The Future of Revenue Enablement Is Dead – Unless It Becomes “Revenue Risk Management”
A few weeks ago, I met with the newly appointed CRO of a ~1,000-person SaaS company.
I asked him a simple question:
“What’s the biggest change you’ve made in your first few months?”
His answer wasn’t what you’d expect. He didn’t talk about:
- Changing territories or quotas
- Rolling out a methodology
- Upgrading messaging
Instead he said:
“I cut my enablement team from 17 people down to 4.”
Think about that.
His first major decision as CRO wasn’t about growth mechanics.
It was about cost justification:
His first move was taking a hacksaw to his enablement team.
In his words:
“We have a board-level mandate to get to the Rule of 40. I had a 17-person enablement team that could not prove their revenue impact or justify their expense on the P&L. If you can’t attribute your work to revenue outcomes, that’s deadweight.”
That wasn’t an emotional decision.
It was a financial one.
And it’s not an isolated case.
A few weeks earlier, the CEO of one of our customers did the same thing.
He reduced his enablement team from six people to one.
When asked why, he didn’t hedge:
“When I scrutinized whether enablement had any measurable impact on revenue outcomes, no one could show me proof that they did.”
So he cut.
Because adding headcount without provable revenue impact isn’t enablement.
It’s rent extraction.
And rent extraction is a CEO’s hate-language.
This is the uncomfortable truth most revenue enablement teams don’t want to face:
In an era where companies prize efficiency almost as much as growth,
every function is now guilty until proven revenue-positive.
Revenue enablement is no exception.
Which leads to a simple, brutal conclusion:
Revenue enablement is dead – unless it evolves into revenue risk management.
The Real Problem: Vanity Enablement
Stories like these aren’t outliers.
They’re signals.
They reveal how most executives actually perceive revenue enablement today:
- A cost center
- A content factory
- A function with weak credibility
- And most critically, one that cannot attribute its work to revenue outcomes
That model has a name.
“Vanity Enablement.”
It works the same way Vanity Marketing used to work.
• Lots of activity.
• Lots of content.
• Lots of internal praise.
And almost no attribution or accountability to revenue impact.
For years, marketing lived in this world. Campaigns were celebrated. Events were “successful.” Content was shipped. But when CEOs asked a simple question — “How did this move revenue?” — the answers were vague, defensive, or nonexistent.
Eventually, that stopped being acceptable.
CMOs learned a hard lesson:
If you can’t attribute your work to revenue outcomes, you don’t get a seat at the table.
So marketing evolved. Attribution became mandatory. Pipeline and revenue became the language of credibility.
Revenue enablement has not made that leap yet.
And that’s the problem.
Today, most enablement teams still measure success by:
- Content shipped
- Programs launched
- Certification rates
- Training NPS
None of those metrics matter to a CEO.
Because none of them answer the only question that actually counts:
“Did this reduce revenue risk or increase revenue outcomes?”
When enablement can’t answer that question, executives don’t see a strategic function.
They see overhead.
Which is why, when efficiency becomes a board-level mandate, enablement is often the first place leaders reach for the hacksaw.
Not because enablement isn’t valuable — but because unaccountable enablement doesn’t survive scrutiny.
If your enablement team can’t quantify revenue impact, it’s not a strategic function. It’s a cost center pretending to be one.
AI’s Impact on Revenue Enablement (Not What You Think)
I usually hate “how AI is going to impact {{insert job function}}” hot takes.
The answers are always the same two clichés:
- “It’s not replacing us — it’s making us better!” eye roll
- “It will reduce the number of people required to do the job.”
Both may be true for revenue enablement.
And both miss the point entirely.
It’s not a conversation about replacing revenue enablement.
Or making them more efficient.
It’s about changing the entire power structure of the role itself by making skill measurable (and correlated to revenue outcomes).
The moment skill becomes measurable, the accountability (and therefore, power) model of revenue enablement collapses — and is rebuilt.
