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Revenue enablement is a 360-degree-enablement strategy that takes a holistic approach to engaging multiple teams in your company so you can refine your sales process and expedite revenue growth.
As a sales or revenue team leader, you’ve most likely already started shifting your current sales enablement strategy to include all your customer-facing teams, but you may not have officially formalized your organization’s switch to prioritizing revenue enablement efforts.
To help your business adapt to the changing world of sales and new customer demands, this article will explore revenue enablement, how it works, and best practices for empowering your revenue and sales teams.
What is Revenue Enablement?
“Revenue enablement to me is really an evolution of sales enablement. As organizations start to realize how much of their revenue comes from expansions in B2B SaaS, they’re beginning to take a more holistic, end-to-end approach with their enablement.” - Melanie Fellay, CEO & Cofounder at Spekit
Revenue enablement is the process of helping customer-facing teams maximize revenue at every stage of the customer journey. It helps organizations support all channels that conduct revenue-generating activities in addition to their sales teams, including marketing, customer support, account management, and others.
“I believe the shift to calling it “revenue” has been a shift in accountability to the entire funnel. Organizations are shifting from just a sales enablement focus to revenue enablement, I think because customer expectations are changing. They expect a seamless experience. Traditionally, they may have been passed to a different point of contact at each point in their buying experience whereas now there’s a shift toward more ownership and accountability of the customer’s experience throughout their journey.” - Brandon Jones, VP of Revenue, PAAY
How Does Revenue Enablement Work?
Every customer-facing team member can be viewed as a “seller” working to deliver a great customer experience at every touchpoint–and, therefore greater revenue opportunities.
Formal revenue enablement strategies create alignment in resources, technology, and training so these team members can:
- Bring together a fragmented customer experience
- Increase engagement, retention, and CLTV (customer lifetime value)
- Eliminate ineffective touchpoints
- Align on how to approach each customer
- Maintain relationships to turn customers into advocates
Revenue Enablement vs. Sales Enablement
While both sales enablement and revenue enablement focus on improving an organization’s ability to generate revenue, they aren’t the same.
Sales enablement provides the tools and training material needed to help sales teams engage with prospects and effectively close deals. Sales enablement metrics include the number of meetings set, opportunities created, quota attainment, and internal sales teams’ NPS.
An example of sales enablement would be using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to store customer and prospect data and identify sales opportunities. Another may be providing the sales team with a playbook containing scripts and guides to help them navigate through different prospect scenarios.
Revenue enablement optimizes every customer touchpoint to create a seamless, successful customer experience beyond the sales process. By implementing enablement in each stage of the customer journey, organizations can monitor the progress of cross-functional teams to reduce churn rate and increase CLTV, improve employee engagement and retention, and better manage resource allocation.
Download the Rise of Revenue Enablement Research Report for FREE here ->
Why Sales Teams are Prioritizing Revenue Enablement
This is why sales enablement is shifting: by supporting all go-to-market teams across an organization; businesses can cover–and drive revenue from–the entire customer lifecycle.
Plus, revenue enablement helps sales teams work in sync with multiple departments within an organization. Creating synergy throughout a business can improve communication and workflows, resulting in stronger revenue-generating performances from every customer-facing team member.
In fact, companies reporting strong alignment have up to 19% faster revenue growth and a 15% increase in profits compared to non-aligned companies.
Companies reporting strong alignment have up to 19% faster revenue growth and a 15% increase in profits compared to non-aligned companies.
How to Shift from Sales Enablement to Revenue Enablement
By 2025, 75% of top companies will be using a RevOps model and measuring business outcomes by the ability of all teams within an organization to drive revenue at every stage of the customer journey.
Should you prioritize revenue enablement over sales enablement?
Well, the modern buyer is smarter than average, and due to all the information on the internet, they have more understanding of their pain points and products that can offer solutions. This means that your current prospects are engaging in conversations with sales reps simply to know whether your product can 100% solve their problems. Traditional sales enablement models can no longer work for these prospects. Enablement helps support all touch points across the buyer journey.
