesses in that process.

Revenue operations key responsibilities

RevOps’ primary goal is to support revenue-generating teams with the data, processes, and tech they need to work efficiently. Anything to do with clean data, tech stack optimization, and efficient, aligned revenue processes will be in revenue operations’ wheelhouse.

This involves:

Managing the tech stack, and ensuring the customer relationship management (CRM) system is used correctly, and feeding accurate data and information to the right teams at the right time.
Aligning sales, marketing, and customer success, so that these separate teams are acting as one unit, using the same data and working towards the same overarching goals - not pulling in opposite directions.
Standardization of processes. Operations is the name of the game, so RevOps teams look to standardize processes across revenue teams to increase efficiency across the revenue function.

Data-driven decision-making is at the heart of everything RevOps does, allowing the team to identify areas of strength and weakness across the revenue organization.

3 similarities between revenue enablement and revenue operations

Similarity #1: They’re both support functions

Revenue enablement and RevOps are both support functions. They don’t generate revenue themselves directly. Instead, they focus on offering training, tools, tech, resources, training and more to functions like marketing, sales, and customer success to make those teams better at making the organization money.

Without revenue enablement, those teams will not have enough content and training to keep up with changing buyer behavior and trends. Without RevOps, those teams will not have the data, tech, or optimized process they need to be successful and efficient in their roles.

Similarity #2 In some organizations, revenue enablement reports to RevOps

Depending on the needs of the organization, revenue enablement can report to a number of different teams. According to the Sales Enablement Landscape Report 2024, 27% of enablement teams report into their company’s RevOps function.

This is a good fit for many organizations, because both teams are focused on the same broader objective - to support and create alignment between revenue teams. They just achieve this goal in their own unique ways.

Similarity #3: They are both involved in change management and process improvement

Revenue enablement and RevOps are both heavily involved in activities which change or influence how revenue-generating teams operate. This also leads to frequent collaboration between the two teams.

For example, RevOps may implement a new tool for the marketing and sales teams to use, and develop the process for how the tool should be used. Revenue enablement will take responsibility for training the teams to use this tool like RevOps intended.

There’s an obvious need for collaboration and alignment between revenue enablement and RevOps in this example - if the RevOps team doesn’t communicate the tool change, then the revenue enablement team won’t be able to run training for the sales and marketing teams.

Overall, both functions are designed to break down silos between the sales, marketing, and customer success teams, so that they can operate on the same page and start acting as one unit, rather than individual, disparate teams.

Revenue operations vs revenue enablement: 3 key differences

Difference #1: Revenue enablement is responsible for onboarding new hires, RevOps isn’t

The Sales Enablement Landscape Report 2024 found that 67% of enablement teams are exclusively responsible for onboarding new hires, with another 28% holding partial responsibility for this task.

This means that overall, 95% of enablement teams are responsible for onboarding new hires. In fact, onboarding is seen as the enablement activity. Training new hires to get them up to speed and contributing in their role as quickly and efficiently as possible is enablement’s bread and butter.

While revenue operations may be involved from a distance, due to their background role in setting up accounts for new hires within the tech stack or streamlining processes, they won’t be directly responsible for the new hire’s onboarding experience - unlike revenue enablement.

Difference #2: RevOps implements and optimizes the tools and tech, while revenue enablement trains teams on it

Revenue operations teams’ main technology responsibility is buying and implementing revenue tools. This function looks to optimize processes by vetting new tools that’ll help sales, marketing, or customer success reps perform tasks faster.

They’ll then implement new tech within your organization and ensure it’s integrated with your existing tech stack.

On the other hand, revenue enablement will train the revenue team on how to use these new tools. While there’s always a degree of collaboration (and RevOps may help train reps on how to correctly input CRM data, for example), the bulk of implementation and upkeep will lie with revenue operations, and the majority of training and coaching will lie with revenue enablement.

However, as the two teams’ goals are closely aligned, collaboration between the functions is key in order to provide the best experience to the revenue teams.

