Revenue enablement seeks to provide all go-to-market functions, revenue-generating channels, and customer-facing roles with the tools, resources and data to maximise a company’s revenue-generating capabilities.
It goes beyond sales enablement and supports all touch points across the buyer journey.
That means integrating multiple departments, including sales, marketing, and customer success teams, to help create a seamless customer experience and optimise each stage of the customer journey.
Revenue enablement prioritises end-to-end metrics and technology and provides consistency, alignment and visibility to improve the modern buying and selling experience.
It’s all about identifying processes that need improvement and continuously iterating and experimenting to understand which processes most effectively contribute to your revenue goals.
Revenue enablement can help improve and empower your sales team's performance and equip them with the necessary training, knowledge and resources to close deals faster and increase conversion rates. It can also boost sales productivity, streamline processes and accelerate revenue growth.
It helps bring together fragmented customer experiences, increase retention, and support all GTM teams in improving communication and workflows. This increases collaboration and alignment and breaks down silos between GTM departments.
Revenue enablement also helps optimise multiple touchpoints across the customer journey and collect more information about your prospects.
This helps create a holistic view of your customer journey and provides insights into pain points, customer behaviour and preferences, ensuring your customers have a seamless customer experience.
Centralising data and breaking down data silos also empowers businesses to make data-informed decisions and optimise their revenue performance by basing strategies on facts rather than guesswork.
Over the past few years, Cognism has transformed its revenue enablement strategy through its revenue operations function.
At the end of 2020, Cognism had one sales operations analyst running Salesforce as an entirely separate entity. Salesforce had been built ad hoc due to a lack of resources, and the sales team were responsible for building and maintaining the CRM and ensuring data quality.
All the sales, marketing, customer success leaders and account managers operated independently.
This sufficed for the time being, but as Cognism scaled from $4 million to $10 million ARR in 2020 alone, it was clear that with this kind of growth, they needed a more stable infrastructure and to build out an operational and revenue enablement strategy.
Fast forward to 2024, and Cognism has an operations team of 19 operators.
The operations team has become a trusted partner to their stakeholders. They’ve created a structure where sales, marketing and customer success can work alongside the revenue operations team and in alignment to execute their GTM strategies more efficiently and effectively.
This has helped scale Cognism to reach $60 million ARR. But Rome wasn’t built in a day; let’s check out how Cognism built its revenue enablement strategy through insights from our Revenue Operations team, including:
Before building out and implementing a revenue enablement plan, it’s important to build the basics. That means mapping out and understanding your customer journey. As Antoine Cornet shared:
“At the start, it was about building the foundation of our systems. We figured out how we tracked our opportunities, our attribution model, and how to track customer health and renewals.”
“Those were all basic things, but it was about building for our future. We needed to build a scalable way to trust the data we would analyse in the future.”
For Cognism, this included a Salesforce CPQ migration.
Cognism knew they could track the new business side of conversation rates effectively, but once they became a customer, they needed a more 360-degree view. As Kristapor Giragosian shared:
“We didn’t have a great picture of how that renewal flow was going or how our entire customer journey was going.”
“We had to build out the concept of a master contract and understand what accounts purchased which contracts initially and if they were upsold.”
This was a year-long implementation, but it meant that Cognism could understand who customers were, what they bought, and when they should renew. This analysis should underpin your revenue enablement efforts.
Cognism also made a considerable effort to increase its infrastructure and paired sales operations alongside the Salesforce side to sketch out the ideal customer journey flow.
You need to understand the entire customer journey from the start, from when a customer or a prospect first learned about your product through marketing to the sales process and buying cycle and then to customer success. As Kristapor shared:
“We got to that point where we had a stable and secure revenue infrastructure, as I like to call it, which was our CRM.”
Cognism then built an attribution model and leveraged campaign member objects and custom Salesforce logics to track different customer touchpoints.
The next focus of your revenue enablement strategy is understanding your ideal customer profile.
Doing this requires a clear view of their customer base and a strict opportunity management process. This is foundational to any data analysis.
Here, Cognism used its data to populate its firmographic and demographic data. The operations team then hypothesised specific characteristics that would make an account better or worse.
They then ran a regression analysis to understand if that individual variable positively impacted their chance of winning that prospect at a higher rate. As Anotine shared:
“Some variables will tell you nothing, and some will work. We then bundled the ones with the highest correlation into a score, giving us our ICP.”