Shifting from sales enablement to revenue enablement requires restructuring your go-to-market approach. It seems easy since sales enablement already has some of the functionality of revenue enablement; however, the trick is in tying all other teams to the revenue goal. The first thing you should do is drive cross-functional collaboration so that everyone knows the business’s revenue enablement goals and KPIs they should work toward achieving.
Since revenue enablement extends beyond your sales teams, here’s how you can make a smooth transition:
- Invest in building a revenue enablement tech stack that suits your business structure and needs
- Regularly offer training and coaching programs for all revenue-facing departments
- Give enablement resources to business collaborators like resellers, customers, channel partners, and system integrators
- Track and measure revenue enablement metrics like retention rates, customer satisfaction, and customer lifetime value
Before implementing revenue enablement, plan a step-by-step process involving outlining goals and objectives, mapping your customers' journey, creating playbooks for all teams, deciding on a tech stack, and measuring outcomes.
This way, you’ll have a structured strategy to help you know when you’re meeting targets.
Revenue Enablement Example
A great example of revenue enablement is just-in-time learning. Just-in-time learning is an agile approach to learning that integrates consistent, bite-sized, personalized pieces of information directly into the flow of work.
Knowledge is provided when and where needed, so team members don’t have to context-switch and spend the bulk of their day searching for answers. Most reps spend 3 – 11 hours or more each week searching for answers to questions about the tools they’re using, the processes they’re learning, and any additional information they need to know.
How do you enable your reps in a way that drives revenue–without reducing productivity?
Most reps spend 3 – 11 hours or more each week searching for answers to questions.
Meet Spekit.
Spekit’s revenue enablement platform surfaces information within the tools your team uses every day. No more searching for answers, context-switching, or unnecessary disruptions. Employees can easily access the resources they need at the moment they need them–right in the tool they’re working in.
With Spekit, all your training and enablement — for your applications, processes, sales playbooks, SOPs, and more – are accessible on the go. Whether it’s a quick step-by-step process guiding them through creating a quote in Salesforce or a competitive battle card to handle an objection, Spekit is your revenue enablement companion every step of the way.
Advantages of Revenue Enablement
Let’s look at some benefits revenue enablement can bring to your organization.
Stronger Sales Performance
Revenue enablement has various components, including sales enablement, which involves empowering your sales team with the necessary training, skills, knowledge, resources, and technology to sell your product better to prospects.
According to Gartner, shifting to revenue enablement will help reduce the complexity of your sales ecosystem, making it easier to equip sales reps to close deals faster. Your business outcomes and revenue are directly tied to the performance of your sales team. Therefore, a well-executed revenue enablement strategy will improve sales performance, conversion rates, and ROI growth.
Alignment of Sales & Marketing Teams
Your sales team does not exist in isolation. Sales reps must collaborate with other teams, like marketing, customer support, and product, to ensure prospects have the best buying experience.
Revenue enablement helps break down silos disconnecting your sales team from other teams, especially marketing, and encouraging communication and collaboration across the organization. This cross-functional alignment will increase the revenue-generating efficiency of your business.
Customer Journey Visibility
Compared to sales enablement, revenue enablement provides a more holistic view of unique customer journeys, allowing businesses to gain valuable insights into customer pain points, preferences, needs, behavior, and decisions. 96% of customers are loyal to brands that understand their customer journey and prioritize their needs.
Through revenue enablement, you can track customer conversations and engagements on a centralized platform and make data-driven decisions to personalize your customer’s journey.
Improved Customer Experience
After signing a contract, customers may feel like they’re being “handed off” to another team–losing the rapport they’ve built with their sales rep and disrupting the natural progression of their valuable relationship with the entire company.
With revenue enablement, you get to provide everyone with a dependable and holistic customer strategy from pre- to post-sale, ultimately providing customers with a more consistent experience.
