What is Revenue Enablement and Why is it Important?

The E-Myth Revisited is one of the best business books ever written. In it, author Michael Gerber lays out three common archetypes in business: the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician.

The entrepreneur is a visionary that sets the course for the organization but hates the nitty-gritty details. The technician doesn’t care much for vision-casting, but just wants to put their head down and do the work.

Yes, we realize saying that businesses seek to increase revenue isn’t exactly a groundbreaking insight. But in practice, revenue enablement is a very intentional and holistic discipline.

It involves optimizing the sales process, aligning customer service and sales teams, and creating effective customer engagement strategies.

More practically, it means making sure your sales and service teams are working together to provide the best experience possible to customers. 

Revenue enablement is an important part of any successful business, as it helps companies maximize their profits and grow their customer base. 

It also involves leveraging the right data and technology to support the customer journey and ensure sales teams are well-equipped to close deals

By implementing the right strategies and making sure that all departments are working together, companies can ensure that their customers have the best possible experience and that their revenue goals are met.

Finally, revenue enablement requires a close examination of the customer journey, so that you can identify opportunities for improvement. This could involve refining processes, optimizing customer experience, or even introducing new products and services.

In essence, revenue enablement is about creating a seamless customer journey and ensuring that all stakeholders are working together to create a consistent and positive experience. By doing so, businesses can maximize their revenue potential.

Why is Revenue Enablement important?

Revenue enablement is important because, simply put, it helps your business serve more customers and make more money. 

The nuts and bolts get a bit more complicated (as you’ll see in this post), but that’s the big idea.

Here are a few specific benefits of leveraging revenue enablement in your organization:

• Revenue enablement helps organizations focus their efforts on activities that will drive the highest returns and reduce costs associated with inefficient sales processes. 
• Revenue enablement helps ensure that sales teams have the skills and knowledge to identify and nurture potential customers, and to develop relationships with existing customers.
• Revenue enablement helps organizations develop a comprehensive view of their sales process. This helps ensure that sales teams are equipped to identify and respond to market trends, and to adjust their strategies as needed. 

Revenue enablement vs. sales enablement: what’s the difference?

We talk a lot about sales enablement on our blog, and for good reason. Our entire product suite is dedicated to helping sales teams automate tedious, error-prone tasks so they can get back to selling (and making those commissions).

While sales enablement is about making sure the sales team has the right skills, knowledge, and resources to close deals, revenue enablement also includes the marketing and customer service teams as well.

In other words, sales enablement is one piece of revenue enablement, but revenue enablement has a much larger scope, taking the user journey, marketing funnel, and customer service pipeline into consideration.

Who does revenue enablement… enable?

Revenue enablement enables everyone involved in the sales process, from sales reps to marketers to customer success teams. 

It helps sales reps to be better equipped to identify, understand, and address customer needs, so they can close more deals. It also helps marketers to create more effective campaigns that drive leads to sales reps and increase their conversion rates. 

And it helps customer success teams to better understand customers’ needs, so they can provide more personalized support. Ultimately, revenue enablement helps all of these teams to work together more effectively to drive more revenue for the company.

Exploring the Revenue Cycle

As mentioned above, revenue enablement is very closely tied to the user journey. It’s all about putting every stage in the customer lifecycle under a microscope to identify inefficiencies, positive trends, and success patterns.

This starts by thoroughly understanding who your customers are and what their needs are. You need to know their individual characteristics and preferences in order to tailor the experience to them.

In Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Sales & Marketing, Monetize Data, and Ignite Growth, authors Stephen G. Diorio and Chris K. Hummel offer up a helpful paradigm.

They argue that revenue enablement happens through activities, and each of these activities can be relegated to five categories:

1. Awareness activities
2. Promotion activities
3. Value-selling activities
4. Activation and support activities
5. Expansion activities

Let’s take a look at how each of these are impacted by a revenue enablement strategy.

1: Awareness activities

In sales enablement, awareness activities are the top-of-funnel campaigns and initiatives employed by marketing teams to attract qualified buyers into your sales funnel. 

These activities are aimed at increasing brand recognition and awareness, as well as creating interest in your product or service. Examples of awareness activities include:

• Content marketing
• Email campaigns
• Social media campaigns
• Paid search advertising
• Online video campaigns
• Event sponsorships
• Webinars

Content marketing is a great way to build brand awareness and keep your prospects informed about your product or service. By creating highly engaging content, you can attract prospects to your website and then use a lead magnet and lead capture form to snag their contact information for later remarketing. 

