When sales enablement came onto the scene in the 2000s, it promised a bright future of aligning sales and marketing teams to improve the customer experience.

This promise followed through, giving sales and marketing leaders everywhere a look into their customer data and how customers were engaging with their product as well as highlighting what processes were and weren’t working. However, as sales enablement continues to evolve and remains an essential part of improving the buyer experience, some professionals believe a “zoom out” is needed.

The modern buyer experience involves more touchpoints than just sales and marketing, which is why some companies are adopting the term “revenue enablement” instead of “sales enablement.” Let’s take a closer look.

What Is Revenue Enablement?

Revenue enablement is the process by which an organization most efficiently acquires and maintains customers, maximizing revenue gained through each stage of the customer journey.

Enablement professionals predict that revenue enablement will be a bigger focus and investment for many organizations in the coming years. This is because more roles are involved in the buyer experience, including teams such as customer success and sales engineering.

To fully understand why companies are beginning to adopt the term “revenue enablement” in place of “sales enablement,” we must compare and contrast the two.

Sales Enablement Versus Revenue Enablement

Sales enablement is the strategic and continual process of equipping sales teams with the coaching, training, and content they need to efficiently engage buyers. As its name suggests, it supports the sales team.

Sales enablement has become a pillar in companies across the world because it assists with some of the industry’s biggest problems: maintaining high customer retention and increasing sales numbers every fiscal year. Both are becoming increasingly difficult. However, along with its widespread adoption, sales enablement has expanded to include voices outside of the original sales and marketing structure. This is where revenue enablement comes into play.

In 2019, Gartner research reported that the B2B buying process is nonlinear and has increased in complexity. An average buying team consists of seven to 13 active participants, depending on deal size, plus additional occasional stakeholders.

This research demonstrates why so many companies gravitate toward revenue enablement. The term encourages teams across the entire organization to assist buyers through the funnel and out the other side as satisfied customers—not just marketing and sales teams.

Revenue enablement is customer-focused and allows the organization to affect the buyer journey, making it a more well-rounded function.

Revenue Enablement Is the Future

Revenue enablement is quickly becoming a hot topic, and many see why it’s getting so much attention. Sales enablement focuses on efficiently coaching and training sales reps and creating content that provides value to the buyer. These factors are still crucial to the improvement of the buyer experience, but solely focusing on them may be limiting enablement as we know it.

For example, customer support is a team that directly affects the buyer experience. However, the team is typically less known for generating company revenue and more often credited with maintaining high customer retention and satisfaction. But isn’t this just as important as the content your marketing team is creating?

There is so much more to the revenue generation pie than just two functions. Revenue enablement gives your company a greater opportunity to wow the buyer and turn them into a repeat customer. Sales enablement was the jumping-off point for elevating your sales team. Revenue enablement gives each team across the company the opportunity to support the buyer from all angles.

Look Forward

The future is bright for revenue enablement. It’s still in its infancy. Even sales enablement, which has been around for a while, is still maturing and expanding. The enablement industry continues to work to align team goals, train reps, and provide customers with relevant content.

Every day we learn something new about building a great customer experience. If you want to elevate engagement and create more productive sellers, get in touch with Showpad to see how we’re driving better buying experiences.