Who should be responsible for buyer enablement?
If you want something done - you need a single person to have ultimate accountability for its success.
I know this because seventeen years ago I selected two friends as best men for my wedding and ended up organising my own stag weekend (which had its own benefits in hindsight).
Even in companies where there is agreement that buyer enablement is a valid go-to-market strategy, there is often no single owner of the strategy, no owner with the ability to implement it across the entire go-to-market function.
You’ll know this is the case when you see one or more of these:
Only one buyer enablement tool - an ROI calculator or maturity assessment - one tool aimed at one persona instead of a broad set of tools aimed at different parts of the buying group.
A tool that isn’t used systematically by sellers or CSMs - a calculator or guide that is buried in the footer of the website - promoted by marketing but not used by sellers to qualify and drive their deals forward
No reporting or analysis on the success of buyer enablement tools - something was built, and it looks nice, but its usage doesn’t feature in any quarterly OKRs or executive dashboards.
Buyer enablement is cross-functional
For your buyer enablement strategy to be successful it needs to be embedded across all of your go-to-market functions - from marketing, to sales and customer success, in your Revenue Operations team, and often in your product team.
Your buyer must be at the centre of it - and therefore every team that interacts with your buyers through their journey of discovering, buying from, implementing and expanding with your company needs to be involved.
Here are some considerations when considering who owns buyer enablement:
Chief Revenue Officer
If you are at a scale where you have a true Chief Revenue Officer then this is the sensible ultimate owner of your buyer enablement strategy.
As Chief Revenue Officer you are a leader of leaders, and have responsibility across your marketing functions, your sales teams, and your customer success strategy.
It is your role to define and lead your go-to-market strategy, and a key element of that will be building a buyer-centric journey.
You have the ability to bring representatives from across your go-to-market team - especially your customer success teams, and develop a pipeline of tools and content that scales their expertise and processes and brings it to your marketing teams to promote to your potential buyers.
Whilst as CRO you will be the executive owner of the buyer enablement strategy you will need individuals to execute the planning and delivery - consider a buyer enablement role in your RevOps strategy team.
Note: I mentioned if you are a “true” Chief Revenue Officer. Sometimes companies at smaller scale name their VP Sales a CRO - maybe to appear bigger or to entice a certain type of candidate.
If you don’t have full ownership of the entire go-to-market, aren’t focused on leading leaders, aren’t assessing potential acquisitions or moves into new geographies, then it is likely the CEO that should be the owner of the buyer enablement strategy.
Chief Marketing Officer
If you are in an organisation that doesn’t yet have a Chief Revenue Officer with full responsibility across the go-to-market functions then a Chief Marketing Officer can make a great owner for buyer enablement.
This is especially true if as CMO you have your eyes on a move into a CRO role - which is becoming an increasingly popular career move.
As CMO you can use your ownership of buyer enablement to firstly increase your awareness of the sales and customer success functions, whilst also getting better insight into the full buyer journey - far beyond when your marketing teams hand over a marketing qualified lead to sales.
Start by inviting individuals to a cross-functional buyer enablement team including representatives from marketing, sales and customer success.
Those from sales and customer success will be delighted that marketing really want to listen and learn from them and to develop tools that will support their part of the process.
Once you deploy your series of buyer enablement tools, use this cross-functional team to support the enablement of their colleagues across the business.
Develop cross-functional dashboards and board report slides that demonstrate the impact that buyer enablement is having on top, mid and bottom of the funnel metrics.
These metrics will support your transition into a full revenue responsibility role.
VP Revenue Operations
Revenue Operations might be a hot topic and one of the fastest growing careers in SaaS - but beware.
In this age of efficient growth, even the team tasked with finding that efficiency is at risk.
There are two words in Revenue Operations - and the most important of those is “revenue”.
As a RevOps team, if you cannot clearly demonstrate how your team significantly increases revenue - well beyond the cost of your team - then you are at risk of being caught in layoffs or being transferred to other roles.
Buyer enablement can be your ticket to demonstrating strategic revenue growth.
As you look around your colleagues you may recognise the siloes that mean no-one else is aligning the buyer journey and developing buyer-centric tools and processes.
If that is the case - get out of the office and go and speak to customers. And I don’t mean listening to Gong call recordings - really go and see them.
“We’re focused on building a better experience for our customers, so I’d really appreciate if you can spend an hour with me and walk me through your journey of finding us, what problems you were trying to solve, how our team helped (or didn’t help) and how we could improve that experience.”
As you speak to a range of closed lost, closed won, expanding and renewing customers you will learn a great deal about their buying process and challenges and can design tools and processes that are built around the buyers.
Nominate one of your team as the buyer enablement lead - they can sit in your RevOps strategy team and be 100% focused on what happens outside of your company’s walls.
Develop dashboards and analytics that demonstrate how your buyer enablement strategy is directly driving sourced and influenced revenue.
Can you drive more pipeline than marketing themselves?!
Other possible owners
If you aren’t the CRO, CMO or VP Revenue Operations then there is still the opportunity for you to take the lead - you’ll just need some sponsorship from senior leaders.
VP Sales, VP Marketing or VP Customer Success
Whilst you don’t have ownership of the full go-to-market team, start an employee group with members from across marketing, sales and customer success.
Build it around lunch and learns and the idea of knowledge sharing across teams.
Out of those sessions have the members define a pipeline of possible tools that could support buyers.
Develop a minimum viable product with spreadsheets or a Google Doc/Word and once you have validated its success - take it up the line for formal investment.
You’ve now got a great example of a time when you took on a cross-functional leadership position for your future CRO or CMO interview!
CEO
If your company is sub $25m ARR, then it is likely you the CEO, the founder, who is the only person that has cross-functional responsibility across marketing, sales and customer success.
The buyer enablement strategy sits with you.
It is for you to define and reinforce a buyer-centric culture across your teams - through your vision, through the quarterly and annual company objectives, through your weekly all-hands calls, through the 121’s you have with your executive team.
“We exist to service our customers - and that service starts well before they start speaking to our salespeople”
Ensure a team member in your go-to-market or RevOps teams own the delivery of the strategy you define.
Have a buyer enablement slide on your all-hands deck that demonstrates how your buyer-centric approach is feeding your sales team’s pipeline.
Pick an owner and get to work
Like my stag weekend - the key is having a named individual owner, and for that owner to have defined objectives and key results that they are responsible for.
In this way buyer enablement becomes central to your go-to-market strategy rather than a gimmick that you put on your website.
Get started
Whenever you are ready, there are three ways that I can help you accelerate your revenue.
Buyer Enablement Assessment - Answer nine questions in five minutes and receive your free personalised report to help you SDRs and AEs generate pipeline.
Revenue 360 Assessments - inspire and lead your revenue teams with revenue specific 360 reports designed for marketing, sales and customer success teams.
Buyer Enablement Platform - We’ll design, build and manage your buyer enablement platform on your behalf - generating quality pipeline in under 90 days.