Background
Peer started as a consulting business back in 2014. It wasn’t called Peer back then, but revenue generation for sales and marketing teams was the mission. 😉 After working at a successful digital and brand agency, I found that there were a lot of organizations that didn’t understand how to use marketing to drive revenue. Meaning – they ran successful marketing campaigns but couldn’t turn those campaigns into revenue.
I started my career at a healthcare manufacturing and distribution company as a BDR. Eventually, I ran a BDR sales team and worked closely with my marketing director and customer success team to drive revenue from marketing all the way through to the customer. We didn’t feel like it was rocket science; it was just good sales and marketing alignment. And, it worked! We grew year over year by 10-20% and we consistently hit our lead and revenue targets.
After I left the healthcare company, I worked at a well-respected digital agency that primarily worked with mid-market and enterprise organizations in the financial services and insurance industries. These companies had considerable sales teams and much larger marketing budgets. But, what was incredible about that experience was seeing how siloed the sales and marketing teams were. And, these siloed teams led to missed opportunities to generate revenue from marketing efforts.
After leaving the agency world, I saw an opportunity to teach sales and marketing teams how to work together, define their Ideal Customer Profiles, nail their messaging, and run campaigns that supported the sales team and turned contacts into customers. Or in other words, create a sales enablement program that worked! That curriculum became Peer Sales Agency’s primary offering, Revenue Generation Foundation.
Now that we have been operating Peer since 2018, we have a framework that we run with our clients and for ourselves that helps us grow consistently and add new logos while keeping our clients happy and growing. The way we implement different strategies to generate revenue has certainly changed with new tech, new expertise, and a team that won’t stop improving on the original idea, but the goals and the core of what we are driven to do are the same. So, let’s break down how companies generate revenue from their marketing and sales enablement programs.
Why does a company need Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is crucial for revenue teams to help educate and nurture prospective buyers through the buyer’s journey to make a decision. We’ve all heard the standard stat 75% of all buyers research their decision before they connect with salespeople. So, if a prospect is doing their own research, it’s imperative that marketing teams create content that appeals to their pain points, what they are thinking, and what they are feeling at each stage of the buyer’s journey so that the prospect has the research they need to educate themselves about your offering. Without it, your company won’t be included as a possible solution.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement involves the content, process, and delivery of marketing materials to prospective buyers to support the sales process.
Sales Enablement Content – This is content that is designed to answer buyer questions. It can include marketing materials, articles on a website or social media channel, videos, and even recorded events. All content is designed with buyer personas and pain points in mind to align the messaging to the needs of the buyer.
Process – The process of using the content to map to the buyer journey is important so that your buyer feels as though they are naturally moving from one stage to the next of their research. Process is typically supported by multiple delivery channels.
Delivery – This is a very important part of sales enablement. Knowing which channels your buyers are using to do their research is vital so the marketing team can ensure the content is available in those channels to put your offering in front of them at the right time. Delivery can include social media, email marketing, search engines, LLMs, and salespeople themselves.
What are the components of a successful sales enablement program?
Ideal Customer Profile: The first step in creating a successful sales enablement program is to identify the persona or Ideal Customer Profile of the audience you are trying to reach. Once you have a documented persona or ICP, you will perform research to identify the key pain points, feelings, ideas, and solutions for them.
Audience Research: Research is typically performed in a variety of ways, beginning with interviews to understand your ICP. After those interviews are complete, research tools like SEMRush, SparkToro, and a whole host of others uncover data-backed insights about your audience to support content strategy and creation.
Content Strategy: A foundational step in the revenue generation strategy is to start with a content strategy. This allows the marketing team to map buyer pains, feelings, thoughts, and questions to the stages of their journey. Then, that strategy becomes the guide for which content the marketing team needs to create to turn contacts into customers.
Content: Content creation is the process of creating a variety of materials in different formats to educate the buyer. This is the grind part of sales enablement, and frankly, the part that many companies are outsourcing to AI. AI-generated content can be done effectively as of the writing of this article. But, using humans to inform and edit the creation of content is still the gold standard in motivating a buyer to make a purchase. Creativity and authenticity are more valuable now than ever in content creation.
CRM & Marketing Automation: Contact Record Management systems (CRM’s) are the source of truth for contacts. It is possible to track engagement for a prospective buyer in your CRM all the way from contact to customer. Whether companies are using HubSpot (our preferred CRM & Marketing Automation platform) or Salesforce or any other CRM, it is important to look for technology that can track interactions so the sales and marketing teams can bubble up the most active buyers and reach out at the right time without bombarding them to force a decision. Because buyers hate that. There is a reason they do their research before they speak with a salesperson. They want to feel like they control their own purchasing process.
Data Monitoring: Tracking key performance indicators like:
- Website traffic to high-performing pages
- Page visits by contacts
- Audience sources
- # of Email opens and clicks
- Requests for demo, information, calls, or contacts made with sales
- # of Meetings
- Average deal size
- Days to close
- # of Deals closed
They are all important. These data points identify areas where a sales and marketing team is finding success and where they need to iterate to improve. It is also important to know that I have never seen a revenue generation program demonstrate definitive ROI in less than 6 months. Trends should be the leading indicators of whether the team is heading in the right direction.
Revenue: Sales Enablement is worth nothing if the act of creating deals, putting revenue to the deal, and tracking it through the sales stages to closed-won or closed-lost is not executed religiously.
How do Marketing and Sales Enablement work together to Generate Revenue?
Marketing creates and maintains sales enablement for the organization. They don’t do it in a silo. They work with the sales team to get feedback from their interactions with buyers so they can make adjustments and improve outcomes for the sales team. And, marketing also helps train the sales team on how to use sales enablement to keep their prospects moving down the funnel toward a purchase. This is typically done through CRM and Marketing automation tools like Salesforce and HubSpot.
At Peer, we’ve always believed that revenue generation isn’t about chasing the newest trend or flooding the world with content. It’s about taking the time to understand your buyers, align your teams, and build a repeatable system that actually moves people through a decision. The companies that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets—they’re the ones who stay close to their customers, stay honest about what’s working, and stay committed to doing the fundamentals really, really well.
When your ICP is dialed in, your research is solid, and your content is built with intention, your sales team suddenly feels supported instead of overwhelmed. And when marketing and sales are actually talking—sharing insights, refining messaging, and using the same process—everything becomes easier. Deals move faster. Buyers feel more confident. Revenue becomes predictable instead of reactive.
This is the work we’ve been doing since the beginning: helping teams create alignment, clarity, and a framework they can trust. And while the tools and tactics will always evolve, the core truth stays the same—companies grow when they put the buyer at the center and empower their teams to guide that buyer with confidence. That’s the heart of sales enablement. And that’s how marketing truly drives revenue.
