Mastering the Modern Revenue Strategy In Today’s Changing Landscape

To move the needle in business nowadays requires efficiency to drive consistent revenue growth. Changes within the marketplace are often moving at such a fast pace that the teams responsible for driving revenue may feel a sense of fatigue or confusion on how to stay competitive and optimize value for the business. Whether through diversifying service offerings, developing new partnerships, or entering a new market, the modern revenue strategy is constantly evolving.

The direct connection between enablement teams and revenue strategy provides an opportunity to collaborate with sales leaders and provide crucial resources and tools to help teams modernize their approach to the rapidly progressive marketplace.

Here are four key approaches for how sales enablement can navigate the evolving business landscape to impact a company’s revenue strategies and drive growth.

Drive Consistent Messaging to Build Alignment Across the Organization

Consistency is vital when it comes to messaging. Everyone suffers when teams are confused about where to find the most up-to-date information or the purpose behind the resources they’re being asked to use. Repetition can help bring strategy to life and encourage people to learn with messaging that is engaging, relevant, and easy to find.

“If you achieve a consistent approach, you have a much better prospect around achieving the kind of goals you want,” said Peter Armaly, senior director of customer success enablement at Oracle.

Aligning on a consistent approach that matches the needs of teams will help revenue leaders achieve their own goals and allow the enablement team to predict a better winning strategy. This approach avoids changing the way things are done simply for the sake of change.

“If you’re going to achieve your revenue strategy, it’s got to be frequently articulated by your most senior people,” said Armaly. “And it has to be really assimilated and understood all the way through the organization.”

To set the tone and create alignment on priorities, leadership teams should be guiding those discussions with insights and solutions that will benefit the groups ultimately responsible for executing the priorities established. This also means being open to constructive feedback and using specific measures such as insights from customers or data from analysts to help guide the overall message of the strategy. This will help ground the core messaging of the strategy in a way that is effective for all teams.

“About a year ago, we started a big reorganization of our team to separate the responsibilities of commercial and adoption,” said Renée Osgood, head of customer success enablement at Ceros. “We knew that we would need to drive home this one team mentality and allow people to truly understand and appreciate everyone’s new way of working and where they were really going to fit in within the success of our customers as well as the business.”

Equip Teams With Effective Training to Enhance Flexibility

As part of enablement’s investment in the overall revenue strategy, ensuring that teams are equipped with the skills they need to be successful is also of paramount importance. One of the greatest assets a sales team can have are communicators comfortable and adept at speaking to the ins and outs of the product while also listening intently to a customer’s needs. This critical skill became especially true during all of the transitions in work environments over the past two years.

“We had to take an existing skillset for our field teams, which was occasional virtual engagements with customers, and transform that into always virtual engagements,” said Ray Schloss, worldwide technical sales enablement & community director, Dynamics at Microsoft. “You have to make sure that you are giving people the right resources they need to achieve their revenue goals.”

Enablement teams invest significant resources into training that helps reps understand and align on key messaging, deepen understanding of a product or service and its value proposition, and build confidence for customer interactions. As a foundational component of rep success, training is a necessity for teams to be agile and flexible while incorporating knowledge at the right moment throughout the customer’s journey.

“There’s all this constant need for pushing the information to the front, that this is the revenue strategy, this is how we’re measuring it, this is why we segment our customers and why we put in a certain amount of effort in this segment versus that segment,” said Armaly. “Everyone has clarity on the why, and the purpose of it ultimately is to drive success for our customers.”

Sales enablement teams are responsible for delivering the tools necessary for success. They can increase success by engaging with sales teams early in the training process to identify issues, gauge feedback, or make adjustments as essential in honing knowledge and gaining new skills.

Maintain a Consultative and Personalized Approach in Times of Change

In transitional times, resources may change and expose the need to pivot quickly to meet the evolving market’s needs. By taking a more thoughtful, personalized approach in buyer conversations, reps can better articulate value to help maintain and grow buyer engagement throughout the entire customer journey.

“We want to retain our customers and grow them,” said Armaly. “It’s that second part that is actually a taller order, of course, because that challenges people to get to know their accounts and drive them towards success and be able to have the conversation to what next.”

Even with the rapid scaling of automation among teams from marketing to sales and beyond, organizations can benefit by emphasizing the importance of upholding the personal touchpoints in the customer experience that make all the difference in conversion and retention.

This all comes back to the foundational importance of communicating the business value while also speaking a customer’s language. Organizations can speak to the technical aspects of the value proposition but should also understand the needs of the customer to help transform their business.

“Continuing to come back to that message of business value, understanding the customer’s needs, and making sure it’s aligned to their industry is not new,” said Schloss, “But it’s making sure that it’s correctly emphasized and our teams are enabled to have those conversations.”

Listen to Customer-Facing Teams

The reps out in the field and on the frontlines talking to customers will understand the challenges and opportunities that leaders and the executive team may not be privy to. The insights gained from understanding revenue teams’ feedback are invaluable when implementing a new approach to the revenue strategy.

“These people that are actually speaking to customers and living the life have great value, and their input is really important,” said Schloss. “When you’re designing programs at a corporate level to try to help implement a company-wide methodology, make sure you’re taking the voice of the field into consideration.”

Consistently taking in feedback from customer-facing teams can help ensure that reps have the resources they need to achieve their goals, that the revenue strategy is landing with buyers, and that gaps in the process are uncovered early so that they can be filled with enablement support. By listening to the needs of teams across the revenue organization, enablement can help streamline the customer experience.

​”When thinking about enablement, really think beyond your sales team and think about how do you appropriately enable all of the different teams and individuals that are part of that customer journey,” said Osgood. “Whether it’s customer support, professional services, customer success, it’s all these teams working together and supporting sales that drive those outcomes, drive retention as well as revenue.”

Businesses across industries are accelerating at a clip that requires enablement professionals and revenue leaders to be nimble, especially when a shift in overall revenue strategy causes those changes. Enablement teams can create an environment where everyone can learn, adapt, and adopt new approaches to be the most successful in their conversations with customers, ultimately driving the most value for businesses.

4 Bookmarks

• 
• 
• 
•