Moving from sales enablement to revenue enablement

Enablement has evolved massively over the last few years. From one-off in-person lectures, to Zoom breakout sessions during the pandemic, to gamification and reinforcement – we’ve seen it all.

The latest shift however isn’t about how you enable, but who.

Let’s face it. The economy isn’t what it was before the pandemic.

With this change, many companies are transforming their teams to win in this environment. The customer success (CS) function can no longer survive without thinking commercially. Selling with the help of partners is increasingly common to break through the noise. And marketing departments are having to work harder to bring in leads.

We have to enable more GTM teams to drive results. This is where revenue enablement comes into play.

Why should you switch?

Where sales enablement focuses on the sales funnel, revenue enablement supports the full customer lifecycle.

It’s a strategic shift that can have a huge impact on the team’s ability to find, close, retain and grow customers. By enabling all customer facing teams, ie: marketing, business development, sales, customer success, professional services and even partnerships, they all speak the same language and are aligned throughout the buyer’s journey.

Ultimately, this increases the likelihood of bringing in deals in the first place and keeping customers happy post launch.

When should you switch?

For those wondering if this is the right approach for your business – I truly believe that every organisation with a sales, marketing and CS function can benefit from increasing their scope to revenue enablement.

Most traditional enablement teams are already working on bridging the gap between sales and marketing. Now we extend that bridge over to CS as well. So the question isn’t why you should do it, it’s when - and the time is now!

How to move from sales to revenue enablement

This can feel like a daunting move at first. Similar to how we think of enablement maturity as a sliding scale, you don’t need to go all in at first.

Instead, start with the basics and slowly build a ground swell of interest. In a world where CS are increasingly expected to be more commercial, many of the programs you run for sales would be beneficial to them too. A great example of this is discovery or demo training.

It’s a similar amount of effort, with potentially double the impact.

This works especially well if you’re a solo enabler looking to expand your support to new roles, or for small teams with a specialist solely focused on CS. Enablement tools like Showpad, Highspot, and Mindtickle can help you scale your efforts, without hiring.

As you start to prove success and have the ability to grow your enablement team, you can then think about hiring a person dedicated to the org, but don’t feel like this has to happen right from the start.

Many CS teams don’t have the luxury of having enablement like their sales counterparts. You need to gain their trust that when they show up to an enablement-sponsored event or training, it’s going to be valuable for them. It's also okay as an enabler to admit you might not have the expertise or knowledge to enable a team you're not used to, like CS!

The best place to start is to simply ask.

Interview senior stakeholders, as well as top- and bottom-performing employees. Then, rather than deciding which sessions you will start with, pick a few you think would have a high impact and use a Slack poll or survey to have them decide the order of sessions. This helps to convert some of the holidaymakers and prisoners into active participants.

My story: A Sedna case study

To bring this to life, I was a one woman show at Sedna and started the journey towards revenue enablement last year. I didn’t really have any experience enabling CS.

Given the economic situation, we made a strategic call that our CSM team should start becoming more commercial and as most of them didn’t have experience in this, I was asked to step in.

I thought it would be easy at first, but boy was I wrong!

I was met with a lot of resistance. So, I had to think outside the box.

One of my biggest wins was when first starting out revenue enablement was launching a new methodology for discovery, Sandler. When we initially rolled it out, we knew that we wanted all of GTM to have the training as our first real test of “revenue enablement”.

But the CS team didn’t think they needed it. So we took a phased approach over about 8 months. We started with the BDRs who are hungry for any training they can get their hands on.

The sales team heard them using Sandler tactics and started begging for the training themselves. We went with sales next and threw a CS person into the training. It wasn’t long before the majority of people in CS, PS and even the CEO were knocking at the door for the training as well!

Final thoughts

Revenue enablement is the way forward.

Not only does it allow enablement teams to have more impact across the business, but it also breaks down silos and creates a unified language and strategy across the customer lifecycle.

Over time, this change will increase your pipeline and ultimately your revenue, as well as drive happy customers.