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When you tell someone you're in enablement, it's not often they fully grasp what that means. Some people believe enablement is simply content creation and management. Others believe that it’s sales training or cold calling coaching. But the truth is that it’s all these things—and more.
When you build enablement into your businesses, you’re not just enabling your team members—you’re empowering them.
Businesses are 57% more likely to experience higher buyer engagement when they have a dedicated sales enablement team. And Garner found that companies that prioritize revenue enablement are 80% more likely to exceed revenue growth targets.
But what exactly is enablement these days? In this article, we’ll break down sales and revenue enablement, the processes around them, and the top sales enablement platforms on the market.
What is enablement?
As a whole, enablement refers to the process of providing strategies, tools, and resources to enable a business to reach its goals. You’ve likely heard enablement broken down into two categories: sales and revenue.
Sales enablement
Sales enablement is the strategic process of equipping sales teams with the tools, content, and knowledge they need to close more deals and engage customers effectively. But it’s not just about providing all these educational and impactful tools and resources. It’s also about making sure they’re continuously easy to use and accessible.
When you build out your sales enablement strategy, use sales enablement metrics like quota attainment, lead-to-customer conversion rate, content usage, and the length of the sales cycle to ensure that your sales enablement team is tracking how their supplies and strategies are helping your business close more deals.
Revenue enablement
Revenue enablement is the strategic process of helping customer-facing teams maximize revenue (not just sales). Revenue enablement processes support all teams that implement revenue-generating activities, like customer success and account management.
Key components of enablement to wrap your arms around
Let’s take a look at the pieces of the enablement puzzle:
Sales and revenue enablement frameworks
Sales and revenue enablement frameworks are processes that help sales and customer-facing teams sell more effectively. They involve the overall strategy as well as sales enablement training, sales tracking, and sales content creation and management.
Revenue frameworks would include the overall strategy used to maximize revenue, including training customer-facing teams to find opportunities to upsell, increase customer retention, and boost overall client engagement.
Enablement strategies
Enablement strategies are the methods by which you implement your enablement resources into the workflow of your salespeople. These strategies ensure you’re reaching your enablement goals and tracking progress.
To develop an enablement strategy, you must first analyze your sales and revenue goals and objectives. Your strategy should always be guided by your goals. You should also consider your industry, company size, and sales team structure to ensure your strategy is appropriate for your current market and attainable by your team.
Your enablement strategy will be broken down into multiple components, including your sales training processes and content marketing processes. Especially when talking about your revenue enablement strategy, which includes all customer-facing teams beyond sales, you'll want to ensure there’s alignment between your sales, marketing, and customer success teams to see your strategy through.
Enablement tools and software
Gartner found that 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision-making. This means your enablement teams will need to be able to gather and use this data. Enablement software typically offers content management and distribution, analytics tracking and sales intelligence, and training.
P.S. Try out Spekit for just-in-time enablement and AI-powered content creation and management.
What to know when starting your enablement team
So you get it: Enablement is important.
But when you’re new to building out an enablement team, how do you know where to start?
Spekit asked some of the most prominent sales and revenue enablement thought leaders to share their stories and insights into today’s enablement. Let’s learn from these experts as they take us through their experiences in the enablement space.
Watch all their stories here ->
1. Enablement from Anthony Benedettini
Anthony Benedettini, Revenue Enablement Manager at ZoomInfo, says he wishes more people knew that enablement “is a lot of project management.”
Project management and the skills it requires, such as organization and communication, are vital parts of a sales enablement strategy. With many different projects in motion, a sales enablement team must stay agile and organized to offer high-quality content and coaching to their sales professionals.
Benedettini also says that enablement is a highly creative role, as you must be able to find a way to make complex topics easy to understand. It’s not just about summarizing information. It’s about making that information accessible and memorable.
2. Enablement from Adam Whiddon
Adam Whiddon, Sales Enablement Trainer at Paytronix Systems, says sales enablement is “all about the people and helping them in whatever it is they’re trying to achieve.”
Sales enablement is a highly collaborative role that plays a crucial part in the operations of a company. Whiddon also says that sales enablement teams should know their value and what they create for the company.
According to HubSpot’s study, he’s absolutely right. Their report found that 65% of sales leaders who outperformed revenue targets had a dedicated sales enablement team.
3. Enablement from Brooke Bachesta
Brooke Bachesta, Director of Learning Design at JLL, agrees with Benedittini that project management is a vital part of her role, but she also highlights that successful sales enablement professionals must have skills in “data analytics, stakeholder management, and relationship building.”
For those who may not see themselves as sales representatives long-term, Bachesta says that sales and revenue enablement can be a great place to transition. These roles are highly collaborative and support sales without the team members having to be involved in the direct selling process.
