Defining Revenue Enablement

What is Revenue Enablement's Definition?

There is an important name change gaining momentum in the sales world: the evolution from sales enablement to revenue enablement. To understand this change, we need first to define revenue enablement. Revenue enablement is the strategic process of maximising revenue growth throughout every stage of the customer journey. It supports customer-facing teams by aiding them with the tools, content, processes, and data to close deals and drive revenue generation. Unlike sales enablement, revenue enablement spans to all parts of the organisation, including the sales team, marketing, account management, retention, and more.

As Jerry Maguire once said, “Show me the money!”

So, what is really driving this change and what impact will it have?

Revenue Enablement’s Impact

The term revenue enablement is now a staple in both Gartner and Forrester’s market analysis. Forrester puts this down to the fact that “the still-young function of sales enablement in B2B organisations is evolving; its capabilities are increasingly extending to supporting additional customer-facing roles, such as solutions overlays, sales engineers, ecosystem partners, and customer success.”

They talk about how most B2B organisations consider it important to “support their customer-facing roles with the competence, confidence, and content required to deliver a seamless customer journey.”

This is of course true - all public facing roles play an important part in achieving customer success and therefore it is not just sales teams that can value from enablement.

The Benefits of Revenue Enablement

Gartner outlines the key benefits of transitioning to a revenue enablement in three pillars: consistency, alignment, and visibility. However, we would add a fourth benefit here - Focus on the end goal.

One of the biggest topics of discussion in enablement recently has been the importance of being able to measure your business impact. In the past, sales enablement functions have been guilty of using metrics that don’t allow them to report on the impact they have on revenue and business objectives. With the evolution of revenue enablement, we can uncover this connection.

Under the revenue enablement umbrella, the goal is exactly what it says. All focus is on driving revenue - both within the enablement team and, importantly, amongst stakeholders.

The change in name provides stakeholders the reassurance that enablement activity is aligned to achieving strategic business impact. It also helps to elevate enablement in their eyes from strategy-taker to strategy-maker.

Measuring Enablement Success

Revenue enablement prioritises metrics from the beginning of the customer journey until the end. It uses data and analytics to improve enablement efforts throughout every stage and in every department. The renewed focus on revenue generation should also provide a different lens to analyse the metrics that are in place. So, what could these metrics look like?

Whether we are looking at sales metrics such as quota attainment, win rate, pre-sales meetings metrics, or customer success measurements such as speed to onboarding, it is important to walk backwards from your lagging indicators to identify the leading indicators and the competencies that sit at the heart of success. You can even analyse the strengths of your top performers to add some additional intelligence.

However, another vital step is identifying skills gaps and benchmarking performance in these areas to start with. Not only will this help you to prioritise activity for maximum benefit, but it will also provide an important starting point from which to measure your impact. To get a true picture of this, it is important to collate data from across your sales tech stack as well as from 1-2-1s to see where support is needed.

As enablement continues to evolve, revenue enablement takes the forefront. Harnessing a strong revenue enablement strategy is key to organisation-wide success. Don’t know where to start? Richardson’s Accelerate Sales Performance System builds revenue-relevant selling behaviours with personalisation and precision. Learn more about how our system can aid your revenue enablement strategy by downloading the brochure here.