What’s in a name?
Don’t worry, we are not going to get all Shakespearean on you! We are actually talking about an important name change that is gaining momentum - the evolution from sales enablement to revenue enablement.
So, what is really driving this change and what impact will it have?
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 organizations 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.
Gartner outlines the key benefits of transitioning to a revenue enablement as:
Consistency: All customer-facing roles leverage consistent customer messaging, similar technology and data, and sales motions that reduce friction in traditional handoffs between functions.
Alignment: Marketing, sales and customer success work together to improve end-to-end revenue generation. They either collaborate cross-functionally on efforts that support the entire customer buying journey or come together under one revenue enablement function.
Visibility: There’s visibility throughout the customer buying journey, making it easier to optimize enablement efforts to improve revenue.
In actual fact, we would have 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 but the evolution to revenue enablement could hold the answer to this.
Under the revenue enablement umbrella, the goal is exactly what it says on the tin. All focus is on driving revenue - both within the enablement team and, importantly, amongst stakeholders.
The change in name provides them with additional reassurance that enablement activity is aligned to achieving strategic business impact and can help to elevate enablement in their eyes from strategy-taker to strategy-maker.
The Measure of Success
The ability to measure revenue impact is still vital and the renewed focus on revenue generation should also provide a different lens through which to look at the metrics that are in place.
On the topic of measurement, Gartner states that revenue enablement “prioritises end-to-end metrics'“ and “uses data and analytics throughout the entire customer journey to create and improve enablement efforts.”
So what could these metrics look like?
Whether we are looking at sales metrics such as quota attainment or 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 indictors and the competencies that sit at the heart of success (take a look here for more detail). 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 you can see from the example on the right, the results are definitely worth it.
So, what’s In a name? Well in the case of enablement, it could just be that the rose by another name smells even sweeter!