As business needs change, the field of sales enablement is growing, expanding, and evolving. It takes a team of people from across the go-to-market (GTM) organization to close deals and meet the complexity in today’s marketplace. These changes require alignment across a growing number of teams – from messaging to processes to measurement. Naturally, this pushes enablement teams to support employees outside of what we would call typical sales roles. The evolution from sales enablement to revenue enablement reflects the new reality that customer centricity requires full GTM alignment.

Take a data analyst whose job is to optimize our solution’s performance on the back end and who is now asked to present some of these optimizations to an executive. Storytelling, simplifying complex topics, and speaking to business outcomes are not the key competencies where someone in this type of role would typically excel. Many teams in a GTM organization have customer-facing roles increasingly important to the sales process that require skill sets similar to those of field sellers.

Likewise, roles within our sales enablement team have also been evolving. When I started, I was mostly in charge of supporting our account management teams with onboarding, workshops, and call analysis sessions – working closely with their team leads and VPs to identify enablement opportunities. While this is still the case, some of my more recent projects involve collaboration with our RevOps and strategy teams as well as business intelligence and product marketing. Key elements include measuring the impact of enablement programs and win/loss analysis. The same can be seen in other roles on our team. One of our more recent hires works closely with partnerships and is a master project manager – making sure cross-functional projects involving multiple departments and stakeholders go smoothly and yield desired results. Org structures are following the same trend – with teams in revenue strategy, operations, and enablement now all reporting to the same VP.

A current example that exemplifies this evolution is a product-related enablement program we’re running. It started with strong collaboration between our team and product marketing and kicked off with two weeks of live sessions, followed by an e-learning certification and live simulations in small groups. While the main focus of the program was on enabling our sellers, leaders from every GTM department have requested participation of all members on their teams. This demonstrates both leadership buy-in and a strong need for alignment across a much bigger part of the organization.

This initiative shows the path to being a truly aligned and customer-centric organization and, more than ever, how enablement will play a pivotal role in managing change, breaking down silos, and upskilling our GTM workforce.