What is Revenue Enablement? The new key to B2B growth

Sales used to be the main team responsible for revenue growth at B2B companies, so companies focused all their enablement efforts on training sellers.

But the macro environment has shifted:

• Buying teams involve sellers less often in their product evaluations
• The rise of product-led growth and self-serve SaaS means Sales is often not a customer’s first touchpoint with a company
• Customer Success is responsible for retention and expansion revenue

Because of these changes, enablement teams need to widen their focus to the entire customer lifecycle.

This is known as revenue enablement.

Here’s your guide to revenue enablement, how it differs from sales enablement, and how to make it happen at your company.

What is revenue enablement?

Revenue enablement means providing go-to-market (GTM) teams (Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success) with the tools, resources, training, and knowledge they need to win deals and retain customers at every stage of the customer journey. 

It also means providing buyers and customers with the education and tools they need to make an informed buying decision and be successful with your product.

Revenue enablement has emerged because the lines between customer and prospect have blurred, especially in B2B SaaS—where PLG and freemium have become the norm.

Customers are constantly deciding whether to keep buying your product and hopefully expand on how they use it—month after month and year after year.

Smart companies know it takes close collaboration between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success to make that happen. That’s why revenue enablement has emerged as a holistic, cross-functional approach to generating as much revenue as possible from every single customer. 

Revenue enablement vs. sales enablement

Revenue enablement is wider in scope than sales enablement.

Sales enablement centers on empowering the Sales team by giving them the training and resources they need to turn more leads into customers. These resources can include up-to-date branding and messaging information, one-pagers for dealing with common objections, and case studies.

Revenue enablement expands on sales enablement to also include buyer enablement, customer success enablement, and customer enablement:

• Buyer enablement gives B2B prospects everything they need to make a more informed purchase, with content, tools, and timely support.
• Customer success enablement keeps this essential team supplied with what they need to better assist customers.
• Customer enablement empowers your customers to get more out of your product with onboarding guides and other educational content.

Examples of revenue enablement

So what does revenue enablement look like in practice? Here are some ways Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success can collaborate on a revenue enablement strategy:

• Sourcing customer and prospect concerns and pain points from Sales and Customer Success so Marketing can adjust messaging and create content to address them.
• Creating resources like case studies and audience research, to improve sales assets, email sequences, and webinars in a data-driven way.
• Reviewing common reasons for churn with Customer Success so Marketing can adjust promises made in their content if needed.

The beauty of revenue enablement is the ability to respond to changing business demands by adjusting how different revenue teams work together. 

If, for example, your organization is going through a period of high customer churn, your revenue enablement strategy might focus on reversing this trend by focusing more resources on the Customer Success team.

More and more organizations are hiring Chief Revenue Officers to oversee the implementation of this strategy, and facilitate the collaboration it requires.

Why now for revenue enablement?

“I felt this shift toward revenue enablement as the VP of Marketing at Lattice. Our best deals always came from Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success working together.” - Alex Kracov, CEO and Co-Founder of Dock

The buyer journey has evolved. The sales team still matters — in fact they still have a huge role to play — but they aren’t alone in driving revenue anymore. Internal and customer-facing teams, from marketers to customer success reps, all have a role to play in understanding customer behavior and meeting their needs at every stage of their journey.

Here are some of the changes that make revenue enablement so essential.

1. Buyers have all the power

Think back to every purchase you’ve made recently. Did you give your contact information to a sales team and wait for a call? Or did you start doing your own research?

According to Gartner, a buyer only spends 17% of their time talking with sales. The rest of the time? They’re researching your product through your website, Google, G2 reviews, or even communities like Reddit.

Focusing solely on sales enablement means you’re throwing all your resources at just a small slice of your buyer’s time with you. With revenue enablement, you can meet your buyer where they’re at, whether that’s on your website, consuming your content, or looking you up in communities.

2. Selling is consulting

With so much of the customer journey being a mission to get information — rather than sitting in a sales-led demo or getting a quote — organizations staying ahead of buying trends need to adjust their sales process to look more like consulting than traditional sales.

