Unlocking revenue: How enablement and marketing drive success together

This topic is particularly close to my heart, having led both revenue enablement and marketing teams myself. If you’ve ever been in the trenches of these departments, you know the “finger-pointing” game all too well, where it’s never clear who should take the next move.

Ever watched an Olympic tennis match?

It’s fast-paced, with players constantly on their toes, switching between offense and defense, all while managing the pressure.

Now, imagine that same intensity in an enablement and marketing meeting – minus the rackets, but with just as much tension and (sometimes) grumbling.

These days, everyone is scrambling to stay ahead of the competition.

The key to success? It’s simple: internal collaboration and seamless communication between teams.

When enablement and marketing are in sync, external business flows more smoothly, allowing revenue to grow faster and more consistently.

These 4 items will be vital in setting enablement and marketing up for success:

Establish & build rapport
Define swim lanes
Create fluid process
Re-visit processes often

Establish and build rapport

Building rapport between enablement and marketing is one of the most crucial steps in setting the stage for long-term success. When these two teams align, they create a foundation for collaboration that drives business outcomes.

For enablement, product marketing and the broader marketing team are key partners in achieving success. Product marketing plays an essential role by providing critical product knowledge – helping enablement teams create the materials that empower the sales and GTM organizations.

This includes in-depth insights on product features, benefits, competitive positioning, and any updates or changes, which are vital for product launches and updates.

Marketing, on the other hand, ensures that the company’s brand is consistently represented across all channels and that top-of-funnel activities are effectively managed.

By working together, enablement and marketing can convert marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into sales-qualified leads (SQLs), driving a seamless flow from awareness to sales.

If you're thinking, "That's not how my marketing department operates," it highlights the importance of building rapport in the first place.

Taking time to understand what your marketing team is working on and where there are opportunities to collaborate based on your respective roles can bridge gaps.

A strong partnership starts with clear communication and an understanding of each team's goals and responsibilities – so make rapport-building a priority, early and often.

Define swim lanes

Now that you have a clear understanding of what each team does and how to communicate and collaborate effectively, it’s time to focus on defining swim lanes between enablement and marketing.

This step ensures that roles and responsibilities are clearly outlined, preventing overlap and confusion.

This is where your Enablement Charter becomes essential. A charter isn’t a static document—it should evolve to meet both enablement and business needs.

For example, if your company introduces a new platform to enhance customer outreach, it’s crucial to define who owns specific aspects, such as license provisioning, email cadences, and other key tasks.

Documenting these responsibilities will streamline internal processes, which in turn leads to a smoother external experience for customers.

By clearly defining swim lanes in the Enablement Charter, you establish a framework that keeps both teams aligned, accountable, and focused on their unique contributions.

This clarity ensures that enablement and marketing can work together efficiently, without stepping on each other’s toes, and can deliver the best possible results for the business.

Need help creating an enablement charter? Check out our template.

Create fluid processes

To ensure continued cross-collaboration, both enablement and marketing will need to establish processes for each team.

At a previous company, we found ourselves overwhelmed with collateral – sound familiar? Both enablement and marketing were producing collateral rapidly, without any governance over who was creating what or how it was being distributed to the sales team.

To address this, we created a Collateral Governance Committee. Drawing on the relationships we’d built with marketing and supported by leadership from each function, we selected key cross-functional collaborators we regularly worked with.

My marketing counterpart and I developed a weekly agenda, assigning action items to our collaborators so that no one’s time was wasted and progress was made each week.

Over the course of two quarters, we audited over 10,000 pieces of collateral, created a visual map showing which types of collateral the sales team could expect at each stage of the Sales Process and Buyer’s Journey, and established a streamlined process for collateral creation going forward to reduce redundancy.

Without this process, we would have faced the same issues: confusion, underutilization, and poor sales/customer engagement with these valuable resources.

Use the data and re-visit processes often

Enablement should never partake in a project unless there are metrics attached, and this Collateral Governance Committee was no exception to that.

One of our fabulous marketing colleagues ran monthly reports to show which of the pieces of collateral was being utilized the most, whether from customer conversations, downloads from our website or from social media posts.

This was very valuable information as it helped us determine if were hitting the mark with our ICPs, placing the correct collateral in the correct Sales Stages and Buyer’s Journey Stages and so much more!

This data-driven approach will also help with the cross-collaboration between marketing and enablement and should be kept in mind during the initial conversations.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, think of the relationship between enablement and marketing like a high-stakes tennis match.

Both teams need to stay on their toes, constantly shifting between offense and defense, all while maintaining clear communication and a strategic game plan.

By building rapport, defining roles, creating fluid processes, and revisiting them regularly, enablement and marketing can play in perfect sync, delivering the right collateral at the right time, and ensuring a smooth flow from awareness to sales.

With the right teamwork and a data-driven approach, both teams can avoid the dreaded "double faults" of confusion and misalignment, ultimately driving revenue and business growth, just like a well-executed rally that ends in a winning shot.

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