Beyond the Buzzword:

How Revenue Enablement Platforms are Revolutionizing Sales (And It's not Just for Sales Teams)

Revenue enablement platforms are not just a tool for sales teams; they're a strategic investment that empowers every customer-facing team to drive revenue growth.

Typically,  sales, marketing, customer success, and other revenue-related functions work independently toward revenue success and growth. Revenue enablement adopts a unified approach and breaks down silos between all revenue-related functions, and ensures all teams are equipped to succeed. This involves providing them the relevant tools, training, and resources to engage customers and close deals.

Busting Myths About Revenue Enablement

While revenue enablement has a proven track record, several misconceptions restrain teams from reaching their full potential. It’s time to bust a few myths.

Myth #1: Revenue enablement is all about training

One of the biggest misconceptions is that revenue enablement is all about sales training. While training is integral to revenue enablement, it’s not the only aspect. Revenue enablement takes a holistic approach to ensuring all teams are adequately equipped to engage customers. This involves providing all the teams with the required resources, collaterals, tools, and training.  

Myth #2: Revenue enablement is only for large enterprises

A prevailing myth is that revenue enablement can only benefit large enterprises. Revenue enablement can help businesses of all sizes, from startups to large companies. Deploying a revenue enablement solution allows companies to create a centralized repository for all deal-critical resources such as case studies, battlecards, product documentation, etc. An easily accessible, centralized repository will always be helpful, regardless of company size. Further, a revenue enablement platform seamlessly integrating with the company's CRM system offers a unified view of customer interactions and significantly reduces the admin burden. By breaking down silos and encouraging collaboration, revenue enablement allows companies, large and small, to scale and grow. 

Myth #3: Revenue enablement is a one-time initiative

Revenue enablement is never done and dusted. It’s a continuous process that requires ongoing evaluation, course correction, and refinement. For instance, the market constantly evolves, with new competitors, changing customer needs, and unique technological advancements. 

Revenue enablement tools and strategies must adapt to these changes to remain effective. Revenue-generating teams need training refreshers and updated resources as products and services evolve. This requires continuous learning programs for teams to be aware of industry trends, sales techniques, and product knowledge.

Further, revenue enablement helps companies recognize gaps, identify areas where reps need support, and optimize the strategy by consistently tracking key metrics. This allows businesses to align with evolving market conditions and meet business objectives.  

Myth #4: Revenue enablement is solely a sales function

While sales teams play a crucial role, revenue enablement involves collaboration across multiple departments, including marketing, customer success, and product. Revenue enablement platforms ensure consistent brand messaging across all customer touchpoints. The goal is better cohesion, unified messaging, and improved customer engagement across all customer-facing teams, not just sales. 

Myth #5: Revenue enablement replaces people with tech

While the right tech stack enhances revenue enablement efforts, it's never a substitute for human interaction. Research shows that top sellers use the tech stack to humanize interactions with buyers, with 91% of sellers at large companies using sales tech once a week. Revenue enablement focuses on nurturing customer relationships, improving customer satisfaction, and driving repeat business, all built on human interaction. 

Anatomy of a Revenue Enablement Platform

A centralized hub serving as a single truth source is a cornerstone of revenue enablement. Leveraging a revenue enablement solution will make it easy for teams to access the resources, data, tools, training, and collaterals required for effective customer engagement. Here are some of the essential features of a comprehensive revenue enablement platform: 

Content management

Companies spend significant time, effort, and resources developing content, collaterals, and libraries. However, reps often struggle to locate relevant, up-to-date content within these libraries. Poor content management increases the risk of reps sending prospects outdated or irrelevant information. 

A holistic revenue enablement platform simplifies content management, with all the content located in a single, easily accessible location. This makes it easy for companies to organize, update, and send collaterals, including case studies,  product specifications, presentations, brochures, etc. 

This means reps can spend less time figuring out the location of the right collateral and more time engaging with the customer. Ideally, the content management system should allow teams to track how each piece of content is used and how it impacts the sales outcomes. A few revenue enablement platforms also offer AI capabilities that provide contextual search, helping reps leverage the right content to engage buyers. 

Training and coaching

Another crucial feature of a revenue enablement platform is supporting organizational training and coaching programs. The training programs should be adaptable, scalable, and aligned with business goals and competencies.

When it comes to learning, an intuitive UI makes it easy to use and enriches the experience. Training and coaching features within a revenue enablement platform help organizations deliver personalized programs that address each rep’s unique needs. This could include creating and delivering interactive learning experiences such as quizzes, videos, simulations, etc. The platform should also allow companies to track and evaluate individual progress and performance and offer feedback and guidance.

Analytics

Robust analytics and insights are essential for fine-tuning strategy. Insights into sales performance and effectiveness allow companies to compile and analyze data and generate and visualize reports. Organizations can maximize resources and set realistic targets by identifying current industry trends. Analytics and insights into sales training and coaching allow companies to understand the best training methods, identify training gaps, and evaluate retention rates. 

