How to Drive Revenue Growth with Sales Enablement

Driving revenue growth is important at any time, but it’s especially essential during difficult economic times. Often, this means changing how your team approaches sales, how you conduct sales training, and how you interact with customers at every stage of the buying journey.

How do you strategize these changes and roll them out to your sales team with high buy-in? The most effective answer is to make the most of your sales enablement team. This group can lead the charge and create materials to support the new direction and train your team on fresh approaches.

Let’s dive into how your revenue enablement team can be the hub of your revenue growth, both in the current economic climate and in the future.

How sales enablement drives revenue

One of the reasons that sales enablement is often referred to as revenue enablement is because of the significant impact the department has on your bottom line. 

Aligns sales and marketing

One of the most challenging aspects of driving revenue is keeping your sales and marketing teams on the same page. Sometimes there’s a rivalry between the two, while other companies simply have miscommunication.

Your sales enablement team can ensure both teams are communicating the same message to prospects and customers regularly. This alignment makes a big difference: when Optimizely unified its messaging strategy, the company saw an increase in average contract values and its pipeline of enterprise clients.

Onboards and ramps new sales reps

This is one of the core mandates of the revenue enablement team. New hires are not normally seen as a major revenue driver, but the truth is that the faster they ramp up and start hitting goals, the more they improve your bottom line.

Revenue enablement teams create onboarding processes and measure their effectiveness to shorten ramp times and maximize revenue.

Gives the sales team the skills and assets they need to win deals

Training the sales team is the second core mandate of the sales enablement group. With the right tools, your revenue enablement unit can create engaging training, drive buy-in for new initiatives, and measure the effectiveness of training.

Maximizing your training and sales materials helps your sales reps make a huge difference in your revenue growth.

Continually measures and improves processes

Finally, the revenue enablement group stays on top of how well your sales processes and training are working and makes changes when necessary. By optimizing training, materials, and feedback, your sales enablement team ensures that every dollar you spend on training has a maximum impact on your bottom line.

How to drive revenue: develop a revenue growth strategy

It’s clear that your sales enablement team is central to revenue growth, but that doesn’t mean it happens automatically. Instead, your organization needs to create a revenue growth strategy to implement improvements over time.

Without a strategy, your company’s growth will be at the mercy of changing market conditions and consumer behavior. However, if you create a strategy to adjust to the environment and make it work for you, you can sidestep the challenges and instead grow your revenue consistently.

Measure the contributing departments

There are a lot of departments that have an impact on your overall revenue. For example, customer service has a major role in customer retention and repeat business. The pricing department needs to understand the market and price the product in a way that will entice the maximum number of customers. 

Marketing needs to bring attention to your brand and create leads, and sales need to close deals in a way that maximizes profit while also benefiting the customer. 

The first step to creating a successful revenue growth strategy is to understand how your inputs are doing and where pain points exist. Then, addressing those issues can be part of the strategy.

Set your revenue goals

Once you know where you’re starting, it’s time to start creating revenue goals. To do this effectively, you first need to understand what stage your company is in.

As a startup, you’ll be focused on creating clear processes, matching your products and services to the market, and improving the quality of your offerings. Your revenue growth goals may focus on maximizing your market share or growing your user base.

In the growth stage, a company is more established and may start hiring a larger team. This could be the point at which a business is acquired, or the founders may continue to run the business with a more defined management structure. At this stage, revenue growth focuses on maximizing the ROI of investment capital, achieving and maintaining profitability, and continuing to add new customers.

At the maturity stage, a business is well established and may not have the founding team involved in the day-to-day operations. This is when revenue becomes more predictable and your processes are well-defined. As a mature business, you’ll be looking to create steady year-over-year growth, build the percentage of revenue that comes from repeat purchases, and maximize the effectiveness of every department within the company.

Implement revenue growth strategies

Finally, it’s time to implement strategies that can help you reach your goals. Remember, your revenue enablement team is likely to be central to this implementation phase since their core work impacts all levels of the customer journey.

The first revenue growth strategy to concentrate on is using learning and development as a growth engine. When employees are engaged in training, your company will see significantly higher revenue and profit. Studies have shown that businesses that invest at least $1,500 per employee on training each year have 24% more profit than those that spend less. 

The more people learn and grow, the better they perform in their current jobs and the more impact they can make in your organization in the future.

Next, it’s essential to empower your team with the right tools. For example, an all-in-one learning platform gets rid of the need to manage multiple tools and make sure they work well together. 

When Peakon decided to launch their enablement team, they knew that having the right technology was vital. Using WorkRamp, they increased both company growth scores and employee engagement. 

As Celine Grey, the Sales Enablement global lead at Peakon noted, “An investment in our team is an investment in our customers. As we grow and transform as an organization, we want to ensure that our teams have all of the information and skills they need to be successful and grow with our company. With the insights we gather from our WorkRamp learning initiatives, we’re able to scale best practices throughout the sales organization, providing better professional development opportunities.”

Finally, you’ll need the sales enablement team to find new ways to reach customers and then educate your sales and marketing teams on how to improve their outreach. The revenue enablement unit is on the front line of noticing changes in customer behavior and adjusting outreach accordingly.

For example, during the pandemic, we saw the adoption of digital commerce accelerate dramatically in B2B industries. This turned out to be beneficial for both buyers and sellers as speed and efficiency increased. That doesn’t mean that human interaction isn’t valuable, however — McKinsey also found that over 70% of B2B decision-makers preferred remote human interaction over self-service. 

Understanding these trends can help your company continue to drive revenue growth even as the market shifts and decision-makers change their approach, budgets, and more.

Leverage sales enablement to drive revenue growth

As you can see, your sales enablement team is central to ensuring that your sales and marketing teams maximize revenue. 

When you take advantage of learning and development to create growth and use the best tools available, you’ll see significant increases in your revenue and profitability.

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