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.

Revenue enablement explained

Revenue enablement is all about giving revenue-focused teams the resources, tools, and training they need to deliver excellence at every stage of the customer journey.

After all, the sales team isn’t the only team that contributes to generating revenue. Any team with a customer-facing role helps (or hinders) the business in reaching its revenue goals.

Because the customer buying journey doesn’t always start with a sales rep. 

Today, it’s much more likely a customer has done some research before they ever speak to a team member. And they’ve probably combed through several pieces of marketing content by this time.

Similarly, there are stages of the customer journey after the sale. Your new customers speak with your customer success team for onboarding and support.

Revenue enablement, by focusing on the buyer journey, rather than the sale, manages to be more customer-focused than sales enablement could ever be.

Why revenue enablement?

“But we’ve already got a sales enablement team,” we hear you say. “It’s working well. Why should revenue enablement be any better?”

Before we pit sales and revenue enablement head to head, let’s turn to the data to make a case for revenue enablement itself.

1) Your customers don’t trust your salespeople

According to Hubspot, only 3% of buyers think sales is a trustworthy profession.

Deep down, you know this to be true. How many times have you picked up the phone, recognized it’s a sales call, and hung up?

Sure, it’s partly sales’ responsibility to combat this. And choosing the right sales methodology is a big help.

But they don’t have to do it alone.

Revenue enablement helps make sure that, as soon as a prospect hears your company name, they’re already feeling good about the conversation.

2) Buying processes are getting more complex

According to Hubspot’s 2024 State of Sales report, there are five people, on average, involved in any buying decision.

It’s no longer the case that salespeople have to persuade just one or two decision makers.

To make matters worse?

With a traditional sales enablement approach, those additional decision makers are unreachable.

A revenue enablement approach gives an enablement team influence over more touchpoints in the buyer journey. Some of the material that marketing, for example, put out, can in turn reach and influence these once-unreachable decision makers.

3) It’s already here

Just 37% of respondents for our 2024 Sales Enablement Landscape Report believe “sales enablement” accurately describes their day-to-day role.

93% believe, in an ideal world, that enablement should serve more than just the sales team, while:

  • Just 7% think enablement should serve only sales.
  • 30% think enablement should serve all revenue-generating teams.
  • 47% think enablement should serve all teams in the Go-to-Market function.

In other words, the majority of enablement professionals are already doing something approaching revenue enablement. Or, at the very least, they believe they should be.

The industry is changing. Revenue enablement seems like the smartest way to keep up.

Molly Sestak Business Transformation Lead at Sedna “I truly believe that every organization with a sales, marketing and CS function can benefit from increasing their scope to revenue enablement.”

Revenue enablement vs. sales enablement

Here are some of the main differences between sales enablement and revenue enablement:

1) Focus and scope

Focus and scope are perhaps the main differences between sales and revenue enablement.

• Focus:

Revenue enablement focuses on influencing the customer journey, and overall revenue growth.

Sales enablement focuses on sales, the sales cycle, and the outcomes of individual deals.

• Scope:

Revenue enablement teams aim to support all revenue-generating teams in the business. That includes those that interact with customers both before and after the sales cycle itself. This involves the product, marketing, and customer success teams, in addition to sales.

Sales enablement teams look only to support their sales teams with the content, training, and tools they need to overcome recurring objections and win deals against their hottest competitors.

2) Org structure

While there’s no hard and fast rule around which team sales enablement should report into, revenue enablement teams may more often find themselves reporting to, and sitting within, different teams.

It’s not uncommon for revenue enablement and revenue operations teams to work together. (Just as it’s not so different for sales ops and sales enablement teams to do the same).

Rather than reporting to sales leaders, revenue operations teams could just as easily find themselves reporting into the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), or leaders from any of the teams they serve.

3) Metrics

The metrics you’ll use to measure your enablement team will differ, depending on whether they support sales alone, or all revenue facing teams.

The following metrics are pretty typical for revenue enablement teams. You’ll notice the presence of more customer-centric metrics, in addition to the usual sales-centric metrics:

  • Conversion rates
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Sales cycle length
  • Churn and retention rates
  • Content engagement and adoption
  • Revenue growth

Growing revenue enablement within an organization | SEC
GHX’s Director of Revenue Enablement, Jaclyn D’Arcy, GHX explains the value of a revenue enablement team and how to grow and expand it in your organization.


What teams does revenue enablement support?

Remember the customer buying journey?

Revenue enablement looks to support all teams involved.

The goal extends from closing the deal to getting the customer all the way to renewal or a second purchase. And this involves more teams than sales alone.

Marketing

🗞️
Revenue enablement supports marketing teams to ensure their messaging is consistent throughout the buyer funnel.

They’ll also repurpose marketing materials into enablement collateral to help other teams win and retain customers.

But this works both ways. You’ll also give the marketing team strategic insights into how they can improve the ways they influence the buyer journey themselves.

Sales

💰
For sales, revenue enablement functions largely the same as sales enablement. They give the sales team training, coaching, content, and tech stack support.

