Why Enablement Is Important Across Everything In Your Business

Performance is key within your company, and as the person in charge, you likely want to do everything you can to make that performance as good as it can be. Enablement should play a major role in that effort, ensuring that your teams are always armed with the tools and collaborations they need to succeed. Done right, these efforts can lead to around an 8% increase in quarterly revenue for your sales teams alone. 

By gaining complete departmental oversight with the help of Simplified Revenue Operations, you can implement an inclusive, company-wide business enablement strategy with ease. But what exactly is enablement, and why does it matter? 

What is Enablement?

Put simply, business enablement is the process of enabling your teams to do their jobs by providing the necessary tools, resources, and connections.

Based on this definition, you might assume that enablement largely refers to training, but that’s only one part of the enablement framework. Think of it this way – training is for animals, whereas enablement is a multifaceted strategy of support and empowerment for your very human employees. Here, training should sit alongside focuses such as enablement technologies, enablement materials, and so on. 

You can split business enablement into two distinct categories, which include :

• Business enablement: Resources, tools, and strategies that enable your company to operate more efficiently business-wide in mind of goals like business growth and agility.

• Sales enablement: The tools, processes, and training used to further the goals of sales representatives, typically via marketing collaborations, such as specific sales accounts and figures, rather than company-wide improvements.

Sales enablement is perhaps more widely discussed, but companies are increasingly seeing the value of implementing business-wide enablement processes to drive continuous improvement and lasting results, as well as short-term sales goals. 

What Does Enablement Involve?

If enablement isn’t simply training, what does it involve? Ultimately, the ins and outs will vary depending on company requirements and capabilities. Hence why it can be so useful to develop an enablement strategy alongside company-specific insights like the ones you can get from our team. Business enablement best practice most commonly involves priorities such as :

• Technology: Technologies and systems like CRMs can significantly enhance business processes by simplifying communication and account access, as well as measuring enablement markers like revenue acquisition to ensure returns. 

• Training: As well as specific departmental training, enablement should include training for specifically enablement-based priorities like communication and collaboration, as well as management or teamwork. 

• Collaboration: Simplifying cross-departmental collaboration between, say, sales and marketing teams. Collaboration tools are crucial for this, as are cross-department meetings that keep everyone talking the same language, and the communication training already mentioned. 

• Oversight and Optimisation: You can’t enable your teams without knowing their needs. Business enablement is reliant on your ability to identify things like performance bottlenecks or department silos and determine the improvements (and enablements) necessary to overcome them.

Why Does Enablement Matter? 

The better you understand how to help your teams thrive with the right enablement focuses, the more you can enjoy benefits that include :

• Increased employee retention
• Increased profits
• Streamlined processes
• Usable data-driven insights
• Increased productivity
• Competitive Advantage
• And more

Enablement is especially useful for driving success when applied company-wide, as it ensures that every department within your business has the support and empowerment necessary to thrive, work together, and achieve better results overall.

What’s Wrong With Your Enablement Strategy?

The value of business enablement is plain for all to see, but it isn’t enough to simply apply an ill-planned enablement strategy and expect results. Poorly laid enablement strategies can do more damage than good, impacting everything from your sales capabilities to your onboarding success. This is a significant problem considering that 94% of sales leaders report that onboarding is vital to employee enablement in the first place. After all, without sufficient expertise, your teams will act at a lower capacity regardless of those shiny enablement tools.

But what can go wrong with your enablement strategy? A few things could be holding you back, including :

• Failing to implement enablement company-wide: To be effective, enablement needs to be a company-wide focus that ensures truly seamless operations and drives lasting results. If you’re only enabling certain departments like your sales team, the money you spend will go to waste when your products and inner-operations continue to fall below par. 

• Disconnected enablement strategies: Enablement strategies should be well-planned and seamlessly aligned across your company. Disconnected departmental strategies are ineffective, and can confuse the processes you’re aiming to simplify through the use of different technologies, disparate data sets, or varied overall goals.

• Depending too much on technology: The right technology is key for enablement in a modern age, ensuring data collection, seamless communications, and easier account handling. Still, if you rely too heavily on technological enablement, you’re open to complete breakdowns during tech setbacks, which could lead to employees who are even less able to do their jobs than before. 

How Can Simplified Revenue Operations Enable Your Enablement Strategy?

Enablement happens to some degree across every one of our offerings here at Simplified Revenue Operations, meaning that we can help you easily ensure company-wide enablement with measurable results. 

Just a few of the ways we’ll enable your enablement strategy include :

• Providing the right data: We help you to make sense of your data company-wide, ensuring that you recognise key areas where enablement is necessary. Ensuring data enablement across your teams also means that they can work effectively based on facts, rather than guesswork.

• Measuring your metrics: Measuring the outcomes of your enablement focuses is invaluable for motivation and onboarding, ensuring employees are always aware of the help in place, and its overall value. 

• Forecasting for full enablement: Enablement requires you to foresee what your teams will need in future, as well as providing the right tools now. We simplify that task with forecasting process reviews and CLV implementation that makes it easier to stay one step ahead. Our quarterly or annual business reviews can also make sure your enablement predictions are always on track. 

• Simplified sales enablement: Sales enablement is dependent on the cross-functionality of your sales and marketing teams. We make it easier to secure this crucial collaboration with marketing process reviews that always align your marketing team with the right revenue goals from the get-go.