Top-of-funnel content should be tailored to your target audience, and it should be able to answer their questions and provide them with valuable information (without asking for anything but an email in return).

Then, using those captured addresses, you can nurture them through email marketing. You can use email campaigns to introduce your product or service, as well as to keep your prospects informed about new developments and to remind them to take action.

2: Promotion activities

Promotion activities are what many marketers would call “middle of funnel” initiatives. Prospects are not yet qualified and ready to buy, but they recognize they have a problem and are beginning to trust your brand.

At this point, you can start promoting your actual solution via case studies, testimonials, and use cases.

3: Value-selling activities

Value-selling activities usually involve a formal hand-off from marketing to sales to make the final close.

Prospects who’ve made it to the value-selling stage know their problem, trust your brand, and are actively evaluating your solution against the competition.

At this point, prospects likely want to see the product in action via a demo or free trial, as well as talk pricing and get approval from all internal stakeholders.

The value-selling stage is exceptionally important, not only because it’s the stage that’s most likely to close the deal, but because it involves a hand-off from one department (marketing) to another (sales).

These hand-off points are prone to inefficiency and “leaks,” and thus a big priority for organizations wanting to leverage revenue enablement. 

4: Activation and support activities

In the world of B2B sales (especially software), the sale is only the first step. In order to stay profitable, you need to reduce churn. 

And in order to reduce churn, you need to encourage customer adoption and bring the user to “first value” as quickly as possible.

This means making sure they understand how to use the product, how to get the most out of it, and how to leverage the features that are most valuable to them.

This can be done through a variety of methods such as onboarding programs, training resources, user conferences, and webinars.

Once the user has achieved first value, it’s important to keep them engaged. This can be achieved by continually marketing new features and updates, providing customer support, and offering incentives for continued use.

This is another extremely important hand-off point: from sales to customer service (or customer success if you have that team in place). 

Finally, it’s important to measure customer satisfaction and take steps to increase it. This can include surveys (most notably, NPS score), feedback loops, and customer success programs. By focusing on customer retention and satisfaction, you can ensure that your customers stay with you for the long haul. And that’s the key to a successful B2B business.

5: Expansion activities

The final stage in revenue enablement is turning existing customers into repeat customers, advocates, and even evangelists for your brand.

This can be done in a variety of ways, but the most important thing is to provide excellent customer service and support. Make sure your customers are satisfied with their purchase and offer them incentives to come back.

Create customer loyalty programs that reward customers for their repeat business and offer discounts or other rewards if they refer friends and family.

You should also leverage customer feedback to ensure your products and services are meeting customer needs. Make sure to take customer feedback seriously and use it to improve your products and services.

Finally, a great way to expand the value of a customer is to upsell or cross-sell them, either by promoting new products or by building new value into an existing product to make your brand even more “sticky.” 

How can you implement Revenue Enablement in your business?

Now that we’ve talked about what revenue enablement is and how it manifests itself throughout different parts of the sales cycle, let’s talk about how you can implement it in your organization.

Create a revenue enablement team

Creating a revenue enablement team is a great way to ensure your organization is tapping into its full potential. A revenue enablement team is a specialized group of individuals who are dedicated to helping your sales and marketing teams reach their targets.

They do this by providing resources, training, and guidance to help ensure that everyone is working together to maximize profitability.

The team should be composed of experienced professionals from various departments who understand the company’s mission and goals. This could include sales, marketing, finance, and operations.

The team should also have access to data and resources that will help them track progress and make informed decisions. The primary goal of the team should be to identify opportunities and leverage them to drive more revenue.

They should be able to identify areas where sales and marketing teams can optimize their efforts and recommend strategies to help them reach their goals. The team should also be able to monitor and measure the success of their initiatives. The team should be given the necessary resources to drive success.

This could include budget, technology, access to data and analytics, and marketing materials. They should also be given the autonomy to make decisions and take action.

By creating a revenue enablement team, you’ll be giving your organization the opportunity to increase its profitability and reach its goals.

With the right team in place and the right resources, you’ll be able to maximize your potential and drive more revenue.

Optimize your hand-offs

As mentioned above, some of the biggest “leaks” in your revenue enablement cycle are whenever prospects or customers get handed off from one department to another.

