What is Revenue Enablement? Everything You Need to Know [2023]

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.

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 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. 

How Does It 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 Examples

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. In fact, 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. 

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 one and 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. 

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. 

Advantages of Revenue Enablement

Let’s look at some benefits revenue enablement can bring to your organization. 

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. 

Better 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 entirely. 

Increased Revenue & CLTV

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.  

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 customer journey.

By embedding bite-sized pieces of learning directly into the flow of work, the processes you’ve strategically put in place will be followed to the letter–and all your teams will feel empowered and confident in their daily roles. 

This will, in turn, increase performance and accelerate revenue generation.

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

You’ve most likely mapped out your customer journey before, but this time, start analyzing it with a revenue enablement lens. Include all the channels where customers interact with your business and team members, starting with discovery and then going past the initial purchase to include onboarding, customer support, renewals, and advocacy. 

Over time, you can identify sales productivity gaps, churn risks, and pain points where customers may be experiencing friction. You can also track and analyze customer behavior and engagement at each touchpoint to determine how team members can better serve your customers.

A clear, well-thought-out customer journey helps align your team’s processes to implement a deliberate revenue enablement strategy and deliver the best experience to prospects and customers when needed.

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. 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 provide that learning for your revenue enablement teams? With Spekit’s just-in-time learning. 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.

Sepkit 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. 

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?

About the Author

Elle Brayton

Elle is a boy momma 2x, brand builder, storyteller, growth hacker, and marketing leader with 12+ years of experience scaling SaaS B2B organizations. Follow Elle on LinkedIn here ->