“The next challenge became keeping the data and firmographic data up to date. Clean account data and having an easy way to query a database to identify new accounts that might fit your criteria but hadn’t previously is important.”
Next, it's important to implement some sort of account scoring model. As opposed to asking the sales team to book 12 monthly meetings with whoever they could prospect to, Cognism took an analytical approach when looking at who their best customer was. This transformed its sales strategy and productivity, as Kristapor said:
“We not only looked at who our best customer was, but who WE are best for. We began to understand who and what customers our service and product served best.”
“We identified some excellent parameters, including if the account had a sales team that was growing, if the account had a revenue operations function, or if the account had a particular type of tech stack. We scored them based on this and decided that these were the customers we should go after.”
“This was when we began to notice the impact we could make through our revenue enablement strategy as an operations function.”
Cognism had invested highly in its marketing and sales functions, but as the company began to scale, it noticed hiccups in its revenue-generating process that would cost efficiency.
Anytime the marketing team or sales reps had to run analytics themselves or had any technical, flow or systems issues, it cost the team massively.
That’s when Cognism started to scale its revenue operations function and revenue enablement strategy. They brought some strong people into the sales operations unit, eventually turning it into revenue operations. As Kristapor shared:
“At first, we had sales operations, customer operations and marketing operations. That was great initially because each part of the funnel needed desperate attention.”
“Then, once we had an excellent team built out with specialisations, we transitioned at the beginning of 2023 to spanning the revenue operations team over the entire funnel and splitting it into a process team.”
Cognism then began to outline the processes the GTM function needed to do its job as efficiently as possible. They also began to outline what team is responsible for executing those processes.
On top of that, they formed an analytics and insights team responsible for digging through all the data throughout the GTM function and understanding and presenting those insights to all revenue teams. This guided their revenue enablement efforts, as Kristapor said:
“We could then outline where we could make a big impact if we did X, Y and Z, which could lead to A, B and C results.”
Collaboration underpins any successful revenue enablement strategy, so creating a feedback loop is essential.
Each stakeholder should be encouraged to have regular one-on-ones with the appropriate team members.
For example, at Cognism, the head of Sales Operations holds weekly catch-ups with an Account Manager and the VP of Customer Success to ensure they vocalise any issues and that everyone strives towards the same goal.
At the same time, Cognism began adding to its revenue infrastructure and architecture team. They scaled out their Salesforce team and went from having no in-house resources to four internal Salesforce administrators who are skilled and experts in their field. As Kristapor shared, this was important:
“That added to our prowess and scalability in being able to turn this from a 10 million ARR to a hundred million ARR business and do this as intelligently as possible.”
Data can help guide your revenue enablement strategy and GTM motion. Here, Cognism uses multiple sources of truth in its infrastructure.
Their sales data lives in Salesforce and is visualised through reports and dashboards, whilst their product data lives in Pendo. They can sync their usage data into Salesforce using Redshift, whilst all the financial budget data lives in Pigment.
This enables stakeholders across all revenue-generating teams to find the data they need at any given moment, spanning the entire customer life cycle and buying journey, increasing visibility and reducing data silos.
Keeping the data clean and consistent was an important step when building the RevOps function. As Ben Dyson shared:
“The only way to ensure this is to check and check again. When we implemented Tableau, we set up all the data syncs from Salesforce into Tableau and then compared the data points side by side to see whether they were accurate and matching. There’s no way to ensure they are consistent without that check.”
At Cognism, the operations team defines which data points are the most important and which format they should be in. Cognism ensured they knew precisely the format they wanted per data point as they entered their systems, whether through a form or an upload.
It’s equally important to enrich and clean your data on a regular schedule. Cognism established a report containing the most important key data points, which they then monitor to investigate any spikes. As Simon Heckhuis said:
“The operations team monitors their KPIs regularly and knows what is normal. You want to make sure when you have new tools that they follow the data format as you want it.”
“When it comes to deduplication, you must ensure that every tool you connect to your main database checks for dupes.”
“Additionally, we implemented an automatic deduping software to look at contacts, leads and accounts and match everything to make our database as lean as possible. You want to keep the data at a very high level and ensure your data set is complete.”