For example, when prospects get handed off from marketing to sales, or customers get handed off from sales to customer service or customer success.

When it comes to optimizing your hand-offs there are some key elements to consider. 

Firstly, communication is essential. When handing off to someone else, make sure both parties understand the task at hand, what is expected, and who is responsible for what. This reduces the risk of confusion and makes sure the right person is doing the right job. 

Secondly, make sure to document the transfer of information. This could be in the form of an email, a note, or a transfer form. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page, and that the hand-off is clear. 

Thirdly, establish a timeline for the hand-off. Setting a timeline can ensure that the transfer is completed in a timely manner, and that all parties involved are held accountable for their tasks. 

Finally, make sure to follow-up after the hand-off. This is important to ensure that the hand-off was successful and that no issues arose during the process. By following these steps, you can ensure that your hand-offs are smooth, successful, and efficient. 

Double-down on effective sales channels

Your sales team is the backbone of your business and the key to success. That’s why it’s so important to double-down on effective sales channels. First and foremost, you need to make sure you have the right salespeople in place.

That means finding experienced, knowledgeable, and reliable salespeople who can help you reach your target audience. Next, you need to focus on the sales channels you’re using.

Are you using the right ones? Are there any that you’re missing out on? Leveraging multiple channels can help you reach more customers and increase your sales.

Let’s face it: there are so many sales channels, and more are popping up everyday. You’ve got social media, and within social media you’ve got like half a dozen platforms.

You’ve got SEO, paid search ads, email marketing… it can get very overwhelming.

That’s why it’s important to experiment with each sales channel for a set time period, document your findings, and then double-down on the most effective two or three channels.

Don’t try to be a jack of all trades and master of none.

If LinkedIn is working and Facebook isn’t, go hard on LinkedIn and forget about Facebook. 

If webinars fall flat but email marketing is taking off, don’t try to reinvent the wheel — focus on email.

A huge part of revenue enablement is finding the highest-ROI sales channels. And that’s something that’s completely unique to your brand. 

Track your progress with intelligent KPIs

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, so you obviously need to be logging some KPIs as you leverage revenue enablement.

But what do you track? 

Here are some good starting points:

Revenue per Sales Opportunity: This KPI is a measure of the average revenue generated from each sales opportunity. It helps you determine how efficiently your team is converting leads into customers.

Average Deal Size: This KPI is a measure of the average revenue generated from each deal. It helps you identify which deals are most profitable and which need further optimization.

Customer Lifetime Value: This KPI is a measure of the total value of a customer over their lifetime. It helps you identify which customers are the most valuable and should be given the most attention.

Lead Conversion Rate: This KPI is a measure of the percentage of leads that are converted into customers. It helps you identify which steps of the sales process need to be optimized in order to increase conversions.

Customer Acquisition Cost: This KPI is a measure of the cost to acquire new customers. It helps you identify which marketing channels are the most cost-effective and should be given the most attention.

Foster teamwork and a culture of knowledge sharing

Teamwork and knowledge sharing are essential for any successful organization. A culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing not only creates an environment for creativity and innovation, but also fosters a sense of camaraderie and trust among team members.

And this culture-building is an ongoing process.

It requires setting and communicating the right expectations, providing resources, and implementing the right processes and tools. 

For more on this essential topic, check out our post on the importance of knowledge sharing.

Final thoughts

Revenue enablement is all about optimizing the entire customer journey.

This means examining intradepartmental communication, interdepartmental practices, and overall lead velocity to identify and fix inefficiencies — or double-down on what’s working.

One of the highest-ROI investments you can make into your organization is implementing sales and marketing software that scales with your business.

Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true Revenue Enablement Platform. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams.

This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios and provides the data for rich analytics that power better coaching, forecasting, and long-term customer support. Learn more about our solutions or Request a Live Demo  to see it in action.

Final thoughts

Revenue enablement is all about optimizing the entire customer journey.

This means examining intradepartmental communication, interdepartmental practices, and overall lead velocity to identify and fix inefficiencies — or double-down on what’s working.

One of the highest-ROI investments you can make into your organization is implementing sales and marketing software that scales with your business.

Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true Revenue Enablement Platform. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams.

This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios and provides the data for rich analytics that power better coaching, forecasting, and long-term customer support. Learn more about our solutions or Request a Live Demo  to see it in action.