What is GTM Enablement? A guide for revenue leaders

Your SaaS company has a top sales team, builds a great product, and runs marketing campaigns that your competitors envy.

But your prospects still take forever to convert. Your customers churn more than they should. And your teams miss opportunities to help each other win.

GTM enablement solves these issues by creating systems that help every customer-facing (and customer-adjacent) team work better together.

Let's explore what effective GTM enablement looks like and how to build it in your organization.

What is GTM enablement?

Go-to-market (GTM) enablement equips all revenue-generating teams with training, support, and resources to engage, educate, and guide customers at every stage—from pre-purchase education to post-sale support.

This definition of GTM enablement might be broader than you thought before reading this article.

The longstanding take on GTM enablement focuses on providing Sales teams with training and resources to promote new products or features. With that definition, go-to-market enablement is seen primarily as a short-term initiative tied to a product or feature launch.

However, this traditional definition doesn’t address that 78% of B2B buyers have completely or largely established their buying requirements before making their first contact with sales.

If sales contact is so late in the buying process, “enablement” should cover all the touchpoints a prospect makes before clicking the “Book a Demo” button. 

The definition should also incorporate a buyer’s post-sale experience, as Gillian Heltai, Chief Customer Officer at Haus, explains on Grow & Tell:

“[Customers] get so excited when they're buying. We're selling them the dream. If you don't deliver a great onboarding, it's like this trough of disillusionment where it's like, ‘Oh, I thought it was going to be this. And now this is so sad.’

That’s why our view of GTM enablement is more expansive in timeframe (the entire buyer lifecycle), and teams supported (Sales, Marketing, Customer Success). 

In many respects, GTM enablement is similar to revenue enablement. But where revenue enablement uses a revenue lens to arm an entire revenue team to close deals and win renewals, GTM enablement takes a more tactical view to empower GTM teams to reach (and ultimately win) more customers.

Jobs to be done for GTM enablement

Lish Barber, Director of Enablement at Sigma Computing, sees GTM enablement as a “business inside a business,” 

“You're doing the sales part, right? You're listening. You're doing discovery. You're scoping. But then, you're also having to be the product. You're building the solution with the customer. You're like co-designing with your sales leaders. Then you're kind of the marketer at the end because you got to market it back. You got to sell it back and then track the adoption of what you've built. So it's a business inside a business.”

📺 Watch more: Get more enablement nuggets from Lish on this episode of Grow & Tell.

This “business inside a business” model of GTM enablement empowers all stakeholders when going to market. Here’s how.

Sales enablement

Yes, sales enablement still exists in this version of GTM enablement. But, it’s just one facet of what’s considered “go-to-market.” As with the traditional definition, the Sales Enablement team equips Sales with everything they need.

Enablement materials here might include:

• Product demos
• New feature 1-pagers
• Pitch decks with vetted positioning and messaging
• FAQ cheat sheets
• Case studies
• Battlecards.

By providing insights and training on the product, market trends, and competitive positioning, sales teams can deliver solid value propositions, differentiate from competitors, and overcome objections.

Customer success enablement

Customer success team enablement has become increasingly important because B2B customers are always shopping. 

CS teams can’t equate an upfront annual payment with unconditional loyalty, especially as PLG competitors and freemium plans make it incredibly easy for customers to try other options.

Here are just a few ways that good enablement improves customer outcomes:

• Product training and onboarding experiences help customers quickly reach their goals and let customer success teams identify waning customer health, spot and overcome roadblocks, and discover areas for expansion
• Notes about sales promises and roadmap insights help CS better manage customer expectations
• Competitive talking points from product marketing help to reduce customer churn.

Customer enablement is also important to any GTM strategy because when customers see the value of a tool, they’ll stick around longer. 

Hair stylist extraordinaire Vidal Sassoon might have inadvertently been a customer enablement pioneer with his slogan: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” 

Marketing enablement

Marketing enablement equips marketing teams with resources and data to create compelling content throughout the customer journey. 

Sharing insights from customer-facing teams plays a big part in marketing enablement, including:

• Feedback from Sales on prospect knowledge gaps to refine messaging and build stronger campaign material
• Updates from Customer Success on top retention reasons to create proactive ad campaigns and landing pages.

This framework helps marketers stay aligned with sales and customer success teams while producing targeted materials that address real customer needs.

Buyer enablement

This modern GTM definition even incorporates folks who aren’t customers…yet! Enablement here centers around your buyer champion, an influential person at your prospect’s company who fully understands the value of your software. 

Solid buyer enablement gives that advocate all the info they need to get a resounding “Yes! Here’s our credit card” from their buying committee. 

Resources here might include: 

• Case studies
• Video testimonials
• Product sheets
• Comparison pages

Signs of a strong GTM enablement team

Once the engine of your GTM enablement team is humming, you can’t help but step back and see the following benefits for your organization.

