How Revenue Alignment Extends the Concept of Sales Enablement

Revenue enablement extends the concept of sales enablement to the entire revenue engine.

This year’s SiriusDecisions Summit Europe 2019 was a fantastic conference that left attendees with much to consider as we look forward throughout the next couple of years. The theme – “TOGETHER: Achieving High Performance by Aligning the B-to-B Revenue Engine” – underscored revenue alignment and customer-centricity.

Revenue Alignment Takes Shape in the Sales Enablement Industry

SiriusDecisions stated that revenue aligned organizations bring together revenue enablement and revenue Operations as peer-level functions to create high-performance B2B revenue engines. They define revenue enablement as:

Revenue alignment places the customer at the center of business success. It puts a premium on creating measurable outcomes, delivering solutions that customers will adopt, and upon a high degree of collaboration between customer-facing teams using sales enablement principles.

Revenue enablement extends the concept of sales enablement to the entire revenue engine. It takes a customer-centric approach and aligns these functions across the buyer journey.

By bringing all teams in the revenue engine together, organizations can create tighter alignment via:

• Shared goals
• Shared metrics and KPIs
• Shared resources to deliver the necessary content, training, and coaching support
• Enabling professionals and SMEs in the marketing, sales, and customer success areas to support their areas of expertise in an integrated manner

Sales Enablement focuses on delivering content, training, and coaching to the sales teams. Revenue Enablement takes these same practices, layering a process-focused, data-driven set of methods on top.

Revenue Operations brings this same cross-functional approach to operations while uniting sales, and marketing operations and creating customer care operations where required.

The important thing for individuals and businesses to consider is that revenue alignment is a result of research SiriusDecisions has performed with real companies, not the result of theories born out of nowhere. The top-performing companies are already utilizing these approaches, and it is time for the rest of the business world to begin doing the same.

Remember your Existing Customers

Another area of focus at the event was the importance of delivering value to your existing customer base. Too often, the enablement and operations functions focus more energy on acquiring customers, than on their existing customers.

High-performing organizations are twice as likely to report a significantly greater investment in customer success, and high-performing organizations are three times as likely to report a significantly greater investment in customer marketing. The best businesses in the world are delivering exceptional value and great content to their customers, making sure their customers always succeed. They also help their customers understand the other ways they can help these customers solve different business challenges.

Revenue alignment covers the journey from the beginning of problem understanding through their lifetime with your business. The SiriusDecisions Summit Europe 2019 reinforces the importance of this approach to business while making it clear that the best companies in the world are already doing this intuitively.

While it is not critical for businesses to immediately jump on board with the entire revenue alignment movement. However, if organizations want to improve business outcomes, they should begin experimenting with these concepts sooner than later.