Identifying which processes need improvement and experimentation is a fundamental aspect of revenue enablement, and your revenue team should be constantly finding new processes and updates to increase KPIs and productivity.
This includes productivity in terms of pipeline generated and revenue created.
At Cognism, the operations team is at a point where they are running data-driven experiments consistently and embracing an experimental culture.
First, stakeholders identify what they perceive as an issue or a bottleneck within the current processes.
The operations team compiles the relevant data to verify whether this is the case. They then present it to a wider group along with an initial specification for a solution, which undergoes repeated iteration.
They use experimental templates outlining a specific hypothesis, how they will test this hypothesis, and whether they will test it in a specific region or with a particular team. As Kristapor said:
“We get buy-in from stakeholders, and then if we reach X metrics, we decide how we roll out widely.”
“That’s why the experimental process is so important to us. If someone has a hypothesis and spends 10% of that time working on it, and it pays off, it will have a huge impact on KPIs. It’s about putting your effort and brain power where we can make the most difference.”
When it comes to revenue enablement and working with large amounts of data, you are responsible for the systems and data that people use in their everyday jobs. If that goes down for even half an hour, this has a massive impact on your revenue-generating functions.
The trick is to learn from mistakes and grow. As Kristapor shared:
“You learn a lot from experience in the early days, and we’ve gotten to the point where we’re tried and tested. We’ve been through these hurdles, and whilst there are always challenges, we’ve created a team culture where we try to improve daily.”
“I’m not going to be complacent, and our models and analytics are always trying to get to the next level.”
The revenue operations team at Cognism is constantly looking for new systems, innovations and essential tools to improve its revenue-generating activity. This massively improves its scalability and processes.
Every quarter, the RevOps team logs every manual activity regarding reporting and data loads and assigns each of these a time frame for doing them.
That way, the team can prioritise the most time-sensitive tasks and look into automating them.
For example, RevOps conducts most of its reporting through Salesforce, and it builds a number of dashboards for all different arms of the business, including AEs, SDRs, and Customer Success.
As Cognism grew, it slowly implemented new systems, including Tableau, where it migrated much of the key wider business reporting.
Previously, the operations team spent a lot of manual time building out reports and presentations. They would produce a monthly RevOps deck for senior leadership on PowerPoint with screenshots from the Salesforce dashboard and reports.
Implementing tools like Tableau meant they could streamline this process with automatically created decks. Improving this efficiency is an integral aspect of revenue enablement and means that the operations team could spend more time analysing the data that matters and driving strategic business outcomes.
Before, Cognism also involved many people and many Excel sheets when it came to scenario planning. They would play with a lot of assumptions in an Excel format.
Building a system like Pigment allows Cognism to plan a revenue scenario quickly and efficiently and provides critical insights to the senior leadership team. As Kristapor shared:
“Getting off Excel onto a planning software called Pigment has been a huge change for us, and what we’re looking for is that scalability. We’re looking ten steps ahead at all times.”
“With Pigment, we can determine how to ramp up in particular regions. We can understand what will happen if we add a certain sales headcount or marketing expansion and scenario plan. This allows us to understand what we should do and where we should go.”
“At the end of the day, we’re trying to deploy X amount of go-to-market resources and maximise the return that we’re getting back in terms of best-fit customers and revenue for the organisation.”
When choosing the systems to grow on, Cognism listens to its stakeholders and always investigates any ideas that arise. Here, the experience from both internal and external people is key.
Cognism deeply evaluates each tool it is considering implementing. The operations team creates tech memos outlining their problem statement and what they want to accomplish.
The revenue operations team understands the internal processes they could use in lieu of a system and what is best for the needs of the business. They then understand what will get the best return on investment and what systems will give time back to the team.
Every system implemented should create time and mental clarity with its replacement process, which lays the foundations for your revenue enablement strategy.
The bigger you get, the noisier it gets, and you need to constantly focus on where you should put your attention, where you’re going to move the needle, and how to improve efficiency through your revenue enablement initiatives.
As a company grows, it is more likely to want to make instant changes, so adopting a lean methodology and slimming down what you’re looking at and where you can impact is vital.
Cognism put in place an Asana change request ticketing system to do this. This sends a form to the relevant parties who want to submit their change request with all the relevant details. That request is then reviewed and prioritised depending on the business requirements.