In-depth Data & Insights
Optimizing the multiple touchpoints in your customer journey allows you to collect more information about their interactions with your organization. This integrated data can uncover novel insights for improving your revenue enablement efforts, including which touchpoints are the strongest, which need work, and which communication channels should be eliminated.
Better Business Outcomes
Revenue is tied to your customer lifetime value, which is the average amount of revenue a customer spends on your products and services over time. By providing consistent messaging and interactions beyond a first purchase, revenue enablement efforts can lead to higher retention rates, more upsells and cross-sells, and even new customer evangelists.
Download the Rise of Revenue Enablement Research Report for FREE here ->
Revenue Enablement Platforms
Here’s important software to have in your revenue enablement tech stack:
Customer Relationship Management Software
If you’re using a CRM, your customers and prospect data is probably scattered across multiple databases, spreadsheets, and documents, making it difficult for you to access information about customers and track their data easily.
Customer relationship management software (CRM) replaces the need for multiple customer data repositories, giving you a single platform to store individual data from leads and clients such as emails, conversations with sales reps, meetings, quotes, proposals, and feedback.
The major advantage of a CRM is that every revenue-facing team has easy access to customer data. Teams can also connect with customers on various platforms, build and nurture customer relationships, and synchronize all customer interactions.
The best CRM will give you access to features like contact management, marketing automation, sales & pipeline management, internal communication platforms, and holistic dashboards for analytics and reporting.
Sales Content Management Systems
Sales content management systems consolidate all sales enablement content on a single platform to be accessed, updated, shared (internally and externally), and tracked. The manual sales content management process would involve you creating sales content using maybe Word/Google Docs, storing it in folders, and sharing it with your sales or marketing team each time they need it.
This painful process slows down the sales cycle and pipeline.
Spekit can help you automate the process. Here’s how:
- Centralized sales content management: Take the pain out of content management by using Spekit to organize content in a few clicks, notify sales reps of new content with in-app alerts, and make sales content accessible in any tool or workflow of revenue-facing teams
- Spekit AI: Spekit AI knows what content reps need to close that deal, even before they do. Automatically surface the case studies, one-sheets, answers, and more reps need to close, when and where they need it
- SmartSend Buyer Engagement: Imagine knowing when customers engage with sales content. Spekit’s SmartSend allows sales reps to generate shareable, trackable links that alert them when a customer interacts with shared sales content so they can engage buyers with the right message, at the right time
- Embedded content: Enable your reps spend less time searching for the right sales content by automatically surfacing the bite-sized training, guidance, answers, and resources they need to drive pipeline directly within the tools they use every day
Spekit’s CMS feature is built with the sales reps experience in mind and reps leveraging it can achieve 69% more time selling, 70% increase in deal save rate, and 20% higher rep quota attainment.
Schedule time to learn how Spekit's revenue enablement platform centralizes and automatically surfaces the answers, content, and training sales reps need to thrive - in any tool or workflow.
Sales Enablement Software
Sales enablement software helps your sales team sell smarter and faster by streamlining and automating the provision of enablement resources to sales reps. It also allows you to align sales with marketing and other teams for cross-functional collaboration.
The best kind of sales enablement happens in the flow of work so that revenue-facing teams don’t see sales enablement as a burden, and you’ll need software built with that in mind.
Spekit offers an enablement experience that teams instantly adopt and love. The enablement platforms combine content management features—SmartSend, Spekit AI, and smart searching with other enablement features like:
- Onboarding and training: Build a continuous learning culture amongst teams through everboarding; learning programs that are always available to reps
- Workflow integrations: Embed Spekit in Slack, Chrome, Salesforce, and other platforms your reps work on so they don’t have to leave these platforms when searching for resources
- Knowledge checks: Assess knowledge retention with fun in-app quizzes that assess the effectiveness of training programs without disrupting productivity
- Built-in analytics: Use analytics and data visualizations to monitor the progress of your revenue enablement strategies
Just in Time Learning Platforms
Just-in-time learning helps employees reduce their forgetting curve by redefining how employees are given access to knowledge. Rather than bombarding them with training materials and resources, just-in-time learning pushes for learning programs to be given only when needed and for knowledge gained to be put into practice immediately.