For decades, revenue skills existed in a fog.
Everyone believed they mattered. No one could quantify them.
Enablement was tasked with upskilling the revenue organization, but had no objective way to answer basic questions leadership actually cares about:
- How strong are our sellers’ core skills, really?
- Which skills correlate most directly with revenue outcomes?
- Where is skill decay happening right now?
- What is that decay costing us in real dollars?
So enablement operated on proxies:
- Training completion
- Certifications
- Attendance
- Anecdotes
Well-intentioned. Completely insufficient.
That era is ending.
AI can now observe revenue behaviors at scale, quantify them objectively, and benchmark them over time — not as activities, but as revenue risk variables.
- Discovery depth and quality.
- Multi-threading effectiveness.
- Closing motion execution.
Once skills can be objectively measured, they stop being enablement initiatives.
They become revenue risk variables.
And risks don’t get debated.
They get managed.
And the moment something becomes a risk, leadership treats it very differently.
• Pipeline health is tracked as revenue risk.
• Forecast health is tracked as revenue risk.
• Headcount capacity is tracked as revenue risk.
Now, skill health can be tracked as revenue risk.
This is the power shift most enablement leaders haven’t fully internalized yet.
Revenue enablement is not being asked to support revenue better.
It’s being forced into a new role altogether.
A role where it manages revenue risk by measuring skills and quantifying their impact on revenue.
The Future of Revenue Enablement: Revenue Rink Management
This is where revenue enablement is headed — whether leaders want it to or not.
Revenue enablement is about to go from a function that struggles for legitimacy in the C-Suite
to one that is respected — and relied upon — as a revenue risk management team.
Not because enablement suddenly becomes more important.
But because the thing it has always been responsible for — skill health — becomes measurable, attributable to revenue, and impossible to ignore.
Revenue is ultimately a skill-constrained system.
Which means skill transformation is one of the most powerful growth levers in the company.
Historically, that leverage was theoretical.
• Enablement could influence skills, but it couldn’t quantify them.
• It could run programs, but it couldn’t dollarize outcomes.
• It could argue impact, but it couldn’t prove it.
Now it’s operational.
Enablement can say:
“Our team is only in the 33rd percentile of multi-threading capability — and based on our own data, that skill gap cost us $5.3 million in closed-lost revenue last quarter.”
And:
“If we move our multi-threading capability to the 80th percentile, based on our current pipeline, we project $2.1 million in incremental revenue by December 31.”
That’s not enablement reporting.
That’s revenue risk reporting.
And it’s crack-cocaine for CROs, CEOs, and even boards. It’s the language they already know and act on.
• They don’t debate it.
• They don’t defer it.
• They operationalize it.
This is why revenue enablement leaders who can quantify skill health and tie it directly to outcomes won’t be ignored.
They’ll be treated like every other serious line-of-business leader.
Because once skill becomes the primary growth lever — and its downside risk can be measured — the team responsible for managing that risk becomes non-optional.
Soon, boards won’t just ask about pipeline and forecast accuracy.
They’ll ask:
“What is the skill health of the revenue organization — and how much revenue is currently at risk because of it?”
Just like they ask for pipeline health today.
When that question becomes standard, revenue enablement stops being a support function.
It becomes a revenue risk function.
It becomes a control function.
The Choice Ahead
This shift is already underway.
• Skill is becoming measurable.
• Risk is becoming visible.
• Accountability is no longer optional.
Which means revenue enablement has a decision to make.
Lead this transition — own skill health, quantify revenue risk, and operate as a first-class business function.
Or you can resist it — and be evaluated, downsized, or replaced by leaders who do.
There is no middle ground anymore.
When boards start asking about skill health the same way they ask about pipeline health, enablement won’t be judged by effort, intent, or activity.
It will be judged by outcomes.
Revenue attribution in enablement is coming.
The only question is whether revenue enablement owns it — or whether it gets audited by it.
That choice will define who leads the profession next.
And who doesn’t survive the shift.