Forget the Hacks:
Proven Revenue Enablement Best Practices that Actually Move the Needle

While there is an abundance of revenue enablement best practices out there, how do you know which is best for your organization? It starts by understanding specific organizational needs and addressing real challenges. 

Successful revenue enablement implementation isn't about following a checklist but a holistic approach that aligns people, processes, and technology to optimize the entire customer journey. This blog post provides actionable strategies for implementing revenue enablement, challenges, and possible solutions. 

Building your revenue enablement dream team

Revenue enablement empowers all customer-facing teams to deliver excellent customer experience (CX) across all touchpoints, maximizing revenue at every stage of the customer journey. Structured revenue enablement strategies are essential to align resources, technology, and training to increase customer engagement and retention.

This requires thinking beyond just the sales department. Revenue enablement involves cohesion and collaboration across multiple departments, including sales, marketing, customer support, account management, and more. 

By 2025, 75% of top companies will be using a RevOps model and measuring business outcomes by the ability of all teams within an organization to drive revenue at every stage of the customer journey. A revenue enablement team typically comprises enablement managers, content strategists, and data analysts. 

As they work to improve workflows within all customer-facing teams to streamline the buying process, revenue enablement teams need to be able to analyze data and KPIs and make informed decisions. This extends to developing an agile mindset to adapt to evolving business priorities. Further, strong communication and negotiation skills are indispensable when working with multiple teams and vendors. Their core responsibility is to build and execute strategies that drive consistent revenue growth. 

Crafting a killer revenue enablement strategy

A structured revenue enablement strategy is essential for streamlining the sales process, fostering customer loyalty, and leveraging data and analytics for intelligent business decisions. Here are the foundational steps in building your organization's best revenue enablement strategy.

Identify the goals

Unifying all the revenue-generating teams to deliver consistent, relevant, and personalized CX starts with defining revenue goals that align with overall business objectives. 

Clear, measurable goals help select the key KPIs, track their progress, and assess whether teams are heading in the right direction. This ensures that all revenue-generating teams are aligned and working towards achieving revenue goals.

Understand your customers

Developing customer-centricity starts with understanding customers and segmenting the target demographic into different groups based on specific metrics. This helps in tailoring strategies to meet the needs of various customer segments. The next step is identifying existing customer problems and how your product/service can solve them.

This involves researching the target demographic, obtaining feedback, and understanding their purchasing behavior. This exercise is essential in understanding the entire customer journey and determining key touchpoints where revenue enablement can make a difference. These insights can help create messaging and positioning that meets customer needs and drives conversions. Most importantly, this allows organizations to innovate and consistently offer great CX. 

Make content relevant and accessible

What type of content do your customers prefer? Understanding where customers are in their journey will help reps tailor the collaterals, increasing engagement and conversions. High-quality, relevant content empowers all customer-facing teams to have meaningful conversations. 

Using a centralized revenue enablement platform reduces the administrative load on the reps by giving them instant access to the relevant collaterals directly in their workflow. 

Use the right tech stack

Choose tools that help create streamlined workflows across all revenue-generating teams. The right tech stack and revenue enablement platform will align with your organization’s revenue enablement strategy, maximize the ROI, and simplify scaling up. These include Customer Relationship Management software (CRM), Content Management Systems, Learning Management Systems, etc. 

Leveraging technology reduces the administrative load on reps, automates processes, streamlines workflows, and offers nuanced insights for informed decision-making. Consider business goals when selecting tools, and choose the tools that will best help you get there.

Measuring and optimizing for success

Revenue enablement implementation starts with assessing the existing revenue processes. What are the strengths of the current process, what areas need improvement, and where do teams need help? 

Key Metrics

A good revenue enablement platform will allow you to track important metrics such as content engagement and usage, lead generation, revenue per rep, etc. Periodically tracking these KPIs will help organizations understand what is working and what needs to be changed. For instance, if the win rate is low, the sales processes may need to be optimized. 

Data collection

Which targets, if hit, would have a significant impact on the organization? Which datasets would help hit these business goals? Organizations need to harness data from various touchpoints in the buying cycle—from pre-sales to post-sales—to understand the customer journey better. It’s essential to keep the data current to gain relevant insights. Some popular ways to gather data include the tech stack in use, customer feedback, purchase history, sales call analysis, etc. 