“Just-in-time learning is a more agile approach to learning, making it easier to drive change when and where people need it,” says Melanie Fellay, CEO & Cofounder at Spekit. “It's a new way of training your team to be successful that's all about meeting your employees where they are." - Read the Full Post Here
Just-in-time learning is perfect for technical training programs. For example, if you want your sales reps to learn how to use Salesforce, it would be counterproductive for you to throw Salesforce manuals at them and expect them to put what they read into practice.
Instead, you can use Spekit’s just-in-time learning platform to surface quick tips, process guidance, and answers that they can instantly access while working in Salesforce. Here’s how Spekit can help:
- Flows: Design step-by-step walkthroughs to virtually handhold employees as they learn new processes and tools
- Speks: Create and equip revenue-facing teams with bite-size training and micro-learning content embedded in their workflow
- Topics: Organize Speks into a learning sequence that learners can follow
- Knowledge base: Enable teams with a centralized accessible knowledge base that has all the information they need
Sales Coaching & Training Tools
Sales coaching and training tools are designed to better the performance and productivity of sales reps by providing personalized and contextual learning, knowledge reinforcement, performance analytics, etc.
They can guide sales reps through new tools and processes, help them practice pitching to prospects in a simulated environment, give live feedback during client conversations, and even offer individual selling improvement tips to reps.
A sales coaching and training tool like Spekit is great for real-time sales coaching. You can train every rep to be your best by centralizing all learning resources, tracking learning progress in real time, and using analytics to identify knowledge gaps and retention.
The platform’s features include:
- Reinforcement learning: Reinforce contextual policies, guidelines, training and onboarding materials where it matters
- Centralized learning: Consolidate training on a single accessible platform
- Speks: Create and share training, answers, and content in minutes
- In-app alerts: Trigger automatic updates to let reps know when new content is available
- Knowledge checks: Increase retention and identify knowledge gaps with short in-context quizzes
- Analytics: Measure the effectiveness of coaching and training programs
Spekit’s coaching and training tools will help you achieve 65% reduction in onboarding time, 50% reduction in sales and CS ramp time, and 65% reduction in time spent hosting live or facilitated training.
Now that you know the revenue enablement platforms in your tech stack, you should decide whether you want to use them singularly or a software that consolidates all these platforms. With a single software like Spekit that allows you to manage customers, sales content, sales training, and overall enablement, your teams won’t need to switch between software, enabling them to work faster.
Revenue Enablement (RE) Best Practices to Know
It’s one thing to know how revenue enablement works. It’s another to implement it in your organization. Let’s look at some top strategies and tips for implementing RE processes.
1. Analyze the Current Customer Journey
Mapping out the customer journey is a common practice, but it's vital to revisit this map through the lens of revenue enablement. Examine every interaction point—from initial discovery through to onboarding, customer support, renewals, and even advocacy. This approach helps pinpoint areas of sales inefficiency, potential churn, and customer friction.
By closely monitoring and evaluating customer engagement across these touchpoints, your team can enhance service delivery and customer satisfaction.
Revenue Enablement at Key Customer Touchpoints:
Initial Purchase Phase
- From Awareness to Consideration: Marketing's role is to craft content (like website copy, social media, blogs) that speaks directly to the buyer’s challenges, demonstrating how your solutions alleviate these issues. Revenue enablement ensures this content is in harmony with the sales narrative, guiding prospects toward a purchase with clear calls to action.
- Sales Engagement: Sales interactions are informed by prior engagement insights gathered by marketing, such as content downloads and website activity. This knowledge allows sales to customize their approach, streamline the buying process, and establish trust swiftly.
Onboarding
A seamless onboarding experience is pivotal in reducing churn and fostering long-term customer success. Revenue enablement plays a key role in smoothing the transition from sales to customer success teams, ensuring consistency in communication, and enabling new customers to derive maximum value from your product.