Sales, Marketing, and CS teams are in sync

GTM teams working in unison bring several operational improvements, including:

1. Unified messaging becomes the standard. Every department speaks with one voice about your product's capabilities. Marketing materials align with sales conversations, and customers get exactly what they expect.
2. Customer insights move freely between departments. You’ll never fret about silos again. Sales shares valuable prospect feedback with marketing. CS passes user behavior patterns to product teams. Knowledge flows to where it will be most helpful.
3. Market intelligence reaches the right people fast. When anyone spots a competitor's move or market shift, that information spreads rapidly to each department that needs it. Teams can then adapt their go-to-market strategies based on real-world changes and be one step ahead of their siloed competitors.

This alignment transforms departments from isolated units doing their own thing into a united force driving business growth.

Clear metrics show enablement's impact on revenue

Speaking of business growth—the success of your GTM initiatives will show up in your KPIs. The more your teams collaborate effectively, the more your numbers will impress the C-suite.

Here's what strong enablement performance looks like across the customer lifecycle:

• Marketing-qualified (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) improve in quality
• Sales cycles become shorter
• Customer satisfaction scores trend upward
• Product adoption rates increase
• Teams win more competitive deals
• Customer churn decreases
• Account expansion grows
• Customer onboarding accelerates

Sam Lau of Anomali suggests tracking two more enablement metrics, "Enablement's impact is best shown through leading indicators like improved conversion rates or fewer bottlenecks.

Go-to-market enablement best practices 

So, what are the best ways to build a strong GTM enablement team? We’ve asked GTM professionals what has worked for them. Here are their top suggestions.

1. Proactively stay close to customer conversations

Your GTM strategy improves when you know what customers say and think about your product.

Morgan Remondinon of IDG recommends joining sales calls to gain customer insights:

“Shadow sessions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, using the opportunity to gather intel to inform all aspects of your communications strategy. This information will influence your strategies, writing, and business acumen to make informed contributions to the GTM planning process.”

If you can’t make live calls, Roz Greenfield of Level 213 suggests reviewing recorded calls from sales tools like Gong or Chorus.

“You’ll gain valuable insights into what’s happening in real conversations. What you’ll hear is often very different from what people think is happening and these soundbites will provide you with real examples.”

Use what you learn to refine your value proposition. As your customers’ needs change, so should your GTM motions.

2. Be data-driven

While qualitative insights from your customers are important, you must also think quantitatively. Staying on top of your business’ stats means staying ahead of problems. 

Lish Barber at Sigma Computing discusses the importance of data-driven decisions with her GTM enablement team on the Grow & Tell podcast:

“I want them to be aware of problems they may not have even realized they had through data … if it's just you coming to them with how can you help, you become the cleanup crew. You become the order taker. You don't become the strategic partner. So many people fall into the ‘order taker help bucket’ because they don't know how to use data.”

3. Establish clear channels for cross-functional collaboration

To make the most of the multi-team, multi-functional flow of information, set up regular checkpoints and focused gathering places.

Schedule regular GTM team meetings to share recent wins, challenges, and new customer insights that could help other teams.

Meetings are also a great time to review upcoming enablement initiatives. Shannon Story, Global Revenue Enablement Manager of DoiT, shares this approach:

"Partner with GTM leadership to create a quarterly roadmap of enablement priorities. But don't stop there. The most important part of this practice is to share the roadmap with the teams you support. When enablement consumers have insight into the plans for the quarter, it reassures them that their needs will be met, reduces stress, and builds trust with the teams you support."

To maintain collaboration between scheduled meetings, set up Slack or Teams channels for GTM brainstorming. Test new messaging, set up a poll for quick advice, or share relevant news that just broke. 

4. Share enablement resources in a scalable content management system

A “single source of truth” for GTM materials is another way to foster strong cross-functional collaboration. Otherwise, you’re stuck with all the pitfalls of siloed resources.

A central content management system keeps your content organized and accessible, so teams spend less time hunting for materials and more time finding and supporting customers.

Noah Massucci, Director of Sales Engineering and Customer Onboarding at Robin gives a real-world example of life before his company began using a revenue enablement tool. 

“[Enablement] was happening all over the place, within our CRM, Excel, Google Docs. We needed more of a shared plan so the customer could really buy in and get into the onboarding and feel like they were contributing.”

How Dock helps GTM teams drive results

While collaborative GTM teams certainly require centralized document storage, they also need joint workspaces where teams share knowledge and work directly with customers.

And that’s what makes Dock different. 

Dock is a client-facing workspace that helps revenue teams close deals, onboard customers, and manage renewals—all in one place. It supports GTM enablement by letting teams:

• Share and map enablement material to each customer journey stage, from first touch to expansion
• Collaborate with buyer champions before a deal closes 
• Onboard new customers once a deal is won.

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Dock’s CRM integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce let you build custom dashboards that give sales, implementation, and deal desk teams the views they need to track progress.

The platform’s analytics instantly reveal which content resonates at each stage, measure customer engagement, and connect document usage directly to deal progress.

Support your entire GTM enablement team with Dock

Growing GTM enablement teams need tools built for working in today’s buying environment. This means going to market with tight collaboration and seamless integrations. And, no silos.

Dock connects your departments and customers in one workspace where real work happens, regardless of the stage in the customer journey. Try it for free today.