A salesperson might focus on knocking down objections, ensuring they’re speaking to decision-makers, and closing a deal. A consultant, on the other hand, collaborates with a buyer to help them investigate their own needs and find answers to their questions.

Because buyers can go out and find most of the information they need without your help, they have less patience for traditional sales tactics. A salesperson who approaches every interaction with a prospect as consulting rather than selling can make honest recommendations to meet a buyer’s needs.

Even with enterprise deals, a salesperson will guide prospects through testing, budgeting, and implementing a solution.

3. The sale doesn’t end at closed-won

Sales enablement ends after the sale, with new customers being handed off to Customer Success for ongoing support. This disjointed approach can increase churn and lead to lower revenue across the board. This is especially the case with products that rely heavily on upgrades and upselling to generate revenue.

Revenue enablement brings Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success together to support customers with resources, content, and adequate support at every stage of their journey. When customers are constantly making up their minds about whether your product fits their needs or not — and can cancel as soon as it doesn’t — revenue enablement is essential.

Why is revenue enablement so hard?

Most leaders will agree that prospects and customers should get exactly what they need when they need it — and that this will lead to greater revenue. What they don’t always agree on? How much resources should be put into a revenue enablement strategy or whose responsibility it is.

Revenue enablement’s purpose is clear, but it also brings significant challenges. Here are some of them.

Few tools can support it

Revenue teams typically rely on a massive tool stack to manage everything from resting content to handling tickets and overseeing their sales pipeline. As organizations scale, it becomes increasingly difficult to enable each team with the exact information they need. Here’s why:

• Sharing up-to-date product information is difficult. Each team might have its own wiki, and it’s rare that someone is dedicated to keeping all that information up to date everywhere. That can mean salespeople make promises their product can’t keep, marketers build campaigns on outdated features, and Customer Success is left holding the bag.
• Finding content is hard. More than half of marketing content goes unused, and it’s not because no one wants to use it. Marketing content can be hosted across multiple platforms, from a CMS (content management system) to a CRM (customer relationship management).
• Sharing customer information is challenging. Digging through email and CRM notes rarely leads to timely action, especially if a primary point of contact has left the company.
• Meeting deadlines becomes a race. Without the right resources, revenue teams might have to engage in the same back-and-forth over and over again to get what they need to close a deal, build a campaign, or save a churning customer.
• Consistency suffers. How do you know if your pricing information is up to date if it’s just one of four copies across multiple platforms?

Too often, knowledge is trapped in dedicated tools, with outdated copies being shipped to other tools. That makes revenue enablement challenging.

Collaboration tools aren’t client-first

Customer-facing teams looking to drive sales and manage conversations with customers rarely use tools that have evolved to match the way B2B buyers engage with their organization. From the customer-side, that makes their journey a patchwork of emails, support tickets, and chatbots. It hardly makes for a uniform experience.

This isn’t just an issue for the customer, it creates problems for your revenue teams, too. Most organizations use their project management tools (like Asana or Trello) to manage external collaboration with customers, which can lead to confusion, misunderstandings, or worse, a security breach.

Other essential customer-facing functions, from mutual action plans or customer onboarding portals, might be jerry-rigged in Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets, and similar tools. Not only are these a ton of work to build and maintain, they’re prone to failure and can’t support most of your initiatives.

Revenue leaders don’t have the visibility they need

Having a sprawling tech stack rather than a single tool for your revenue enablement strategy means leaders lose visibility as information moves between tools — or falls in the cracks between them. When having that on hand can make the difference between a closed deal and a lost one, or a churned customer and a loyal one, the stakes are high!

Too many leaders struggle to get the answers they need when they need them, instead having to scan through multiple email inboxes, a cluttered Google Drive, incomplete meeting notes, and other internal tools.

Because Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success typically each work in their own tools, it’s hard enough for their leaders to get the information from the tools their teams use — let alone those that other teams rely on.

Revenue enablement best practices

Interested in expanding to revenue enablement’s more collaborative, holistic paradigm?