Customer Support
Proactive support not only addresses issues but also builds loyalty. By arming support teams with comprehensive product knowledge and customer insights, they can preemptively meet customer needs, resolve issues efficiently, and uncover opportunities for upsells or cross-sells.
Renewals
Understanding the customer experience is crucial for renewals. By analyzing data on product usage, satisfaction (e.g., NPS scores), and feedback, you can proactively manage renewal discussions, mitigate concerns, and underscore your solution's continued value, aiming for a smooth renewal process.
Upsells and Cross-sells
Spotting evolving customer needs is essential for identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Revenue enablement prepares both sales and customer care teams to recognize these signals—like increased product usage or shifts in the business environment—and suggest appropriate solutions that meet these new requirements.
By re-evaluating the customer journey with a focus on revenue enablement, you uncover avenues to refine interactions at every stage. This strategic approach enables your teams to provide a more unified and valuable customer experience, driving enhanced revenue growth and customer loyalty.
2. Build & Align Your Revenue Enablement Team Members
The success of your revenue enablement strategy hinges on the ability of the revenue team to collaborate, communicate, and align on best practices and performance metrics.
Sheevaun Thatcher, Salesforce’s VP of Strategic Enablement, emphasizes the importance of ensuring everyone comprehends the revenue plan, is given the correct assets to do their jobs, and receives the knowledge they need with the least friction possible.
“You need to make sure that everything you have on the enablement side of the business is available, accessible, and in the modality that is the most useful,” she says.
So, when you’re building out your revenue team, make sure to:
- Establish an open line of communication among sales, marketing, and customer success.
- Document best practices to ensure an aligned and consistent messaging strategy across every customer interaction (call, email, in-person).
- Identify & communicate key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can measure to prove ROI and determine the performance of each team member.
- Make sure all of your customer touchpoints are covered.
3. Identify processes that need improvement
The core of revenue enablement is iterating process improvement. You should assess all the prior processes you’ve implemented and determine which effectively contributes to your revenue goal and which doesn’t. This in-depth process requires the input of all revenue-facing teams in your organization.
Product and service identification is the first step in process improvement. You should analyze all the products and services your business offers customers and how much revenue they should bring in. Once you’ve done this, you can tie in marketing, sales, product, and customer support teams to understand what each team needs to meet revenue goals. You can ask questions like:
- What is your team's function when a product is released?
- How does your team handle product or service updates?
- What blockers do you face when performing tasks?
- What resources do you need to work better?
- How do we measure the performance of your team?
These questions will enable you to identify processes that haven’t been working and also new processes to adopt. For visualization, you could create a workflow diagram that shows all revenue enablement activities and functions for each team. Then, review the new or adjusted processes with your leadership team.
4. Implement a Strong Technology Stack
A recent study found the majority of sales teams rolled out more than two new tools or technologies last year, with 83% of sales leaders reporting they added at least one new technology to their stack.
Why? Building a strong tech stack empowers your teams and managers to approach every touchpoint confidently and provides your stakeholders with the data they need to understand the ROI of your efforts.
Revenue enablement teams often use a combination of technologies, including:
- CRMs
- Sales coaching platforms
- Conversational intelligence software
- Communication tools
- CPQs
- Learning management systems
- Just-in-time-learning platforms
According to Forbes, “to prepare for [this accelerated digital transformation], businesses must ensure they embed the right technology throughout their process and in every area of operations.” This means evaluating which of your current tech stack is working, what isn’t, and when you may need to transition to a new platform or improve your current workflows.
4. Offer Revenue Enablement Training
To conduct proper onboarding and training, first, identify the skills members of each team need to develop. These can include:
- Understanding your product and solutions, their features and benefits, and how to communicate them to your audience.
- Managing and handling customer objections.
- Identifying impact questions to address your product’s value to customers better.
- Ability to create compelling narratives to help separate your brand from the rest
- Qualifying and discovering high-value prospects and customers.
- Personalizing their approach to each prospect and customer.