4. Enablement from Timmy Henderickson
“I feel more accomplished when my team is winning as a whole, as opposed to me as an individual,” says Timmy Henderickson, Sales Enablement Manager at HopSkipDrive. For Henderickson, the most rewarding part of his job is seeing his coworkers thrive.
As a sales enablement professional, your goal is optimizing the sales process and supporting your sales team with everything they need to succeed. The best enablement professionals are team players at heart.
Pro tip: While you’re optimizing their role, Spekit helps optimize yours. Spekit the only sales enablement platform you'll need to multiply impact by taking all of that great content you create and automatically surfacing it when and where reps need it.
5. Enablement from Aaron Peterik
“When sales teams are properly enabled, they’re more equipped to engage with customers effectively, address their needs, and drive successful outcomes,” says Aaron Peterik, Global MSP & Channel Sales Director at Zero Networks. From customer satisfaction to overall business productivity, sales enablement has far-reaching impacts.
Peterik highlights that marketing, customer success, product development, and human resources all benefit from enablement initiatives. Gartner’s research confirms Peterik’s findings, as more than 50% of CSOs say that enablement will support their marketing and customer success roles in the next three years.
6. Enablement from Matt Brown
“We’re always working to try to improve the experience of selling for our customers,” says Matt Brown, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at International SOS. But, Brown says, the sales enablement team’s customers aren’t just the business’s buyers. Their customers are their salespeople.
“Enablement attracts people who really want to help others,” Brown says. Since his introduction to enablement, he’s found that there’s a huge community of people in enablement who want to help not only their own teams but other people like them. Don’t be afraid to lean on the enablement community when looking for ways to help your sales and revenue teams succeed.
7. Enablement from Nate Maw
In Nate Maw’s experience as the Manager of Customer Experience at Be Fulfilled Systems, enablement is about being forward-thinking, not just for sales but for the company as a whole. From bridging the gap between sales and marketing to making customers feel heard by sales and customer success, enablement means “the whole operation moves forward.”
8. Enablement from Lex Sparks
Like Brown, Lex Sparks, Sales Enablement Coordinator at LightEdge Solutions, has found that sales enablement attracts people who want to help others. Sales enablement professionals also know that sales teams have a lot on their plate, which means that sales enablement needs to offer support, not more challenges.
In Sparks’s experience, sales professionals are always looking for opportunities to grow. They want someone to give them the tools to hone their skills and professional development. Sales enablement is the team that gives them the support to grow.
9. Enablement from Jonathan Goldfuss
In Jonathan Goldfuss’s experience as the Senior Go-To-Market Operations Manager at Daxko, enablement is necessary for the most successful onboarding. “Usually, an SDR is only in-seat for about 14 months, so you have a very short window of time to make that SDR successful,” says Goldfuss.
With the right processes and tools in place, onboarding becomes faster. For example, Spekit clients have seen their ramp-up time decrease in half when onboarding new reps.
10. Enablement from Ryan Kiscaden
Ryan Kiscaden, Sales Enablement Manager at Watts Water Technologies, has found that enablement professionals need to be in it for the long haul. He calls enablement a “burgeoning area,” requiring patience as it can be difficult to see its effects immediately.
But enablement isn’t about immediate effects—it’s about the long-term effects not only on the sales teams but on the organization as a whole.
11. Enablement from Stephanie Zimmerman
For Stephanie Zimmerman, Senior Sales Enablement Product Specialist at Spinklr, she considers her role to be a “fairy godmother” who strives to make “what was uncomfortable now comfortable.”
From objection handling to robust product knowledge, she knows that sales teams face a wealth of challenges. Through enablement, she aims to take pain points that give sales reps pause and turn them into opportunities for growth.
12. Enablement from Alli Clinton
Though Alli Clinton, Platform Content Developer at CoBank, has long loved documenting how processes and systems work, which is what led her to enablement, she knows that not everyone finds documentation interesting. In her role, she seeks to prove that documentation isn’t boring since it can be customized to help all different types of learners learn.
13. Enablement from Aaron Clark
Aaron Clark, Revenue Enablement Manager at Aidoc, says that enablement is “about creating better user experiences.” It’s about providing people with what they need, “when and where they need it,” helping them to reach their true potential. For Clark, enablement “removes the barriers to success.”
Providing users with what they need when and where they need it is one of the core goals behind Spekit. With Spekit, your sales reps get everything they need directly in their workflow. Plus, with AI-powered content recommendations, your sales team can ensure they’re providing their prospects exactly what they want to see to convert.
14. Enablement from Jeff White
“How do we convince somebody to change?” That’s one of the questions that drives Jeff White’s enablement work. Through White’s work as Director of Business Development at RevenueWell, he strives to give salespeople the tools and information to convince someone to make a change. The human desire to resist change has long been studied. Sales reps need to be given the information and resources to target people’s existing belief systems and embrace change.