When scaling, Cognism uses data to inform its decision-making process to double down where it sees fruitful returns.
A big example of this includes the launch of Cognism France, where the team is seeing great success in all the metrics they value as a SaaS business.
It’s essential to always be looking around the corner, and the operations team runs an offsite each year to review the past year, look at all the significant endeavors and achievements and look ahead to the following year to establish their revenue goals.
Here, the operations team will outline their revenue targets and plan, headcount planning, and what they will focus on as a team. This includes creating OKRs at an operational level and as a vision and mission statement everyone buys into. As Kristapor said:
“We have such strong operational and functional leaders, so we outline what we are trying to accomplish, what our vision is and the strategic execution of how we are going to achieve our vision and business goals.”
Cognism outlines three to four business objectives and key results each year as an overall operations team, and each department then makes its departmental OKRs.
However, keeping that lean methodology often relies on experience. As Anotine shared:
“Sometimes you’ll still get it wrong, even with much experience. You might get pulled into a project where the requirements aren’t very defined, and no one is clear on the benefits you’ll get from it. You must be able to tell if something will be a waste of time and remove yourself from that.”
It is a learning curve, and Cognism is still iterating and improving its processes every day.
When it comes to improving the sales process, you can optimise your enablement strategy and processes through data experimentation.
For example, at Cognism, the revenue operations team increased the SDR team’s efficiency through the distribution of their accounts.
Previously, the revenue operations team distributed the accounts the SDRs worked on monthly with the sales leaders.
Initially, the best course of action appeared to allow the SDRs to work the accounts they had been allocated for the month, enabling them to drop accounts and receive a new top-up as desired.
The revenue operations team realised that SDRs were burning through these accounts too quickly and not running full cadences. As Kristapor shared:
“We then worked closely with the sales leaders to update this process and turned it into a quarterly top-up instead. The SDRs were given their books of business each quarter and had to work those accounts each quarter.”
This led to a 25% increase in sales productivity and improved sales performance. With access to accurate data from Salesforce, Cognism tracked all the necessary statistics. After implementing this change, the operations team observed a shift in the percentage of quota attainment.
The operations team tracks the main KPIs: SDR and AE productivity. Much of this focuses on the amount of pipeline generated per SDR.
The main focus at Cognism is boosting the dollar value of each meeting attended, increasing the amount of meeting attendants SDRs are getting from 100 accounts, and then raising the conversion rates of those meetings booked to meetings attended.
The revenue operations team also massively increased efficiency and customer satisfaction at Cognism by scoring accounts and improving its lead management process.
Previously, Cognism used a queue system. MDRs would enter a Salesforce queue and decide which accounts they would work with.
This was messy and meant that MDRs weren’t following up on leads, and there was no way of putting them into a standardised cadence to ensure they had the right number of touchpoints.
Cognism then implemented LeanData. This meant they could assign a lead to the right owner within minutes and automatically push that MQL into an outreach or sales cadence.
Previously, an MDR had to decide what to do, but now they simply have a list of outreach tasks they need to execute. As Antoine shared:
“LeanData is foundational for us. It routes pretty much anything and everything. It goes beyond MQLs and routes accounts, cases and the onboarding process. It’s essentially the foundation of everything.”
Cognism also decided that when their best-fit account came inbound, instead of talking to an MDR, the account scoring system would allow them to book directly with an AE.
Here, Cognism was able to cut down time with the prospect. They already knew the prospect was a good fit, so they didn’t need that extra qualification layer. As Kristapor said:
“We were able to operate more intelligently, and not only were we saving time, but we were also adding revenue to our top line. We’re saving the bandwidth of our GTM team, which gives them the bandwidth to deploy their resources in other places.”
This also massively increased customer satisfaction, an integral aspect of revenue enablement, making the journey of customers and potential customers a more efficient and seamless experience.
Your focus on creating and defining an ideal customer journey should not stop there, and you should be constantly optimising and defining how to build a consistent customer experience.
At Cognism, the revenue operations team conducted a regression analysis to understand their customer segmentation model.
Here, the operations team defined what groups of customers acted similarly and what their experience should look like to optimise their journey. As Kristapor shared:
“We got deep into intelligence and put CSAT surveys along the way to gather customer feedback and ensure we were tracking the crucial touch-points. This helped understand every customer interaction, what the customers were feeling at that point and whether they needed more support or were happy with the process.”