Another critical feature is comprehensive dashboards. These show key metrics and trends, such as data on content usage, engagement rates, and sales performance. This information helps companies tailor sales pitches, improve close rates, and enhance overall sales efficiency. 

Integration 

Revenue-generating teams are often bogged down by multiple sets of tools and tech. A centralized platform that integrates with existing tools, making cross-functional collaboration a breeze. Ideally, integration capabilities allow users to connect to CRMs, enterprise SSOs, other sales productivity and communication tools, social media platforms, e-commerce platforms, and payment gateways.

A centralized revenue enablement platform gives reps instant access to all the tools and resources required to accelerate the sales pipeline. This means all customer-facing teams can leverage data from diverse sources, automate workflows, and create a seamless experience for sales reps and customers. 

Customization 

Every organization has distinct processes and workflows. A customizable revenue enablement platform ensures alignment between the tools and these unique workflows. Further, as market trends and customer needs evolve, a customizable platform allows organizations to adapt to new strategies and requirements. For instance, a customizable dashboard will enable organizations to evaluate the KPIs that matter. 

Customization is vital when dealing with routine workflows. For instance, collaterals such as training materials or case studies can be tailored to specific industries, teams, and role,s ensuring relevance. Tailoring workflows and collaterals for particular customer segments allows for a more personalized CX, increasing customer loyalty and revenue. A customizable revenue enablement platform provides the agile framework to scale and grow, ensuring it is a valuable asset. 

Real-World Results: Revenue Enablement in Action

Revenue Enablement in Action: How Sayari Slashed Ramp Time by 50%
with Unified Enablement

Sayari is a risk intelligence provider that offers worldwide visibility into supply chains and counterparty networks. Built to help businesses uncover risk for regulatory, trade, and ESG compliance, Sayari counts government agencies, financial institutions, and multinational conglomerates among its customers.

The challenges:

Here are the challenges Sayari was facing with their former revenue enablement platform. 

1. Clunky interface:  The previous revenue enablement platform’s interface had limited search capabilities, making it hard for reps to find the relevant information. It took sellers six clicks to create trackable links and 12+ clicks to design a digital sales room (DSR). Further, the platform’s interface was challenging to learn and use. All of this ultimately led to low rep adoption of the platform.

2. Rigid framework: The previous revenue enablement platform used ‘spots’ to organize content. Reps spent significant time maintaining tools and building these ‘spots’ for content discovery. However, they still struggled to find the right content amidst innumerable ‘spots’ without any flexibility in configuring search.

3. Fragmented reporting: Without detailed metrics on critical KPIs (content performance, buyer engagement), revenue teams could not determine which collaterals resonated with buyers. Further, the ROI was also taking a hit with fragmented reporting and low adoption. 

4. Digital sales room experience: Studies show that by 2026, 30% of B2B sales cycles will be primarily run through a DSR, which will be used to manage the customer life cycle. However, designing a digital sales room was challenging with Sayari’s previous revenue enablement solution. The interface was unintuitive, and reps needed a content administrator or someone from the enablement team to build a DSR. This made personalizing the buying experience incredibly tough. 

The GTM Buddy Solution

The requirement now was for an intuitive enablement platform and, most importantly, low on the administrative overhead such as tagging and categorizing individual pieces of content. The platform also needed to be accessible and easy to use. Here’s how GTM Buddy helped Sayari: 

1. Higher rep adoption:  GTM Buddy’s contextual search and recommendations made it easy for reps to locate and share relevant content and access essential information, such as industry-specific case studies. This led to 

• 100% adoption in less than three months
• Increased content usage 
• two-thirds of the 700+ collaterals were being used actively
• Content from the platform was used in US $12+ million of sales pipeline. 

2. Ramp time: Since GTM Buddy was implemented, the Sayari team has been able to reduce the ramp time from 6 months to 3 months in less than a year.

3. Admin load:With contextual search and auto-indexing, reps were able to save significant time. This allowed personnel to focus on improving customer engagement and optimizing strategy instead of managing content. 

4. Buyer engagement with DSRs: With GTM Buddy, sales and customer success teams easily created over 250 digital sales rooms (DSRs). Sales teams used these DSRs to create personalized buying experiences and boost win rates, while customer success leveraged DSRs to understand customer expectations and improve loyalty.

With GTM Buddy, Sayari’s revenue-generating teams got insights into how different pieces of content were performing and their impact on sales cycles. This allowed enablement teams to strategize better, review collaterals, and focus on frequently shared assets. Teams were able to create personalized buying experiences for large teams and simplify the buying experience for prospects. 

With their comprehensive suite of tools and features, revenue enablement platforms empower customer-facing teams to be more effective. A good revenue enablement solution simplifies workflows for all teams, makes collaboration easier, centralizes all resources, and fosters continuous learning. Request a trial to learn how GTM Buddy can help your reps convert the pipeline more effectively. Don’t forget to download our revenue enablement guide to unlock growth and maximize revenue.