Regardless of industry and company size, every business reaches a point where the old way of doing things is no longer feasible — despite status quo bias.
Old processes can’t scale or existing strategies don't serve current economic conditions and revenue stalls.
Implementing new, strategic tools and processes like revenue enablement helps companies build more scalable models to meet ever-evolving business goals and objectives.
You can schedule some time to speak to one of our revenue enablement experts directly to learn more.
How to get started with revenue enablement
To begin this journey, organizations must be willing to take a closer look at existing sales and marketing programs, determine their effectiveness, pivot any strategy or tactics wherever necessary, and start preparing for the expansion of their revenue teams’ scope.
The truth remains, however, that putting those new processes into action is hard work.
In fact, it’s some of the most difficult work that revenue teams can do. Change can push employees out of their comfort zone, causing tension and resistance. Many teams have trouble developing the plans themselves and struggle to come to a consensus on how to proceed.
Even if companies can successfully establish and define those new processes and make some progress on changing their salespeople’s mindsets — the group most often attached to the familiar — there is still the uphill battle of implementing key plans that turn into action.
Enter revenue enablement for business, a solution that takes the heavy lifting out of the strategic implementation required for growth.
By 2025, 60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, merging their sales process, sales applications, sales data and sales analytics into a single operational practice. - Gartner’s Market Guide for Sales Enablement Platforms
How does revenue enablement work?
The term “revenue enablement” has become interchangeable with sales enablement. Rather, sales enablement has become more sophisticated and grown to encompass more than just the sales team. Go-to-market enablement is another synonym gaining popularity. Whichever term you prefer, they’ve come to mean the same thing.
Revenue enablement is often defined as “the process by which you most efficiently acquire and maintain customers, maximizing revenue gained through each stage of a customer’s journey with your business.”
Essentially, revenue enablement for business takes a customer-centric approach in aligning multiple functions across the buyer journey.
By having all teams in the revenue engine join forces, organizations can create better alignment via shared goals, KPIs and metrics, and resources to deliver the necessary content, training, and coaching support to pivot and develop growth strategies.
Revenue enablement helps professionals in the marketing, sales, customer success, product, and finance areas to support their areas of expertise through an integrated approach.
While sales enablement focuses on delivering content, training, and coaching to sales teams, revenue enablement takes these same systems, and layers process-focused, data-driven systems right on top.
From a financial standpoint, these capabilities will help companies drive a holistic strategy to improve customer hand-offs and optimize their customers’ experiences with reliable revenue results.
Introducing your sales team to revenue enablement
These days, revenue or sales enablement is an indispensable component of modern B2B and corporate B2C infrastructure.
What was once an afterthought, sales enablement has become a must-have foundation for any organization with a large sales team as a method of optimizing the customer experience — it provides the necessary framework to effectively engage buyers.
In fact, Gartner reported that, “Demand for sales enablement platform technology has made it a core tech stack purchase for organizations with both direct and partner selling channels.”
But salespeople can be resistant to new technologies and processes. So how can you get your sales team on board with revenue enablement?
- Emphasize the value not just to their own quotas (but definitely highlight that), as well as the overall success of the business
- Demonstrate the resolution of their major pain points from other revenue teams such as marketing and sales enablement
- Show them how it will add ease and efficiency to their workflows
- Have sales, sales enablement, or other revenue leaders design an onboarding plan that teaches sellers the new tools and approaches
Onboard your sales reps more effectively by following The Blueprint for Better Sales Onboarding.
For example, Marketing and Enablement teams are generally focused on developing content and training materials for their salespeople. And often, their only method of measuring success is with verbal validation. Measurement is a secondary or tertiary concern that teams put off until tomorrow. This presents quite a few problems as there are very few, if any, data-driven insights sales teams can use to deliver long-term value unless this measurement is built into your overall approach. If it’s not, they lack the insights required to optimize their business, and drive revenue.
In order to generate revenue, there needs to be a revenue supply chain. From customer success to account management, there are several stakeholders within the revenue supply chain, and all of them need to be enabled. In order to enable them, they need content, buyer personas, and real-time feedback.
The right revenue enablement tools and strategies provide solutions to all of these problems to the benefit of salespeople who stand to gain from improvements such as faster quota attainment, increased annual contract value (ACV), more effective content, a smoother buyer experience, frequent just-in-time training, and more.
Why you should get started today
As anyone in sales knows, the entire customer experience — from the traditional buyer’s journey pre-purchase through the phases of the post-sale customer lifecycle, including the upsell and cross-sell interactions — need to be sustained by the proper enablement of every customer-facing role within the organization. These roles not only include each type of salesperson, but also field marketers, customer success managers, and channel partners.
To stand apart from the competition and stay ahead of the curve, companies need to be mindful of the disengaged customer experience that can accrue. Ultimately, if high-performing organizations want to improve their business outcomes, they should begin experimenting with revenue enablement concepts and examining their business processes sooner rather than later.
Our recent study with Heinz Marketing revealed that only 32.5% of go-to-market teams believe they are effectively delivering a competitive buying experience. Get the results of study in Roadblocks to Delivering a Competitive Buying Experience.
Bigtincan is a complete revenue enablement platform that allows sales and service organizations to access, create, present, and share content, and engage with customers on any device at a moment’s notice. Organizations around the globe rely on Bigtincan to ensure the efficiency and productivity of their workforce and make every customer interaction count.
Get a demo of Bigtincan to see how you can improve buyers' experience with your brand.
