7 Things Revenue Enablement Leaders Need to Know

1. Prospecting proficiency:

This is all about ensuring that we enrich our team’s outreach to prospects. Challenging market conditions represent an opportunity for sales reps to roll up their sleeves and get creative with prospecting. And enablement helps sales reps craft creative strategies that amplify their prospecting efforts. 

Enablement, when it comes to prospecting, means equipping your team with messaging that resonates with the target audience and guides them to engage with you via meaningful conversations that center on value. The consistency of enablement will be key here because it’s easy for sellers to become emotionally affected by market fluctuations and lose focus. Enabling people with technology and tools matters too, helping your reps understand how to use platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Demandbase.

By helping your sales teams build their muscle memory around prospecting, you’re able to foster mental resilience, which leads to success in sales. Enablement’s job is ultimately to help sellers “control what you can control.”

2. Pushing and propelling sales momentum: 

This means enabling your sales reps to qualify deals using various methodologies like MEDDPIC. A lot goes into understanding the potential of a deal: it could mean using our Demandbase tools to uncover opportunities beyond your ICP, leveraging account-based marketing strategies, targeting those high-potential accounts, helping teams understand intent signals and buying cues. 

It could also mean aiding sales reps when deals are stalling, helping them continue to navigate within their accounts and ensuring that reps aren’t putting all their eggs in one basket.

3. Promoting platform performance: 

There’s a real call for tool consolidation right now, which can be tough for those of us selling technology. This is where enablement can really shine. We can equip our teams with the ability to effectively articulate value and ROI; we can help sellers weave in stories that help customers and prospects connect the dots between our solutions/offerings and their needs. We can ensure that sellers have content to contribute for continued value-add.

It’s so important to be able to tell your platform story and help customers connect the dots beyond just features and functionality. Messaging goes along with that. Enablement can do certifications, pitch-offs, practice opportunities. At Demandbase, for example, we host open gyms where you can come and practice with your peers.

4. Post-sales partnerships: 

Enablement has to shift its strategy in this new market, where we’re no longer about “growth at all costs.” We’re more focused than ever on renewals and retention being anchors of revenue growth. Enablement leaders have a big role to play here and it’s very different from how it was in the past. It’s why shifting from sales enablement to revenue enablement is critical, because you can extend your focus to the account team, account directors, account managers, plus customer success teams to ensure that there’s a strong customer journey in place. 

I’m seeing enablement teams amp up their post-sales enablement resources faster than their pre-sales resources, which is very different from the past. Usually, you’d get a sales enablement manager who would span all of sales, but the content was focused on pre-sales. That’s shifting now. There are double the resources on customer success in post-sales because of the focus on retention and renewal. So restructuring your org to fit these shifting priorities is really important.

5. Promoting peoples’ productivity:

Enablement leaders need to make sure they focus on how to make their sales reps more productive during challenging times, and that can be through a ton of things. Instead of reps being reactive to the market, they can proactively pursue personal development. Enablement can play a big role in improving productivity, helping sales reps come out of tough times stronger through opportunities for development.

Every company sees the results from investing in learning and development for reps.

6. Peer-to-peer partnerships to foster collective wisdom:

Related to the above, it’s important to lean on the reps themselves to create a peer network of knowledge sharing. How are prospects and customers reacting to our messaging? Do we need to pivot? What’s working and what isn’t?

It’s really important to create mechanisms for reps to share knowledge with each other, whether that’s sharing stories from the field, tips on what’s working, or anything else that will create the future of sales.

7. Persistent prioritization:

It’s critical to focus on the right things — ruthless prioritization for enablement initiatives protects your sellers’ time. Why take them off the floor for something that’s not going to help them hit their goals? Instead, take them off the floor for something that they need, something that’s critical to their success. 

Revenue enablers are planners, and so pivoting on prioritization is a tough one for us, but it’s really important in this evolving, fast-moving market. The bottom line here is that revenue enablement leaders, as well as sales leaders and sales professionals, always have a lot on their plates, so choosing wisely about your allocations of limited resources (time, money, and energy) is massive.

We hope this foundational look at revenue enablement has helped you (and your teams) learn more about an important concept and provided some insights on how you can work more efficiently and effectively for the remainder of 2023 and into 2024.