The days of buyers relying on sales reps for product information are long gone. Buyers are savvier than ever and have shifted to digital channels to research solutions. In fact, TrustRadius’ 2022 report, B2B Buying Disconnect: The Age of the Self-Serve Buyer, revealed that virtually 100% of buyers want to self-serve all or part of the buying journey.

Because of that shift, traditional enablement no longer works. Enablement functions that focus only on sellers are missing a massive opportunity. Leading-edge companies recognize this and are adopting revenue enablement.

Revenue enablement encompasses everyone involved in the buying cycle. This includes sellers, marketers, enablement, frontline sales managers, pre-sales, and customer success. All of these functions are involved in revenue-generating activities and are within the scope of revenue enablement.

For revenue enablement to work, though, teams must be aligned and work together. But they can’t do it on their own. Someone must orchestrate the process and help people “accelerate speed to revenue,” said Roderick Jefferson, CEO and Fractional Sales Enablement Leader at Roderick Jefferson & Associates.

By accelerating speed to revenue, companies can achieve several benefits, including:

Faster time to market: By reducing the time it takes to launch a product or service, a company can gain a competitive advantage and capture market opportunities more quickly.

Increased cash flow: Generating revenue at a faster pace leads to a more consistent cash flow, allowing the company to reinvest in growth initiatives, cover expenses, and improve financial stability.

Enhanced customer satisfaction: Delivering products or services to customers promptly can lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction, as they receive value sooner and experience less waiting time.

Improved agility and adaptability: A focus on accelerating revenue can foster a culture of agility within an organization, encouraging faster decision-making, innovation, and responsiveness to market changes.

To achieve those things, enablement leaders must become the “orchestra masters” that connect all the lines of business and ensure everyone is on the same page and working toward the same goals.

“The orchestra master has ownership and accountability for various pieces—whether it be marketing, product marketing, HR, engineering, etc.”

— Rodderick Jefferson, CEO and Fractional Sales Enablement Leader, Roderick Jefferson & Associates

“Most importantly, the orchestra master has ownership and accountability for various pieces—whether it be marketing, product marketing, HR, engineering, etc. Think of an orchestra. You’ve got strings, woodwinds, percussion, and they all have to play the same piece, the same song,” Jefferson said during an EnableMinute episode.

“The same applies to marketing, product marketing, HR, etc. They aren’t aligned. There has to be that one orchestra master that taps the stand and says, “OK, let’s start the music. And let’s take all that noise and chaos and turn that into a beautiful sheet of music,’” he said.

5 Steps to Orchestrate Revenue Success

Orchestrating all the players involved in revenue enablement may sound like a huge job. But if you break it down into steps, it is manageable.

Step 1: Create a Plan

Revenue enablement is more than enabling internal teams. You want to create a consistent buyer experience across all your teams and ensure everyone is aligned on the process and understands the messaging related to your solutions.

The goal is to improve workflows across all customer-facing touchpoints, which includes functions such as sales, marketing, customer success, and support.

That being the case, you need a clear plan for enabling revenue across all those touchpoints. Start by answering these questions:

• What teams need to be supported?
• Who are the key stakeholders in each team?
• What are the key revenue enablement goals?
• How will you measure revenue enablement efforts?
• What are your key performance indicators (KPIs) as they apply to your overall go-to-market (GTM) strategy and goals?

Once you have those answers, develop your revenue enablement mission and vision.

Step 2: Design the Revenue Enablement Process

Now that you have your revenue enablement mission, vision, and goals, it’s time to design your revenue enablement process. Work with the appropriate teams and stakeholders to develop each part of the process. An example revenue enablement process may look like this:

• Understand the buyer journey and map the touchpoints.
• Design inbound and outbound programs, including KPIs to measure.
• Design the sales process. Make it very clear when each participant joins and hands off to the next, and describe what each stage looks like and the resources needed. Questions to answer include: What stage does the SDR come in? What content or resources does the SDR need? What is the SDR’s goal? When does the SDR hand the buyer over to the AE? When does customer success join the process?
• Map the right content to the right programs and different stages of the buying journey. Identify content gaps.
• Ensure you have a sales content management system that is easy to use, searchable, and accessible whenever and wherever your sellers need it.

Step 3: Create Playbooks for Your Go-to-Market (GTM) Teams

You likely have a sales playbook, but what about playbooks for all your GTM teams? It is important that each team has a document or resource that outlines the strategies, processes, best practices, and guidelines to follow.

Sales Team Playbook: Your sales team playbook should have sections for each person on the sales team: sales leaders, sales managers, AEs, and SDRs. It should include a detailed process of the buying process, target customer profiles, sales messaging and value proposition, sale scripts, sales collateral, sale metrics and KPIs, details about sales training, overview of sales tools used, and best practices for sales team collaboration.

Marketing Team Playbook: The marketing team playbook serves as a reference and guide for the marketing team to ensure consistent branding, messaging, and effective execution of marketing strategies. Items to include in the playbook include marketing goals and objectives, target audience and buyer personas, brand guidelines, messaging and value proposition, content strategy, marketing channels and tactics, overview of marketing technology, key marketing metrics and KPIs, social media guidelines, and event marketing guidelines.