Additionally, the sales team benefits from revenue enablement being aligned with the rest of the customer-facing side of the business. This helps prospects and customers get a seamless experience as they progress through the funnel. 

Customer success

🤝
The job isn’t done when your sales team closes the deal. That’s where customer success comes in, supporting new customers across their lifetime.

The goal of your product or service is to eliminate customer pain points, but that’s difficult without consistent support.

Revenue enablement empowers customer success teams in the same way as it does other departments. This leads to increased revenue. That’s from recurring sales, upsell opportunities, and stronger customer loyalty.

How to implement a revenue enablement strategy

Revenue enablement involves equipping revenue-related teams with the right knowledge, tools, and resources to engage customers, close deals, and contribute to revenue success.

For this reason, a revenue enablement strategy looks much like a sales enablement strategy—but with a larger scope.

Items to consider when building your revenue enablement strategy include:

• Assess the landscape

Understand the current situation that your revenue teams are in. Are they aligned? What needs addressing most urgently?

Involve stakeholders like RevOps in this process to get a holistic view.

• Be customer-centric

As we mentioned above, the big advantage that revenue enablement holds is that it covers much more of the customer’s buying journey. That means your strategies need to keep the customer front and center, uniting revenue-generating functions in how they support prospects and customers. 

• Empower all teams

Focus your energy on empowering not just the sales team, but marketing and customer success too. Consider what team members in each function need in order to be successful. Consider your tech stack, content, and training. 

• Metrics and reporting

There are dozens of enablement metrics you could track to determine “success”, especially when dealing with multiple functions. It’s important to define what you'll use before starting any projects. As you’re planning, ask yourself what success will look like for that specific project or strategy. 

• Collaboration and alignment

As a role that oversees and supports multiple key functions, it’s critical that any revenue enablement strategy you implement has alignment between sales, marketing, and customer success at its core.

• Consider your organization's maturity

Sometimes it can be easier to start your enablement journey in sales enablement. Then, evolve into revenue enablement as the organization's needs evolve and grow.

You’ll often find more mature enablement functions dropping the “sales” label and going by revenue enablement as they grow, compared to smaller, less mature teams who keep a tighter scope.

Focusing on these key pillars will ensure your team is heading in the right direction to support and enable these teams.


Launching revenue enablement for repeatable revenue | SEC
Bryan Grobstein, Head of Revenue Strategy and Enablement at Lunchbox, discusses implementing revenue enablement teams sharing best practices from experience leading the charge.


Benefits of revenue enablement

Okay, so we understand how revenue enablement and sales enablement differ. And we’ve made a case for it being necessary.

But how does revenue enablement actually benefit you?

How does implementing revenue enablement benefit you and your org?

1) Improves processes

As a revenue enabler, you’re uniquely suited to fix and improve existing processes in a way sales enablers are not.

You speak to a bunch of people around the business. You’re invested in solving their problems.

As a result, you’ll hear where people’s pain points and frustrations lie.

When processes are causing these issues, it’s your job to pull in the necessary stakeholders and work with them to improve and fix those processes.

The result? Great efficiency, less wasted time, more revenue.

2) Aligns teams

Businesses with aligned teams achieve more.

Pipeline360’s recent H2 2024 State of Pipeline Growth report found that 75% of those with aligned sales and marketing teams reached their goals to a “great or very great extent”.

And a revenue enablement approach helps you achieve that alignment.

It stops teams from fighting against each other, pursuing conflicting short-term goals at the expense of the org’s longer-term strategic vision.

What’s more, revenue enablement sets you, as the enabler, up to facilitate that alignment. This helps you demonstrate your own value. In turn, helping you grow your own career.

3) Allows you to focus on strategy

When you understand the priorities of the wider business, and of all its revenue-generating teams, you’re better able to make sure your own work aligns with (and supports) those goals.

When you work primarily with one department (sales), though? You risk becoming bogged down. If the department’s goals are at all divorced from those of the wider business, you might end up pursuing the wrong things.

This also gives you, as the enabler, a position to amass strategic influence within your org. From there, you can prove your own ability and value to an extent that gives you unique career progression opportunities.

4) Creates a cohesive buyer journey

Confused prospects don’t buy.

So you want to give them the most cohesive experience possible.

Mapping the customer journey is the first step towards creating a cohesive experience throughout that journey. One that offers consistent messaging at each touchpoint.

But your buyer journey will always reflect the cohesion and alignment (or lack of it) you’ve achieved between teams internally.

As we mentioned in point two above, you’re uniquely placed as a revenue enabler to bring these teams together. And you have a lot of influence over the buyer journey experience as a result.

This nets your sales team prospects that:

  • Feel better about your brand and your business
  • Feel more confident about the value you offer
  • Can better vouch for your services to other decision makers

This means warmer leads and higher conversion rates.

5) Maximizes repeat business

Sales enablement cares about helping sales teams win more deals.

