No matter how big or small your company might be, the chances are you’re constantly looking for ways to grow and evolve. Every organization wants to increase its sales, capture more customers, and unlock additional profits. However, achieving these goals requires more than just ambition, and revenue enablement is part of that strategy.
To facilitate consistent and stable growth, companies need to implement data-driven strategies for success. Sales enablement and revenue enablement efforts are two of the ways business leaders strive to reach their performance targets.
The question is, how is revenue enablement different from sales enablement, and which strategy is better suited to your business?
What is Sales Enablement? An Introduction
Virtually every company with customer facing teams has its own sales enablement strategy. Essentially, this is the strategy companies use to provide sales professionals with the resources, training, and tools they need to close deals.
The primary aim of sales enablement is to improve revenue operations, by empowering professionals to accomplish more in their roles. Sales enablement teams create content like playbooks and case studies for team members, offer training opportunities to marketing and sales teams, and conduct research into the customer journey, to identify pain points and opportunities.
Used correctly, sales enablement can help organizations to improve productivity, shorten sales cycles, and increase their win rates. In fact, around 79% of sales companies in one report already had a sales enablement strategy in place.
However, as sales enablement has gained increasing popularity, new concepts have begun to emerge in the landscape, introducing new perspectives on revenue generating opportunities. Sales enablement teams focus only on training and supporting sellers, which ignores a large part of the customer journey, and the interactions companies have with their audience.
This has led to the creation of “revenue enablement” campaigns.
How is Revenue Enablement Different from Sales Enablement?
Revenue enablement takes sales enablement to the next level. Rather than just focusing on ways to improve the way employees pitch a product or service to customers, revenue enablement teams take a closer look at the customer journey. They focus on every stage of the customer lifecycle, from initial contact to customer success strategies.
Revenue enablement strategies aim to boost revenue potential, by aligning sales and marketing teams around plans to not only capture leads, but earn their loyalty. Team leaders look for ways to boost customer lifetime value, by analyzing customer experiences, leveraging customer feedback, and assessing comprehensive data and analytics.
Using everything from social media analytics, to customer satisfaction scores, revenue enablement teams help companies better understand customer behaviors and preferences. This leads to the creation of more targeted strategies for the sales and marketing team.
Revenue enablement can also improve the performance of businesses, by helping to improve lead generation and validation techniques, boosting customer retention rates, and discovering opportunities to up-sell and cross-sell with various consumers.
Revenue enablement focuses heavily on process improvement on a wider scale. It helps businesses to not only define what their sales teams need to act more effectively, but what their marketing and service teams need to do to preserve customer relationships.
The Core Differences Between Sales and Revenue Enablement
Both revenue and sales enablement strategies have a similar focus. They aim to help professionals in customer facing roles perform more effectively, and unlock new revenue generating opportunities. They also both have a direct impact on the sales process, and the activities of the sales team.
However, there are some differences between the two concept. Sales enablement, for instance, focuses primarily on the sales team. On the other hand, revenue enablement looks at the entire customer journey. The metrics and KPIs measured in both environments vary too.
Sales enablement focuses on metrics that matter to businesses in the short-term like quota attainment, but revenue enablement looks at things like customer lifetime value and retention rates. Plus, revenue enablement tends to rely more on technology. For instance, team members may use a revenue enablement platform to collect and analyze data.
Is Revenue Enablement Better than Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is still a crucial part of the sales landscape for many businesses. However, like many aspects of the sales world, the concept has begun to evolve in recent years. Sales enablement focuses heavily on providing teams with the right tools, content, and information they need to close deals.
Revenue enablement looks beyond simply closing deals, to provide companies with more of the resources and research they need to create long-lasting customer relationships.
By switching from a focus on sales enablement to revenue enablement, a sales organization can align all of their revenue-generating teams around the same goals. Rather than just focusing on short-term metrics like “win rates”, companies can start to prioritize longer-term ideals.
This can be valuable in an environment where retaining customers, and increasing customer lifetime value, is often more effective than constantly seeking out new leads.
As businesses grow more “customer obsessed”, revenue enablement is quickly becoming a crucial strategy for success. Taking a broader look at the customer journey, and making the right decisions with data and analytics, companies can pave the way for long-term growth.
Why Companies Should Implement Revenue Enablement
Analysts like Gartner believe revenue enablement is the future of the sales landscape, particularly in the B2B landscape. Buyers are changing how they interact with companies, and every sales leader needs to be ready to adapt. Revenue enablement strategies, with a focus on collaboration between sales, marketing, and services teams, can help to drive new opportunities.
Switching to a focus on revenue enablement doesn’t just lead to stronger customer relationships. It can also produce a range of other benefits, such as:
- Continuous improvement of processes: Revenue enablement relies heavily on metrics, data analysis, and insights. A focus on process identification, analysis, and measurement ensures everyone in the business landscape is on the same page, and are moving towards the same goals. Revenue enablement strategies help to pave the way for consistent process optimization, and the reduction of inefficiencies.
- Greater consistency: Since revenue enablement involves a lot of collaboration between sales, marketing, and service teams, it helps to encourage alignment. A revenue enablement strategy doesn’t just focus on how the sales team operates. It provides a comprehensive blueprint for businesses to follow throughout the entire customer journey.
- Improved business outcomes: As mentioned above, revenue enablement helps companies to concentrate on achieving long-term goals, and strategic wins. It takes the focus away from simple quota attainment, and drives attention towards more important long-term targets, like retaining customers and creating brand loyalty.
What’s more, with this strategy companies can also achieve greater visibility into the full customer journey. Enablement teams analyze every potential touchpoint with customers, from the point of an initial interaction to the post-purchase strategy.
This additional visibility helps companies to gather more data they can use to model better sales, service, and marketing strategies in the long-term.
Tips for Implementing Revenue Enablement
While sales enablement is a great starting point for many businesses, revenue enablement could be the next step towards better outcomes. However, evolving from sales enablement to revenue enablement does require a distinct strategy. Here are some quick tips to get you on the right track:
- Plan: The planning phase is an important stage of revenue enablement. You’ll need to define which teams need the most support, what your revenue enablement goals will be, and how you’ll measure your efforts after implementation, using KPIs and metrics.
- Process design: Once you have clarity on the goals you want to achieve and what you want to measure, the next step is to design a process. This means understanding the customer journey completely, mapping the touchpoints, and designing the right inbound and outbound campaigns for success. Make sure every member of your team knows what role they’re going to play in the revenue enablement cycle.
- Create playbooks: Next, create the playbooks and documentation your employees and sales leaders can use across the ecosystem. Similar to sales enablement, revenue enablement still requires businesses to create the right content to guide their teams.
- Implement the right tech stack: Take advantage of technology and tools that help to improve employee efficiency and performance. This could include investing in a CRM system, sales engagement tools, conversion intelligence platforms, and content management systems. You might also use project management tools like Asana.
- Measure outcomes: After implementing your revenue enablement strategy, make sure you’re keeping track of the outcomes your teams achieve. Collect feedback, monitor metrics, and determine which strategies are really working for your company.
Investing in Revenue Enablement
As a holistic approach to generating more revenue and opportunities for your business, revenue enablement can be a powerful tool. Unlike sales enablement, which focuses only on the sales team, revenue enablement looks at every group in your business with an impact on profits.
If you want to learn more about how a revenue enablement approach can support and guide your business, join HSE today. Our gamified training opportunities are perfect for coaching teams to unlock their full revenue generating potential.
