Start, Stop, Keep: Future-Proofing Your Revenue Enablement Strategy

Organizations with sales enablement programs for over two years are 48 percent more likely to experience high buyer engagement and have seven-point higher win rates. So, it’s no surprise that revenue enablement remains a top priority. However, the best practices for revenue enablement continue to evolve.

As you look at your ongoing enablement efforts, what should you keep, and what should you change—or stop doing entirely?

We gathered insights from organization leaders to share changes and trends in revenue enablement to keep an eye on.

Start: Taking advantage of new technologies and advanced analytics

The more you know, the more effectively you can use revenue enablement practices to improve your company’s sales process. 

Many organizations are using new technologies, including AI, to better understand the customer journey and customer behavior, measure the results of experiments with sales processes and materials, and make informed decisions about how to move forward.

Of course, that means data literacy is a new must-have skill for enablement professionals and sales reps. Research shows that 75 percent of organizations plan to incorporate AI-guided selling by 2025. 

The trick will be balancing data insights with human intuition to ensure each customer receives customized care.

“I think that we’re only going to continue to mature the conversational intelligence strategies when it comes to understanding the behaviors of our field,” Whitney Sieck, The Enablement Enthusiast, says. “An example that comes to mind is having enablement being able to provide data-driven feedback to understand and share what’s happening.”

Read more: Data-Driven Sales Enablement

Stop: using one-size-fits-all training materials

Prebuilt content can be a great starting point for your sales training, but you can’t stop there. 

Customizing your training to match sales reps’ needs, learning styles, the customer journey, and the sales process is essential.

It’s vital to customize your training content to meet learners’ needs. For example, you can use multiple types of content in your training, including videos, quizzes, and infographics. This helps you appeal to a wide variety of learning styles. 

Read more: eLearning Content: 24 Types to Include in Training

“Stop: Using static, cookie-cutter training materials, presentations, and sales resources. These fail to cater to the diverse needs and strengths of their sales teams. Instead, adopting a customized approach that addresses specific skill gaps and aligns with individual goals will not only drive engagement but also enhance overall sales performance.” 

 

— Diana Stepanova, Operations Director, Monitask

Read more: 13 Types of Sales Enablement Content Your Team Needs

Keep: a culture of continuous learning

The market is constantly changing, and to keep up, it’s essential to have a culture of continuous learning. 

The skills needed for today’s jobs have changed by 25 percent since 2015, and that percentage is expected to double by 2027, according to the 2023 Workplace Learning Report by LinkedIn. 

Both L&D and sales enablement need to continue to embrace a culture of learning, upskilling, and growth so that organizations can keep up with the rapid pace of change. 

When today’s sales reps are equipped with the necessary skills, they can better meet customers’ needs and help them make the decision to buy.

“Investing in education modules, virtual instructor-led courses, mentoring programs, etc., ensures that reps have access to the latest tools and techniques available while developing robust problem-solving skills along the way.” 

—Anthony Buzzetta, Founder and CEO, G TIER 

Start: customer-focused revenue enablement

For some organizations, this is a “Keep” rather than a “Start,” but if your organization doesn’t currently focus sales around the customer experience, it’s definitely time to do so.

“It’s easier to maintain current customers than to grow the customer base,” Whitney says. “So shifting that focus to the customer and enhancing the methodology–bringing that all the way through the whole buyer journey–is going to be critical.”

Customer-focused revenue enablement includes:

• Tailoring the sales process to the customer journey rather than trying to drag customers through the sales process
• Creating relevant and valuable sales materials that reps can easily personalize for each lead
• Aligning the goals of marketing, sales, and customer success so customers get a unified, high-quality experience throughout

These efforts will improve sales results and help increase customer engagement while reducing churn and overall frustration. 

“There has been a significant transition towards a more customer-centric approach. Companies are emphasizing providing personalized, relevant, and valuable content to their consumers. This can help develop customer trust and loyalty, resulting in increased sales. Companies that prioritize a customer-centric sales enablement strategy are three times more likely to surpass their revenue targets.” 

 

—Matthew Magnante, Content Strategist at FitnessVolt

Stop: multiplying tools

The tech landscape has been growing exponentially every year. If you want to do something, there’s a tool someone will be happy to sell you.

However, your sales reps are not looking for additional logins or switching platforms. Instead, focus on finding an all-in-one platform where you can centralize significant portions of your enablement training and tracking alongside other organizational training activities.

For example, the Learning Cloud from WorkRamp lets you use a single platform for new hire training, sales enablement, employee learning and development, customer education, and more. There’s no need to multiply tools—instead, centralize your work with all-in-one tools that are easy to use and have a measurable impact on improving sales results.

“I discovered WorkRamp when our Sales Enablement team adopted it as the platform for internal training. We quickly realized how beneficial it would be to have one product content library—a singular source of truth for all things Quantum Metric. Having all learning information for internal and external stakeholders in one place makes sense—not only from an investment standpoint, but also from a knowledge-sharing standpoint.” 

 

—Chauncy Cay Ford, Director of Enablement, Quantum Metric

Keep: emphasizing alignment between sales and marketing

Sales and marketing misalignment results in business losses of $1 trillion each year due to wasted efforts and lower productivity, while sales and marketing alignment can increase closed deals by 67 percent. 

Enablement teams have been working to increase collaboration between sales and marketing for quite some time, and this should continue. 

This means creating unified messaging around the product or service for both departments, sharing customer journey insights with both teams and working with company leaders to create goals that aren’t at odds with each other. 

Sales and marketing alignment delivers a far better customer experience, shorter sales cycles, and better conversion rates. 

It’s challenging to get (and keep) everyone on the same page, but it’s well worth the effort.

“Sales enablement professionals should continue fostering cross-functional collaboration within their organizations. Also, continuing to invest in professional development and coaching for sales teams is essential to maintaining a high level of performance.”

—Ryan Mckenzie, Co-Founder & CMO of Tru Earth®

Keep: Proving the value of enablement efforts

Demonstrating the ROI of your initiatives and programs is vital for every team, not just enablement.

But as the market shifts and teams look to maximize efficiency and productivity, proving value is more important than ever. 

Seema Jain, AVP of Revenue Effectiveness at Mural, shares three enablement strategies she thinks will and should continue.

• Prioritizing and personalizing the customer journey. Understanding customers’ needs and differentiating the sales process through collaboration and content curation
• Curating the rep journey. Doing in-depth assessments against performance results, core competencies, and skills matrices to identify gaps that need to be addressed
• Demonstrating value by providing solutions that meet objectives and deliver meaningful outcomes. “The bottom line,” she says, “is that connecting technology solutions to business value and ROI is a trend that will never go out of fashion.” 

Measuring the right metrics is key to understanding the effectiveness of your enablement program. 

Some commonly-tracked metrics include:

• Onboarding time
• Sales enablement tool usage rate
• Lead-to-customer conversion rate
• Sales cycle length

However, the most important metrics to measure are those that tie back to your organization’s business goals and show the effectiveness and value of your enablement initiatives. 

Read more: 8 Steps to Build Your Sales Enablement Strategy

Maximize revenue enablement with the Learning Cloud

As you consider what your enablement team should start, stop, and keep doing, ensure you have the right foundation to empower your team to maximize results.

A solid foundation and the right tools make sales enablement easier—creating engaging training, increasing learner participation, tracking training results and sales metric improvements, and more. 

The Learning Cloud from WorkRamp is an all-in-one platform for your employee and customer learning needs. Supercharge your sales enablement team with customized training and a learning center of excellence.

Contact us to learn more about the Learning Cloud and to schedule a free, personalized demo.