Then, start teaching! But be careful of the methods you’re using. Experts studying the science of learning know the way we were taught to learn is outdated. According to the National Education Association, learning should be distributive, delivered in multiple mediums, and connected to real-life experiences.
How do you reinforce that learning for your revenue enablement teams? With Spekit’s just-in-time learning platform. Contextual, personalized training automatically surfaces based on the tool or process they’re working in, and knowledge checks reinforce your team’s expertise better to aid leads and customers throughout the buyer journey.
Spekit is the most effective way to onboard and continuously train your revenue enablement team members by prioritizing updated content, learning within the flow of work, and consistent reinforcement.
5. Track & Optimize Revenue Metrics
Analyzing the success of your company-wide revenue teams isn’t straightforward, but it’s critical to determine where revenue is coming from and which customer touchpoints could use more work. Start by clearly identifying the goals and metrics to be met at each part of the customer journey, such as the number of meetings booked at the top-of-funnel or quarterly pipeline growth at mid-funnel.
It’s also important to measure the broader impact of revenue enablement on bottom-of-the-funnel efforts, including retention of both customers and employees, reduced ramp time of new hires, higher CTLV, improved customer satisfaction and experience, and more customer advocates.
Important revenue metrics you should be tracking are:
- Direct metrics: These metrics are tied to the process of implementing your revenue enablement strategy. You should track the process cost, process value, and process adoption rates
- Impact metrics: These are quantifiable metrics that assess the impact of your direct metrics. Use them to evaluate the effectiveness of your process by checking how the process has contributed to deal velocity, win rate, and average customer value
- Revenue metrics: Revenue metrics provide insights into the financial impact of your revenue enablement strategy. Track the revenue from new customers, the cost of acquiring those customers, and customer churn revenue loss.
The best way to effectively monitor these metrics is with a revenue enablement software like Spekit that provides a holistic view of all important revenue metrics you’re tracking with easy-to-review informative visuals that enable you to identify trends and patterns that may go normally unnoticed.
Challenges in Revenue Enablement
While revenue enablement is becoming critical to an organization’s success, it still has its challenges.
For one, measuring the return on investment (ROI) isn’t straightforward. Revenue acquisition comes from different channels, so you’ll need to ensure you correctly track which teams and team members contribute. Fortunately, knowing what metrics each team focuses on and implementing a great CRM platform can help.
Another potential challenge is ensuring your sales, marketing, and customer success teams understand their roles within your revenue strategy. This requires strong communication, great leadership, and user-friendly software to help teams ramp quickly, stay aligned, and maintain consistency throughout the customer journey.
Teams can make this simpler with Spekit. Spekit’s revenue enablement platform expedites continuous training, communication, and onboarding by ensuring all revenue teams can access the right information exactly when and how they need it. Your knowledge, revenue plays, cheat sheets, and more are accessible to every team member, no matter where they are within the selling journey.
By embedding bite-sized pieces of learning and content directly into the flow of work, the processes you’ve strategically put in place will be followed to the letter–and all your sales reps will feel empowered and confident in their daily roles.
This will, in turn, increase performance and accelerate revenue generation.
Improve Your Revenue Enablement Strategies
Getting revenue enablement right the first time can be challenging. It requires an organizational shift in ownership and accountability throughout the entire customer experience – and this can get fairly complex.
What’s the best way to expedite your revenue enablement goals? Employing a just-in-time learning platform like Spekit, explicitly designed to meet the agile, fast-paced change and structure of today’s selling environments.
By constantly reinforcing revenue enablement processes and training within your workflows, Spekit enhances knowledge access, implementation, and retention. This enables your revenue teams to scale, see ROI – and ultimately improve your bottom line.
Ready to master revenue enablement? Optimized revenue enablement operations can drive real success, including a 20% increase in sales productivity, 10% increase in lead acceptance, 20% increase in customer satisfaction…and the benefits go on.
Chat with one of Spekit's revenue enablement experts to get started today->