Difference #3: Revenue operations and revenue enablement have separate day-to-day responsibilities

While there are countless ways in which the two teams can collaborate and drive towards the same business goals, their actual day-to-day role and responsibilities are different.

Revenue operations professionals’ daily tasks include:

Managing compensation planning and quota setting.
Cleaning CRM data and analyzing data.
Setting up automations and checking they work properly.
Assessing bottlenecks and improving processes.
Implementing new technology.

Meanwhile, revenue enablement professionals’ daily tasks will include:

Onboarding new sales, marketing, and customer success reps.
Creating content and collateral such as battlecards and playbooks.
Hosting training workshops or presentations.
Making sales kickoff meetings effective and engaging.
Coaching revenue reps to improve their skills.

3 ways revenue enablement and RevOps can align

As we’ve seen, revenue operations and revenue enablement are separate teams with separate responsibilities. However, there’s a lot of scope for collaboration and alignment - in fact, the most successful organizations are those that have aligned RevOps and revenue enablement teams.

These organizations reap the benefits of the two functions, and as a result have aligned customer-facing teams that work in tandem to increase customer satisfaction.

This ultimately improves the marketing team’s ability to generate leads, provides an uptick in sales performance and win rates, and increases the customer success team’s ability to cross- and up-sell.

#1: Revenue team training strategy

Revenue enablement teams can lean on the RevOps team when it comes to in-depth data analysis. When there’s no obvious shortcoming in sales rep performance, for example, but the overall win rate is dropping, revenue enablement can collaborate with RevOps to understand where the shortfall is coming from.

The revenue operations team can look to the CRM and answer questions related to the pipeline that might uncover some of the mysteries that the revenue enablement team is seeing.

This information can then help to inform and shape the revenue enablement team’s training strategies - giving them specific areas of weakness to focus upcoming training and content on.

#2: Tech stack and headcount buy-in

Both teams will have a unique perspective on why a new addition to the tech stack or more sales, marketing, or customer success reps are required to improve revenue generation.

When they combine forces, it can be much easier to gain executive buy-in.

That’s to say, when revenue operations and revenue enablement agree a new tool is necessary for improved productivity and revenue growth, the request will hold more weight than if just one team held this opinion.

By presenting a shared case, execs are more likely to approve new tools. It’s not RevOps vs revenue enablement - it’s RevOps and revenue enablement working together to better their odds of success.

#3: Change management

We touched on this earlier, but both revenue enablement and revenue operations are key drivers of change in organizations (in some orgs this is so valuable, there's a dedicated change enablement function).

Whether it’s a change in processes, tools, resources, etc., whenever something changes for the revenue-generating teams, you’ll probably find RevOps and revenue enablement.

This means it’s essential for the two to collaborate, to ensure that the changes being made are rolled out smoothly and that the rest of the business understands them.

Revenue enablement vs RevOps: metrics

As revenue enablement and RevOps oversee a variety of functions (sales, marketing, customer success, and sometimes more), they naturally track a variety of metrics and KPIs.

Some overlap, while some are specific to each function. As a revenue enabler or a RevOps professional, it’s important to discuss with leadership and stakeholders in the business to understand what metrics are important to them before you start measuring everything and everything.

Some examples of revenue enablement metrics include:

New hire ramp time
Inbound marketing leads
Content usage
Sales confidence
Sales stage conversion rate
Win/close rates
Up-sell and cross-sell rate
Customer churn rate
Sales velocity
Quota attainment

Some examples of revenue operations metrics include:

Sales pipeline velocity
Average deal size
Sales forecasting
Win/close rate
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs)
Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Cost per lead
Campaign ROI
Customer churn rate
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

However, this is just a handful out of the many metrics your revenue enablement and RevOps teams may choose to measure. Factors such as company size, maturity, and vertical will dictate the exact metrics you need to track.

Wrapping up

In short, revenue enablement and revenue operations are two functions with similar objectives, but fundamentally different approaches to achieving their goals.

For more information on revenue enablement, you can join the Sales Enablement Collective Slack community.

Meanwhile, our sister community Revenue Operations Alliance has a similar Slack community, where you can learn even more about RevOps!