For instance, the CRM is the best tool for collecting data points such as sales performance, demographic and firmographic data, the number of leads and deals, and more. When deciding on the tech stack, choose options with features to collect, manage, analyze, and store high-quality data. 

Analysis and reporting

Several powerful data analytics tools are available today. Some revenue enablement platforms come equipped with them, while others leverage AI to analyze the collected data to identify trends, patterns, and opportunities for improvement.

Data analysis helps detect anomalies and errors, allowing teams to identify how diverse factors influence revenue. For instance, sales data graphs specific to an industry or region may help the organization reallocate marketing funds. 

Analyzing data can also tell you why a marketing campaign was successful or how you could tweak it for better impact. These insights can also help companies streamline operations and anticipate potential outcomes of a decision or process.

Continuous improvement

Revenue enablement is never done and dusted. It’s an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring, feedback, and optimization. The revenue enablement team must periodically assess the efficacy of sales and marketing tools, content, and training programs. 

Gathering feedback from different revenue-generating teams and customers helps identify areas for improvement and course-correct. This ensures all teams can access the right tools and knowledge to generate high-quality leads and close deals.

Real-world examples: Companies crushing it with revenue enablement

Darwinbox works towards creating better workspaces through its enterprise-ready, cloud-based Human Resource Management System (HRMS) platform. Used by 900+ global companies that employ over 3 million people across 130 countries, their HRMS automates employee-facing processes, simplifies human interactions, and provides actionable insights.

Challenge

1. Expanding product portfolio

Besides a comprehensive HRMS suite for leading enterprises, Darwinbox offers best-of-breed solutions and related human capital management suites for specific HR needs. This requires all customer-facing teams to be aware of the latest product offerings to provide the optimal solutions based on requirements.

2. Fast-growing sales team

With global customers and continual expansion in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North America, Darwinbox grew its sales team by 60%. This meant new recruits needed quick and easy access to relevant resources and collaterals to close deals effectively.

3. An extensive repository

With over 1,000 resources and assets, reps struggled to locate and share the relevant collaterals with their prospects.

Darwinbox needed a better way to support its global customer-facing teams. 

The GTM Buddy solution

The goal here wasn’t just to organize the content but to make it easier for reps to discover and share relevant information with prospects based on the use case, industry, and specific requirements.

Just-in-time enablement

Based on the context, implementing GTM Buddy ensured reps have access to the most relevant information directly in their inbox, calendar, CRM, and LinkedIn. Reps no longer have to rummage through multiple apps searching for content, saving them valuable time and effort. 

Higher buyer engagement

GTM Buddy’s content engagement analytics helped Darwinbox's customer-facing teams gain better insights into buyer sentiment. As reps share resources and collaterals, they can track content engagement through metrics such as views, shares, and downloads. Reps could also leverage these engagement insights to personalize their messaging.

Improved collaboration

By understanding how buyers are engaging with specific collaterals, revenue-generating teams can work together to maximize engagement. For instance, reps can rate the efficacy of specific enablement content or request new content without leaving their current workflow. This allows marketing teams to prioritize content requests, provide visibility into their status, and send automated/manual announcements about new content to global sales teams.

Reduced administrative load

With over 1000 enablement assets, manually tagging each piece of content would have been a nightmare. GTM Buddy could analyze and auto-index 80% of the library, meaning product marketers had more time to enable their sales team.

The result

• US $250,000 increase in seller productivity with just-in-time content recommendations 
• US $150,000 reduction of annual wastage in the content marketing budget 
• US $2 million of global revenue pipeline influenced by enablement content 
• 300% increase in content usage by account executives and sales development reps

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Avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes

Revenue enablement aligns goals, metrics, and incentives between all customer-facing, revenue-generating teams. A common pitfall here is bringing only some teams under the umbrella. Siloed thinking can hinder efficiency and lead to missed opportunities. A revenue enablement tip is to adopt a people-centric approach, focusing on training and empowering your team. While leveraging the tech stack can maximize efficiency, it is not a silver bullet. Knowing when and where teams need help requires tracking all revenue enablement initiatives and analyzing results. 

Conclusion

Revenue enablement best practices include clear goals, cross-team collaboration, employee everboarding, and the right tech stack to achieve the desired revenue growth. GTM Buddy is here to help your reps convert their pipeline more effectively. Our revenue enablement guide is here to help you unlock growth and maximize your revenue teams’ potential. Book your GTM Buddy demo now to scale better and faster.