These best practices will set you up for success.

1. A centralized RevOps team

Revenue enablement comes with a ton of moving parts. To implement it successfully, a single revenue enablement team must own it — the RevOps team.

This team is behind making sure your CRM serves every team involved in the customer journey, no matter what their needs are. They can help customer-facing teams turn a massive cloud of customer data into insights used to build better campaigns, close more deals, and save more customers.

2. Get your teams in the same tools

When Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams are scattered across multiple tools, it’s more difficult to work toward a common goal. 

The Sales team might work in the CRM platform, while marketers hop between marketing automation tools, project management platforms, and more. Customer success teams, on their end, spend most of their time in a ticketing tool. To stay up to date, people need to hop back and forth between tools — which can be a full-time job by itself.

A serious revenue enablement strategy often involves using a single tool to bring together all business functions involved, especially if that tool is a dedicated revenue enablement platform.

3. Get rid of handoffs

Nothing is a better representation of the silos Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success work in than the handoff.

You’ve probably seen it happen countless times. Marketing brings in a lead that gets handed off to Sales. Sales turns that lead into a customer, and they get handed off to Customer Success. From there, Customer Success is responsible for essentially everything that happens with this customer. Ownership begins and ends with the handoff.

Does this work? Sometimes — at least, at first glance. Many organizations hand off leads and customers with little issue. But over time, there are many ways these handoffs can hold back revenue and create opportunity cost. 

For example:

• Marketing overpromises in their content, meaning Sales has to field tougher questions.
• Sales accidentally misrepresents the level of support potential customers can expect, leading to frustration when customer success reps take them on.
• Increased churn because Sales and Marketing didn’t inform prospects about the product’s best use cases and limitations.

This is where a centralized information hub, like a Dock workspace, can work wonders. Instead of patching together files and features from multiple tools, you can create a single customer-facing dashboard that answers all their needs — while being adapted to how the buyer journey has evolved.

4. Collaborate on renewals and retention

Revenue enablement isn’t just about bringing in new business; it’s about doing more with the business you’ve already got.

When reducing customer churn is the sole responsibility of the Customer Success team, their ability to drive change is limited. If you give Sales and Marketing a stake in keeping customers satisfied, they’ll have retention as a goal in mind from their first point of contact. Customers will come to the product with clearer expectations and fewer questions and be better equipped to succeed

Collaboration in customer renewals can include:

• Streamlining the journey between Sales and Customer Success.
• Improving implementation plans with input from Customer Success.
• Proactively identify at-risk customers.
• Reducing customer friction at every stage of their journey.

Whether it’s renewals, bringing leaders together, or getting rid of handoffs, you need a single tool. A tool like Dock.

Dock: A dedicated revenue enablement tool

Dock is the first revenue enablement platform with collaboration at its core. We saw the modern buyer journey changing — and built the new kind of tool it calls for.

Dock facilitates two different kinds of revenue collaboration:

• Collaboration between revenue teams: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Operations work together through customer workspaces, a centralized content management system
• Collaboration with customers: Revenue teams can work with buyers and customers within Workspaces to drive better outcomes.

Dock's revenue enablement platform is currently made up of four products:

1. Workspaces to collaborate with buyers and customers
2. Content Management to manage and track customer-facing content
3. Quotes & Order Forms to close deals faster 
4. Security Profiles to streamline security reviews

Like a CRM, we store customer data. But we’re also a system for organizing all your customer-facing interactions. 

That’s what we’re building at Dock — a platform to manage the customer lifecycle, centralized so leadership teams get the visibility they need into what’s actually happening in their customer relationships.

Within Dock, revenue teams can get everything they need to drive customer action — whether that’s watching a demo video, completing a security review, generating a contract, or building a custom onboarding flow.

It’s time to ditch the internal productivity tools and endless email threads. Dock is the equivalent of a customer-facing CRM — a dedicated revenue enablement methodology for managing everything that gets shared with the customer.

Dock is free to try. You can talk to our sales team or get started here.