How to Get Your CRO Leaning In: Sales Enablement That Hits Home

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Capturing a CRO’s attention—and earning their trust—is essential for sales enablement to make a real impact. When sales enablement is tightly aligned with the CRO, it becomes a revenue engine rather than a cost center—empowering GTM teams to deliver measurable results and giving leaders the clarity to make smart, confident decisions.

But how do we get there? Grabbing and sustaining a CRO’s attention can be difficult with all of the priorities they are juggling. Here’s some tips on how you can ensure your enablement team gets beyond the noise and becomes indispensable to your CRO’s agenda.  

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Speak Their Language: Productive Capacity and Marginal Gains

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CROs double-take for marginal gains: those small tweaks that drive insane output. The concept of productive capacity–or how efficiently a sales team can convert leads and opportunities into closed deals– is a key component of our strategy at Revlogic. We kick off every customer engagement by identifying the marginal gains that will make their GTM team more efficient after implementing our custom programs. This can look like: 

• Proposing a comprehensive onboarding program that can potentially shave 1 month off of ramp time
• Implementing a consistent PG muscle and strategy that boosts the number of deals piped per quarter, per rep 
• Building and facilitating a meaningful training on discovery that can increase early-stage conversion rates  

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Trust Is Your Ticket: Align, Report, Repeat

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The best way to build trust with your CRO is to connect your enablement strategy to their top priorities. If your strategy lacks a connection to meaningful business outputs or solely focuses on enhancing a small skillset for reps, your programs shift from “top priority” to just added noise for the field. 

• Map your enablement KPIs to quarterly goals: Pipeline, deal velocity, conversion rates, win rates, rep performance – it’s very likely some or all of these are top of mind for your CRO. Understand what outputs are a focus for the quarter, and work cross functionally with your RevOps team to ensure the build and access to dashboards that measure these outputs.
• Co-own success: Co-creation is at the heart of what we do with all of our clients at Revlogic. There is no better way to ensure full alignment and confidence with your CRO than inviting them in for feedback, and iterating quickly based on their inputs. 
• Make your updates count: A CRO has limited time, so you need to ensure the time you do get is well spent. Going into every 1:1 or update call, be sure to highlight the blockers/challenges enablement is addressing, and what’s been done to drive change – whether that’s building and launching a training, creating new resources, or seeing a shift in the outputs you’re tracking. 

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Empathy Is Your Multi-Million Dollar Muscle

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One pitfall I see a lot of enablement professionals get themselves into is relying too much on their past experience. Don’t get me wrong, your past experiences should give you confidence, knowledge and even inspiration on how to tackle new challenges. But don’t undermine the importance of understanding how sellers sell at your current company.  What worked when you sold or did enablement at one company, might not work at the one you’re at currently. This is why it’s so important to deeply understand the day-to-day of your sellers – not just to be successful in your enablement role, but also to show your CRO and your field that you’ve taken the time to understand their process, challenges and potential opportunities. 

Sellers are juggling prospects, price objections, last-minute pitch decks—and CROs are in their corner. Here’s how you can make sure you’re helping them fight the good fight:

• Shadow sales calls and run internal discovery calls with sellers. Recap your top themes and insights for your CRO, highlighting areas of challenge and opportunity that your enablement team can help address.
• Ensure every output, resource, or training is built on actual seller feedback, not textbook theory. Almost everything your enablement team produces should have seller or sales leader eyes on it for feedback and input.
• CROs want enablement that will enhance or improve what sellers already have to do to successfully sell – if you can’t connect the time you’re taking sellers away from the field back to that, then it is not time well spent for them. 

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Bring It Home: Measurable Impact or Bust

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The best sales enablement leaders start every initiative with the end business output in mind. Align your programs, your words, and your actions with what makes revenue leaders tick, with the goal of building trust, empathy and rapid impact in all of your interactions with your field and your CRO. As you work to build tighter alignment between your enablement team and your field, I challenge you to think: What would it take for enablement to be the best investment we made last quarter? 

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