But a won deal doesn’t necessarily constitute a win for the business. Imagine you land five new customers, but four of them churn within two weeks.

Is this an achievement?

If your salespeople are making promises that other teams are unable to fulfil, just to win deals, you’ve got a problem.

Revenue enablement helps prevent this kind of thing. It extends the time horizon, and makes you interested in revenue overall rather than raw sales.

As a revenue enabler, you’d be able to work with customer success to set up strong onboarding programs, for example, to help mitigate churn.

When you’re enabling product and marketing teams, you’ll also find customers opting for upsells and cross-sells more frequently. This means higher overall customer lifetime value, and more revenue.


Building effective sales teams: driving yield and ramp | SEC
Scott King, VP of Sales Strategy and Global Enablement at Delphix explains how to build effective sales teams, starting from the hiring process


How to launch a revenue enablement program (5 handy tips)

For the full run down, check out Bryan Grobstein’s excellent article on launching revenue enablement.

Here are some tips to help you build your own revenue enablement function.

1) Adapt an existing enablement function where possible

The first step is to create the revenue enablement function.

But if you’ve already got a sales enablement function, you should adapt it to make the shift from sales enablement to revenue enablement easier. You can do this slowly. Watch other teams’ interest build as you expand your remit.

If you don’t have an existing enablement function, you’ll have to hire for the role or roll up your sleeves and start doing some of the work yourself.

2) Pick one: Breadth or depth

With a new revenue enablement function in place, you have a choice to make.

You can either:

  1. Start small and grow outward
  2. Start broad and grow downward

The first option involves enabling just one more team to start with, along with sales. Customer Success is a sensible first choice. Get some momentum, prove some results, and then expand further.

The benefit of this approach? You don’t bite off more than you can chew. You tackle and solve each team’s biggest problems before moving on.

But if the biggest, quickest wins for company revenue lie in fixing issues with a different team, you’ll be leaving valuable revenue untapped until you move on.

The second option involves tackling every team at once, and building competence and depth from there.

This is arguably the more challenging approach, but some might prefer ripping off the band-aid.

This also has the benefit of making sure you can scale any processes or materials you create across teams.

Progress is likely to be slower in the beginning, but should quickly pick up momentum once you’ve taken care of the biggest blockers.

3) Understand each of your revenue drivers

Make sure you understand all the ways in which you serve your customers.

These are the things that make you money. It’s your job to make it easier for your business to sell them, and for prospects to buy them.

Note down all the products or services that you offer right now.

Do you understand them, and the value they offer to customers?

Why do customers buy them already? What do they like or dislike about them? How do they compare to competitors’ products?

You’ll need to be able to answer these questions if you’re to help others to the best of your ability.

4) Align with your stakeholders

Now it’s time to meet your stakeholders.

You should look to develop a relationship with at least one or two key members of all revenue teams. That includes product, customer success, marketing, and sales.

Here are a few tips for achieving that alignment:

• Involve them from the start

Something we’ve heard from just about every professional we’ve ever spoken to (in every field):

“Adoption, buy-in, and alignment are far easier when you involve affected parties right at the start.”

When people are involved in the decision-making process, they’ll always be at least minimally emotionally invested.

• Understand their influence

Gain an understanding of each stakeholder’s influence on the buyer journey.

Learn about their processes, and the pain points they experience when handling these processes.

• Map processes to the customer journey

To make sure this “alignment” you’re putting effort into creating actually makes you more money, make sure to map these processes back to the buyer journey.

Where are there gaps?

Where do stakeholders already feel they could improve the impression they give customers at each touchpoint?

• Establish shared targets

Targets act as North Stars and incentives. There’s no faster way to get different teams pulling in the same direction than to establish a shared set of KPIs and OKRs. Ones that relate back to the business’ revenue targets, and that teams talk about in their own meetings.

When teams really feel they own their ability to hit these targets, and share in the success of hitting them, they’ll spend time brainstorming better ways of achieving and exceeding those targets.

That means all teams work harder to push towards a shared goal. And isn’t that what alignment is all about?

5) Admit when you’re coming from a deficiency

Offering your help to others is a double-edged sword.

There are those who interpret offers of help as insulting or condescending. Others see it as a nuisance. They already know what they’re doing. Or, their outperformance is a byproduct of some secret they’re guarding. Or, they just like their freedom, and don’t want you interfering with it.

So first, you need to admit the truth:

You know nothing.

You can’t walk into the Customer Success department and start handing out lists of all the changes you expect them to make. Not when you don’t even know any of their names.

You need to understand their pain points first. (They’re called your “internal customers” for a reason.)

But importantly, they need to know you understand their pain points. This is a prerequisite. Before they know this, they won’t trust you or your enablement materials. Which means they won’t use them. Which means you’re wasting your time.

So admit when you’re coming from a deficiency, and use your humility to kickstart a grassroots movement of trust in your abilities, your materials, and your ability to enact change that helps your internal customers.

More resources

Want to learn even more about revenue enablement and its many intricacies? 

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