Product Team Playbook: The product team playbook helps align the team, provides clarity on processes, and fosters collaboration and innovation. Items to include in the playbook include a clear and concise description of the product vision, the product development process, guidelines for conducting user research and usability testing, a product roadmap, product requirements and specs, user experience design guidelines, product launch and rollout guidelines, product analytics and metrics, product documentation and training materials, guidelines for handling user support requests and feedback, and recommendations for continuous improvement.

Customer Success Team Playbook: A customer success team playbook helps ensure consistent and effective customer engagement, retention, and expansion. Items to include in the playbook include the mission and objectives of the team, the customer onboarding process, a framework for building and maintaining strong customer relationships, metrics and indicators that determine the health and success of customers, best practices for pro-actively engaging with customers, and customer advocacy and referral programs.

Channel Team Playbook: The channel team playbook is a guide for the channel team to ensure consistent channel management, collaboration, and sales growth through indirect sales channels. Items to include in it include channel strategy, criteria, and processes for selecting a channel partner, guidelines for enabling channel partners to effectively sell your solution, channel sales process, marketing support for channel partners, and channel performance metrics.

Step 4: Take a Comprehensive Approach to your Enablement Tech Stack

State-of-the-art, sales enablement tools help sales teams streamline sales processes, improve productivity, and increase revenue. Meanwhile, marketing, customer success, and product teams need their own tools to facilitate their processes.

The problem is as the number of tools has proliferated, so have the challenges. Research shows that using multiple tools increases costs, creates confusion, reduces productivity, and increases security concerns. In fact, 76% of companies say poor adoption of sales tools is the top reason why teams miss their sales quotas, according to Allego’s research.

With that in mind, you want to consolidate your tech stack as much as possible and adopt a modern revenue enablement platform. Modern revenue enablement platforms allow you to curate your content, ready your sales teams, and engage your buyers. Specifically, they support five key business processes:

• Content and messaging: Equips sellers with relevant content that’s easy to find in the moment of need, allows marketers to provide contextual guidance on how to use content most effectively, and ensures everyone in the company has the right messaging.
• Coaching and collaboration: Improves business outcomes by creating a culture of coaching and experiential learning. Allows sellers to collaborate and share best practices.
• Onboarding and training: Puts sales reps at the center of their training and supports them the way they want to learn.
• Virtual selling: Reduces deal cycles by up to 50% and increases engagement with buyers by building strong rapport with video, guiding sellers to use the right content, and increasing buyer engagement with Digital Sales Rooms.
• Product launches and rollouts: Sellers get content, virtual training, AI-spaced reinforcement, and ongoing field updates to accelerate launch success

With a holistic revenue enablement platform, you increase employee productivity, improve collaboration among teams, better prepare your sellers to meet today’s buyers’ needs, and reduce software and maintenance costs.

“Revenue enablement tools are going to differentiate the good sales teams from great sales teams,” Allego CRO Erik Fowler said. “You’re not going to be able to compete if you don’t have these types of tools.”

Step 5: Ensure Revenue Teams Are Aligned, Measure Outcomes

It is crucial for your GTM teams to be aligned because their collective efforts have a significant impact on the overall success of your product or service in the market. When your teams are aligned, you will have consistent messaging across all teams, be able to allocate resources more effectively, provide a seamless buyer experience, improve lead generation and conversion, improve cross-functional collaboration, be agile and able to quickly adjust to market trends, customer feedback, and competitive challenges.

Here are some tactics to help you align your GTM teams:

Establish Clear Goals and Foster Open Communication: Define clear and measurable goals for the organization. These goals should be aligned with overall business objectives and communicated to all GTM teams. When everyone understands the shared vision and purpose, they can work towards achieving the same outcomes.

Develop a Shared GTM Strategy: Work together to develop a comprehensive go-to-market strategy that integrates the efforts of marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams. Collaboratively outline the target market, buyer personas, value proposition, messaging, and channels to reach the target audience effectively.

Drive Alignment Through Knowledge Sharing: Teaching is the highest form of learning. That being said, encourage sales reps to share advice, win stories, best practices, resources, and more. Doing so reinforces learning, helps junior sellers replicate A-player behavior, and is cost effective.

Use a Single Source of Truth: Establish a central repository or platform where all GTM teams can access the latest information, data, and resources. This “single source of truth” ensures that everyone is working with consistent and up-to-date information, avoiding misunderstandings or conflicting messages.

Empower Cross-Functional Leaders: Designate cross-functional leaders who can champion GTM alignment and facilitate collaboration among teams. These leaders can help resolve conflicts, drive initiatives, and ensure that everyone is working towards shared objectives.

Conduct Regular Team Meetings: Schedule regular GTM team meetings to review progress, discuss challenges, and plan upcoming initiatives. Use these meetings to align on priorities, share updates, and ensure that all teams are on track.

Orchestration Key to Revenue Growth

As an enablement leader, you create value when you orchestrate all the people, processes, technologies, and budgets to achieve profitable growth. By working collaboratively, you’ll be able to prioritize initiatives, achieve alignment, and deliver on your company’s revenue enablement mission and vision. This is an opportunity for you to turn chaos into clarity and lead your organization to revenue success.

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