I have been part of naming three categories now. The thing I understood latest, and wish I had understood first, is that a category is not a description a company applies to itself. It is a load-bearing structure inside somebody else's organisation.
That sounds abstract. It is not. Here is the concrete version.
When a category works, four things line up:Every Category Needs a Unit Someone Can Own
Those four have to correspond. Not loosely, not eventually. A category succeeds when a specific person can walk into planning, point at a line item, name the problem it addresses, and be held to a result. It fails when any one of those is missing, no matter how elegant the promise.
Which means moving a category promise is not a marketing decision. It is a decision that reaches into every customer's org chart and chart of accounts, and it moves one of the four while leaving the other three where they were.
Someone absorbs the gap
Watch what happens when a promise moves up-category and nothing else does.
Three years ago an organisation approved a line item. The problem was that sellers could not find or use what the company knew. The owner was a VP of Enablement. The budget sat in Enablement. The measures were readiness, adoption, content utilisation. All four corresponded, the purchase was approved, and everyone went back to work.
Then the vendor repositions. It is no longer a platform for equipping sellers. It is now a platform for how effectively the whole organisation converts strategy into revenue.
Nothing in the contract changed. But the promise just moved from a functional job to an organisational outcome, and the other three did not move with it. Now:
The problem the platform claims to address spans sales, marketing, customer success, revenue operations and sometimes product.
The owner is still one VP with authority over one of those.
The budget is still Enablement.
The gap is real, and it does not stay theoretical. It gets absorbed by the person who signed the original purchase order, in a meeting, roughly one planning cycle later.
CFO: What are we renewing?
VP Enablement: Our go-to-market performance platform.
CFO: Why is go-to-market performance coming out of the enablement budget?
There is no good answer to that question. Not because the platform is bad - it may be excellent, but because the question is structural. The promise outgrew the line item funding it, and line items are not elastic.
The second version is worse.
CRO: Good. If this is our go-to-market performance platform, what performance number does it own?
VP Enablement: Pipeline, partly.
CRO: Win rate?
VP Enablement: It influences it.
CRO: Revenue?
VP Enablement: Eventually.
CRO: Quota attainment?
VP Enablement: It contributes.
CRO: Then what am I buying?
That is not a vendor failing. It is what happens when a promise is pitched at the level of an aggregate. Nobody can own an aggregate. Organisational performance is a number a CRO reports upward, assembled from a dozen inputs and a market. It is not something one function can move, defend, or be measured against and a promise nobody can be held to is a promise nobody can fund.
The honest other reading
I should say the opposite case, because it is real and it is the one I would want to hear if I were the VP.
For an enablement leader who has spent three years trying to get taken seriously at revenue level, a vendor moving up-category may be a gift. It hands them larger language, an executive-level conversation, and a mandate that reaches beyond content and training. Some leaders have been arguing for exactly that expansion and have not been able to make it stick.
So the vendor's move is not automatically a problem. Whether it is an upgrade or an authorization problem depends entirely on one thing: whether the owner and the budget move with the promise.
If the CRO agrees that the function now owns a revenue number and the budget is restructured accordingly, the correspondence is restored at a higher level and everyone is better off.
If the promise moves and the owner and budget stay where they were, the leader has inherited accountability for an outcome nobody scoped to them, funded from a line item that cannot defend it.
Same event. Two completely different years.
The test
Here is the diagnostic I would now apply to any category, including my own.
Does the category come with a unit?
Not a promise. Not an outcome. A unit something countable, attributable to a specific function, and small enough that one person can be held to moving it.
Categories that endured all had one. Customer Success had net revenue retention. Marketing automation had cost per qualified lead. Enterprise performance management had forecast accuracy and close cycle time. In each case, a new function was created, a budget was allocated, and a specific person could say: this is my number, here is where it was, here is where it is now.
Categories that did not endure usually had a compelling promise and no unit. Sales 2.0. Social selling. Growth hacking. Every one of them described something real. None of them survived a budget cycle, because when the CFO asked what the line item was accountable for, the answer was a philosophy.
The unit is not a marketing artefact. It is the mechanism by which a category becomes fundable.
Applying it to my own
It would be convenient to stop there. The test cuts at Revenue Activation too, and I would rather say so than have it said back to me.
There is no Revenue Activation line item in anyone's chart of accounts. Not one. Every customer we have funds us from an enablement budget, under a name most CFOs have never encountered. By the argument above, that is a correspondence problem, and it is ours.
Our answer is the unit, and it is the whole reason we chose it.
Revenue capacity per rep: The revenue one seller can carry and close once the friction around the conversation is removed. It is countable. It is attributable to a function. It is small enough that one person can own it, and it ladders directly to a number the CRO already reports. An enablement leader can walk into planning, name that number, say where it was and where it is, and defend the line item on its own terms.
That is not a smaller ambition than organisational performance. It is a more fundable one, which in practice means it is the larger ambition - because a promise that cannot be funded does not get to compound.
I should also be honest about where we are on it. We can evidence that a coaching or learning intervention changed what a seller does in live conversations, measured against a rubric. Connecting that all the way through to closed revenue is work we are still doing. It is also work the profession as a whole has not finished: Kunal Pandya's assessment of 104 enablement functions found around four in five cannot connect their work to recognised revenue in any measured way, and only about one in twenty can say it without qualification.
That number is the real state of the discipline, and it explains why the current wave of repositioning is happening at organisational scale. When the function cannot yet prove its own contribution, moving the promise upward is tempting, because a bigger claim is harder to falsify than a specific one.
I think that is backwards. The way out of an unprovable claim is a smaller unit, not a larger promise.
What this means in the agentic era
The pressure to move up-category is going to increase, not decrease, because AI is dissolving the boundaries that used to keep functional categories tidy. When the same underlying capability can serve sales, marketing, service and operations, every vendor faces a genuine temptation to describe itself at the level of the whole organisation.
Some will be right to. Platforms with genuine architectural breadth, sold to genuine executive buyers, with budget restructured to match, will make that move successfully.
But most category expansion is not architectural. It is linguistic. And the way to tell the difference from the outside has nothing to do with the announcement. It is two questions:
Did the architecture change, or the vocabulary?
Ask what the platform can do now that it structurally could not have done two years ago, and what had to change in how it is built for that to be true. A real answer describes primitives. A weaker one describes packaging.
Does the new promise come with a unit?
If the vendor cannot name a countable thing that a single accountable person can move, then whatever has been announced is a market description rather than a category and somebody inside your organisation is about to absorb the difference.
For anyone sitting with a renewal and a repositioned vendor, the practical version fits on an index card. Write down three things: why you bought this, what the vendor now says it does, and what you actually need solved next year. If those still overlap, renew and stop thinking about it. If they have diverged, you do not have a switching decision you have a correspondence problem, and it is better to name it in planning than to discover it in a CRO's office.
And whichever way it goes, get the baseline written down. No platform sells you that. It is not a feature, it cannot be procured, and it is the only thing that makes any of the rest defensible.
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