They then fed this data into a customer health and customer satisfaction score. This model predicts how satisfied a customer is with achieving their desired outcome and helps predict net revenue retention and gross revenue retention.
Combining that with customer satisfaction surveys and NPS surveys and tying all that data together with product usage data gives Cognism a 360-degree picture of the customer’s journey and insights into customer behaviour.
The operations team then worked closely with the account managers and customer success leaders to segment the customer base and build teams to support these cohorts of customers.
Cognism was able to assign books of business to the CS and AM teams, which allowed them to build repeatable processes so all customers could use the software for the same desired outcome.
This allowed specialisation within the team and enabled the enterprise team to give the proper attention to the right kind of customers rather than switching between different use cases. As Kristapor shared:
“Adding that layer of intelligence based on data and analytics and letting the data speak for us, combined with using the layer of experience from our CS and AM leadership, made the perfect pairing and helped to improve customer retention and customer loyalty and ultimately provide a positive customer experience.”
The revenue operations team at Cognism track a lot of product usage data alongside the firmographic makeup of the company using Cognism’s data. The operations team looks at who uses the tool, what they expect them to use it for, and how often they use it.
They can look at if a company has a RevOps team, an SDR team, or a marketing function and, from there, understand how they’re working with that demographic data and using Cognism cross-functionally. As Kristapor shared:
“If we know that they should be using the tool to do X, Y and Z, we can understand their next action and then put the suitable prompts in place to lead them to that action.”
“We want them to ensure they’ve gotten their desired outcome out of the tool and show them things they might not know about. It’s about achieving those quick wins and moments of satisfaction along that customer journey.”
Each account manager also has a designated dashboard to identify any upsell opportunities. This includes a couple of metrics, including a customer strategy score, which gives out a value of upsell, retain or save depending on the amount of blank space within that account.
Blank space is the number of licenses an account has purchased compared to their current sales headcount and the credits they have used versus their time through the contract.
Cognism also uses Salesforce to spit out a prioritisation score, considering the company’s sales and RevOps headcount growth. The accounts are growing quicker than others and might be more likely to upsell.
Cognism has formed a solid marketing operations function, and Cognism’s revenue enablement and operations strategy is constantly focusing on improving the marketing processes.
The marketing operations team is highly tool and analytically focused. This includes specialists in charge of Pardot and ensuring that Cognism gets the right content to the right customers and prospects at the right time.
One of the most significant endeavours has been on the product and customer marketing side, specifically building systems for championing marketing.
Simultaneously, marketing operations dig into the audience analytics, help define the ICP and pair the marketing and sales efforts to ensure that the two teams work together. As Simon explained:
“We try to keep all discussions objective on a data level rather than basing them on feeling and intuition. We then enrich our data with real insights from the business to develop a strategy and test it.”
For example, the revenue operations team at Cognism ran several experiments to improve their revenue enablement strategy and help the marketing teams improve drop-off rates.
Cognism noticed that people submitting a demo form with their personal emails weren’t converting at a very high rate.
To tackle this, they ran an experiment to check whether not allowing personal emails would decrease the drop-off rate, which it did.
Cognism also modified its MBO plan. MDRs used to operate under an MBO plan where they would receive a certain amount if the company achieved its ARR target.
This was significantly removed from their personal performance. When Cognism implemented this change, the conversion rate of MQLs started to drop because they weren’t as accountable for performing at a high standard.
The operations team picked this up and changed it to rectify the issue. As Antoine shared:
“We’ll run five or six of these experiments at any time. The experiments vary; sometimes, you’ll get really quick feedback, but for others, you won’t know for a whole year, especially if you’re doing things with your customer base.”
“With marketing, you can normally run experiments for a few months. Because the high volume of MQLs and the time to convert these things isn’t too long, you’ll get feedback within a month or two.”
Revenue enablement allows you to build the necessary systems and infrastructure to propel revenue growth and scale as efficiently as possible.
This allows you to perfect your GTM strategies and workflows through data experimentation and process improvement.
By looking ahead and constantly iterating its processes and revenue enablement strategy, Cognism transformed its GTM motion and grew and scaled sustainably.