Businesses are facing more pressure to meet their revenue targets. And increased competition, evolving buyer expectations, economic uncertainty, and digital complexities are turning up the dial on that pressure.
There are also many internal barriers hindering revenue growth. Siloed tech and teams, manual workflows, and limited resources make hitting revenue targets a challenge.
Sound familiar? It’s time to shift from a siloed sales enablement focus to a more unified revenue enablement approach. This will help align revenue-generation teams around common goals and create a smoother experience for buyers and sellers.
In this article, we’ll show you how to overcome revenue challenges and outline five key steps to building an effective revenue enablement strategy. Let’s dive in!
What is revenue enablement?
We define enablement – specifically revenue enablement – as the strategic approach that equips revenue-generating teams with the tools, resources, and information to effectively engage with prospects and customers at every stage of their buying journey.
We’re not the only ones. According to Gartner, “Revenue enablement connects enablement efforts and uses shared technology, tools, data, analytics, processes, and KPIs to reduce the complexity of the modern sales ecosystem.” This way, organizations can enhance team collaboration, streamline processes, and enable revenue growth.
Gartner predicts that by 2026, ‘revenue enablement’ will appear in 10% of all enablement job titles in the B2B sales market.
Shifting from sales enablement to revenue enablement
Sales enablement unites go-to-market (GTM) teams to provide sellers the information, tech, and resources needed to effectively close business. Taking it a step further, revenue enablement expands its reach to support all revenue-generating departments. Those include sales, marketing, customer success, and other customer-facing channels, such as digital commerce and customer service. Including those departments in your enablement efforts ensures your team can deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized customer experiences.
Companies that successfully implement this unified approach will break down silos across teams and tech, streamline workflows, and ultimately boost customer satisfaction and revenue. In fact, Gartner estimates that “By 2026, 60% of enablement teams will be tasked with enabling all client-facing, revenue-generating roles.”
How to create an effective revenue enablement strategy
Begin your revenue enablement journey by taking these five important steps.
1. Assess your current state and identify gaps
Start with an objective evaluation of where things stand today. Examine your enablement maturity by assessing how your organization currently enables your revenue teams and their prospects and customers across every interaction point. Remember, your analysis should always center on what contributes to revenue growth, so ask questions like:
- Could this process be improved? Could it be faster?
- What silos exist across these teams?
- What barriers are hindering revenue-generating behaviors?
- How are we measuring performance?
This way, you can pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, and growth opportunities. Closely monitoring and evaluating customer engagement across touchpoints will provide your team with the insights needed to optimize initiatives and drive outcomes.
An easy way to get started is to take Seismic’s Enablement Maturity Assessment. This will help you discover where your organization falls and how you improve your revenue enablement strategy.
2. Establish a revenue enablement framework
Building a successful revenue enablement strategy means aligning teammates and functions around the goal of driving revenue growth. Don’t worry if it seems overwhelming at first – even small changes can bring noticeable benefits to your business. Here are some steps your organization can take to implement revenue enablement:
- Create a revenue enablement team: Build a dedicated revenue enablement team that includes members from relevant departments that support the revenue cycle, such as sales, marketing, and customer service. Your organization should clearly define their roles and responsibilities based on how they will support revenue goals.
- Align with cross-functional teams: Drive alignment between revenue-generating departments by establishing a collaborative environment for sharing insights, feedback, and knowledge about customer interactions.
- Understand the entire customer journey: Harness data from different touchpoints in the buying cycle — from pre-sales to post-sales — to better understand the entire customer journey and where revenue can be influenced.
- Establish shared revenue targets and goals: Determine how you’ll support the business and set realistic revenue targets and KPIs that are shared across teams and align with overall objectives. For example, you may have different goals for generating net new business, increasing cross-sell and upsell opportunities, gaining more momentum in a particular vertical, or increasing win rates.
99% of enablement technology users say that it makes their jobs easier.
3. Harness AI
Deploying AI in your enablement strategy is an excellent way to speed up workflows and deliver better, more tailored buyer experiences. And it’s never been more important, as 70% of buyers now expect personalized experiences across all stages in their customer journey, and are frustrated when they don’t receive them. Leverage AI to create unique buyer personas, so your team can map the right content to the right buyers across all stages in the customer journey.
The impact of AI is undeniable, as 83% of GTM leaders agree that aligning AI with GTM strategy will lead to revenue growth for their organizations, according to our State of AI in Enablement Report.
AI can eliminate the legwork by sorting through vast quantities of data and predicting the best actions for all revenue teams, including what content to use at which buying journey stage, and which prospects and customers to contact at certain moments. By doing so, your team can:
- Meet buyers where they are
- Grab their attention with relevant, personalized content
- And provide valuable information that builds trust
4. Deploy the right revenue enablement platforms
The people have spoken, and nearly half of GTM professionals say they wouldn’t work for a company that doesn’t use enablement tools. When building a revenue enablement tech stack, it’s essential to choose tools that streamline workflows for your GTM team and simplify the process for buyers. To accomplish this, consider these tools:
- Customer relationship management software (CRM): A CRM can manage leads, opportunities, and pipeline through a central platform for storing customer data and tracking customer interactions across different touchpoints.
- Training and coaching software: Onboard new team members and deliver ongoing training on the latest sales strategies, product updates, and industry trends with bite-sized modules that are easily digestible. Coach customer-facing teams to enhance their skills with realistic scenario-based practice that gives them the confidence to reach their goals.
- Sales engagement tools: Support revenue enablement by streamlining multi-channel customer communication, such as email, phone, and social media, and make it easy for sellers to personalize messaging while staying on brand. The right tool will also enable lead prioritization and provide insights that help teams make data-driven decisions.
- Sales content management systems (CMS): Employ a sales CMS for GTM teams to manage content in a central location, ensuring they have access to approved customer-facing assets, third-party resources, and enablement tools.
- Customer success tools: Manage post-sales customer relationships, providing valuable insights into customer satisfaction, retention, and cross-sell/upsell opportunities.
5. Measure and improve
What worked? What didn’t? These questions sound simple, but most companies forget to ask them. Instead, they repeat the same ineffective behaviors and processes. Evaluating data and KPIs is critical for revenue enablement teams to identify and replicate success, reduce manual efforts, simplify the buying process, and maximize interactions across the customer journey.
Here are a few key metrics to consider across revenue teams:
Track progress regularly across KPIs to identify gaps in your enablement strategy and adjust as needed. Communicate results and incorporate a full feedback loop across teams for added context into successes and failures. This way, you can refine processes and strategies to achieve better outcomes.
Where does Seismic fit in?
To effectively align revenue-generating teams and channels, you need the right technology. The Seismic Enablement CloudTM provides everything revenue teams need to drive efficiency, scale training and coaching, and measure outcomes. Our revenue enablement platform also integrates with other essential tools including CRMs, CMS, and sales engagement software, serving as a central hub for your revenue enablement strategy. Get a demo today to learn more about how Seismic can support your revenue enablement efforts.
