RevOps meets enablement: The secret to building effective go-to-market strategies

This article was adapted from Bill Ball's conversation with Sandy Robinson on RevOps Unboxed. Listen to the full episode.

Ever wonder what happens when you bridge the gap between sales enablement and revenue operations? As someone who's been in the field for nearly 25 years, I've seen firsthand how this partnership can transform businesses.

Despite it not always being clear to me that enablement would be my path, I eventually found my passion in sales and dove in headfirst. Over the last decade, I've done it all - inside sales, outside sales, managing people, managing managers, and managing clients. At one point, I was juggling all of these responsibilities with about 30 direct reports!

So in this article, I want to share my journey and insights on building effective go-to-market strategies through the critical partnership of RevOps and enablement. Let’s dive straight in!

The critical partnership: RevOps and enablement

Today, I work in two key areas. First, I help small and mid-sized companies build or rebuild enablement from the ground up. Second, and perhaps more relevant to our current economic climate, I work with larger businesses where enablement leaders are thinly spread across teams and need to deliver at scale.

As a co-pilot, I help enablement leaders strategize, execute, and run programs they couldn't do on their own or with their current team.

My focus spans four main areas:

Catalyzing pipeline
Improving talent
Enhancing go-to-market strategies
Improving business navigation and systems

Let's talk about that last point for a moment. If people can't find what they need the first time they need it, when they need to execute, they're not going to come back.

This is where the critical partnership between RevOps and enablement comes into play.

When I started in enablement, I thought I just needed a data person. Now, I don't want someone just helping me measure stuff – I want a partner with a point of view. While my expertise lies in driving change, creating creative solutions, training, and messaging, I need someone rooted in the cold, hard facts of the business to help guide my compass.

Go-to-market strategy challenges

One of the biggest challenges I see in go-to-market strategies is the tendency to treat them as checkbox exercises.

Too often, I see go-to-market efforts reduced to someone speaking from a pulpit or showing a "product marketing movie" with maybe a few questions at the end. But real go-to-market strategies need to go beyond this.

Every company is different, and every enablement job description you read is different. Sometimes you walk into a situation where marketing doesn't work in the company, so you need to lean in and build case studies. Other times, you're working with brilliant data people who've never been in sales, trying to create a sales workflow in the CRM.

But throughout all of this, a common issue I encounter is the lack of clear revenue goals. When launching a new product, the first question I ask is, "What's the revenue goal?" Too often, the response is vague – "We just need to sell more."

Without specific, measurable outcomes, how can we truly gauge success?

Another challenge is the "Frankenstack" approach to both systems and training. Just as CRM systems can become cluttered with unnecessary fields and checkboxes added by various stakeholders, training programs can suffer from the same issue.

When new hires don't know something, the knee-jerk reaction is often to add more to the onboarding process. Before you know it, you're trying to push the power of Niagara Falls through a straw!

Building effective training and systems

Let's talk about the forgetting curve and the myth of the one-and-done training session. I recently heard about a situation where a salesperson was criticized for not remembering something from a training session. They were told, "Well, that was in the training you had three weeks ago. How do you not have it memorized?"

This approach completely ignores the reality of how people learn and retain information. Nobody's going to remember 52,000 things from a 48-page deck presented in a 30-minute Zoom training.

We need to move beyond the "check the box, we did the training" mentality. Instead, we need:

👥 More discussion and social learning

💡 Bite-sized, consumable content

📅 Coordination of training calendars

⚖️ Various delivery methods (not just Zoom meetings)

Sometimes, a two-minute video that people can watch on their phones is more effective than an hour-long meeting where everyone's multitasking anyway.

Creating change with people, not at them

One of the most important lessons I've learned is the difference between implementing change at people versus with people.

When I'm asked to bring change into an organization, I always think about how I can make it a "with" versus an "at" – how can I help people feel like they're part of this change rather than having change happen to them?

Let me give you an example. Something as potentially contentious as exit criteria can become something that sales leaders are excited about if you make them part of the process. My approach is to take a control group and pre-build something for them to critique. They'll tell me, "No, not this, but this."

Through this process, we get to the "why" and the outcome together. The result? People believe in the exit criteria, and forecasting and pipeline progression improve.

This approach aligns with what every CEO wants – owners in the business. When people own the changes happening around them rather than feeling like changes are just coming at them, the benefits are immense.

Best practices for modern enablement and RevOps

As we look to the future of enablement and RevOps, here's my wish list for what effective collaboration could look like:

True partnership: Beyond just having a data person, having a RevOps partner who can provide strategic insight and help guide the enablement compass.
Coordinated change management: A synchronized approach to implementing changes, whether they're system updates, new methodologies, or product launches.
Outcome-focused metrics: Moving beyond traditional quarterly business reviews that just show how different parts of the business are doing, to tracking the customer journey and presenting a point of view on where to focus.
Empathetic approach: Remember that businesses are people first. We need to consider the human element in all our enablement and RevOps initiatives.

At the end of the day, it's about making the choice between just checking boxes or actually trying to achieve meaningful outcomes. Are we just going through the motions, or are we truly helping the business get where it needs to go?

The future of effective go-to-market strategies lies in the collaboration between RevOps and enablement, with a focus on creating change with people, not at them.

By keeping our eyes on meaningful outcomes and remembering the human element in all we do, we can build more effective, more sustainable go-to-market approaches that drive real results.

Conclusion

There you have it! The future of sales success isn't just about having the right tools or systems in place – it's about fostering genuine partnerships between teams that traditionally operated in silos.

When RevOps and enablement work hand in hand, we create an environment where data-driven decisions meet human-centered execution. That's where the magic happens.

Whether you're just starting to build these bridges in your organization or looking to strengthen existing ones, remember that it's not about perfection – it's about progress, partnership, and most importantly, the people who make it all happen.