15. Enablement from Alex Miller
For Alex Miller, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at International SOS, enablement matters most when sales enablement teams aren’t just providing the right information but also providing it in a place where sales teams will actually find it.Research shows that sales professionals spend up to 440 hours every year searching for the right content. Sales enablement teams can help sales reps get their time back by providing them with a centralized hub for their content or, even better, AI-powered content recommendations that save valuable search time.
16. Enablement from Amber Kraus
In Amber Kraus’s experience as the Senior Talent and Revenue Enablement Manager at Data Axle, working in enablement means taking the time to reduce the amount of time a sales representative has to take. When working on a 10-minute presentation, Kraus says, it takes the enablement team over 200 hours to put it together.Enablement takes the time to make more time for those they’re seeking to empower. Those 200 hours are spent turning in-depth information into something easy to digest and implement.
17. Enablement from Jacob Wagemann
Coming from a customer success background, Jacob Wagemann, a Sales CRM Consultant with Southwest Airlines, found that “frontline experience” enables him to “speak on behalf of our customers.” That customer success background helps him to create best practices in sales enablement that keep sales reps customer-focused while also meeting the needs of the sales team.Research shows that sales enablement professionals find success when collaborating with customer success. In fact, enablement is twice as likely to exceed expectations when working with customer success teams.
18. Enablement from Katie Chatterton
In Katie Chatterton’s experience as the Global Director of Sales Enablement at AirSlate, the best sales enablement training means preparing a sales enablement professional to be both the best seller in the room and the best leader. However, she notes that sales enablement draws people who tend to be highly motivated. They already have a drive to help people become the best they can be, making them impactful leaders.Sales enablement also focuses on selling “from around the side and from underneath,” as Chatterton says. They are always looking for the best ways to optimize their sales, even if they are not selling directly.
19. Enablement from Jessica Summersgill
While White notes that customers can be resistant to change, Jessica Summersgill, Sales Training Manager at MPLC, says that sales teams can also be hesitant to learn new things and change internal processes. Top performers can resist learning new methods, which is why focusing on those who are struggling can be so valuable.When those struggling sellers team up with sales enablement, they can turn into high performers themselves, which is what Summersgill considers to be the most satisfying part of her role.
20. Enablement from Monica Sanchez
From Monica Sanchez’s experience as Head of Revenue Enablement at Andela, enablement has come a long way. It’s no longer just a “nice-to-have” but instead something that is “business imperative.”HubSpot’s research confirms that enablement is now considered an integral part of an organization. Their survey found that nearly 60% of sales leaders say their organization has a dedicated sales enablement team.
Resources for building a powerhouse enablement team
We’ve talked about the what and why, but now let’s talk about how to build sales enablement. These resources will help you develop your enablement and empower your team.
Enablement software and tools
Enablement tools help you not only create content, training, and other resources for your sales teams, but they also make it more accessible, ensuring that they’re getting value from everything you create and provide.
Spekit is an AI-powered sales enablement platform that focuses on providing your salespeople with what they need when they need it most. From AI-powered content recommendations to just-in-time learning to content generation and personalization tools, they’ll receive everything they need wherever they’re working.
Spekit users spend 69% more time selling, hit 20% higher quota attainment, and achieve a 30% faster ramp time on average.
Sales and revenue enablement podcasts
Ready to learn from the enablement experts? Enjoy some of these enablement podcasts on the go.
The Win Rate Podcast: Led by B2B sales and marketing expert Andy Paul, The Win Rate Podcast shares insights and tips on increasing sales effectiveness and enablement tactics.
Stories From the Trenches: Stories From the Trenches, from Revenue Enablement Society, is a podcast in which real revenue enablement pros share their real-world experience.
The State of Sales Enablement: The State of Sales Enablement talks to B2B sales and sales enablement leaders, offering actionable insights on sales enablement excellence.
Enablement thought leaders to follow
In addition to the thought leaders who were kind enough to share their insights above, here are a few additional sales and revenue enablement thought leaders to follow:
Keegan Otter: Keegan Otter specializes in revenue enablement, but he’s also involved with recruiting, AI adoption, and many more topics that those in enablement can benefit from learning about.
Lisa Duncan: Lisa Duncan is a senior director of revenue enablement and focuses on helping to mentor the next generation of revenue leaders.
Theresa Garrett: Theresa Garrett is a global sales enablement specialist who shares content about sales enablement and engagement.
Start your enablement journey out right
Enablement professionals know that their hard work isn’t always understood immediately, but their impact is valuable and necessary. As you build out your enablement strategy, we hope that these thought leaders and their experience can help guide you toward success. Here’s hoping your enablement journey is fruitful for your sales team and beyond!
