When most companies talk about “enablement,” they’re already too late.

The typical approach goes something like this:

Step 1: Marketing generates pipeline.
Step 2: Leads go to sales.
Step 3: Sales enablement kicks in to train reps, build decks, and create objection handling guides.

It sounds logical on paper. But in practice, this sequencing creates friction, waste, and underperformance across the entire go-to-market system.

Why? Because true revenue enablement doesn’t start after marketing delivers leads.

It starts long before the first campaign ever runs.

The Fatal Flaw in Traditional Enablement

When enablement is treated as something downstream of lead generation, you end up with a system built on unstable foundations:

• Marketing builds content based on surface-level personas, often imagined in conference rooms.
• Sales tries to “personalize” messaging based on their own experience — leading to dozens of inconsistent narratives.
• Customer success inherits customers who probably never should have been closed in the first place.
• Product marketing spends months retrofitting battlecards after patterns have already emerged in lost deals.

By the time you realize your messaging doesn’t connect, your funnel is full of poorly qualified opportunities and your enablement function is stuck in reactive mode.

This is why so many revenue enablement investments fail to generate real lift — they’re patching symptoms, not fixing the system.

Revenue Enablement Actually Starts Before the Funnel

True enablement begins upstream, at what we call pre-enablement.

This is where you answer the foundational questions that shape your entire go-to-market system:

1. Who Are We Actually Targeting?

Not broad market segments. Not ICP ranges pulled from a data platform. Not “any company that uses Salesforce.”

We’re talking about tightly defined buying groups with:

• Clear pain ownership
• Shared purchase triggers
• Aligned internal stakeholders
• Budget authority tied to specific outcomes

Example:

Instead of targeting “mid-market SaaS companies,” pre-enablement defines your target as:

“VPs of RevOps at $10M–$50M SaaS companies, currently expanding from founder-led sales to formalized sales operations, struggling with pipeline forecasting accuracy and attribution transparency.”

That’s who you’re building your system for.

2. What Real Problems Do They Care About?

Too many companies build enablement content around what they want to sell, not what buyers are actually trying to solve.

Pre-enablement forces you to map:

• Trigger events that drive urgency
• Business problems that create organizational pain
• Emotional friction points that slow buying decisions
• Internal debates that shape consensus

Example:

Your software may have “real-time analytics” as a feature. But what your buyer cares about is:

“Reducing CFO escalations over missed revenue targets caused by inaccurate pipeline rollups.”

Enablement built on features misses. Enablement built on pain lands.

3. How Does Our GTM Motion Integrate the Entire Customer Experience?

Pre-enablement doesn’t just define who and what — it defines how.

• How do we position across every stage of the buying committee?
• How do we sequence conversations to build internal consensus?
• How do we structure onboarding so value realization happens fast?
• How do we feed customer learnings back into positioning continuously?

This is integrated GTM design — not marketing, not sales, not CS — but a unified system that governs how the entire revenue engine runs.

Example:

If your onboarding team keeps discovering that customers misunderstood implementation complexity, that’s not a CS problem — it’s a pre-enablement failure in how sales positioned the rollout to begin with.

Why Most Organizations Skip Pre-Enablement (And Pay for It Later)

Pre-enablement work feels uncomfortable because it exposes misalignment before revenue starts flowing.

• It forces marketing, sales, product, and customer success to sit at the same table.
• It surfaces disagreements about who your best customers actually are.
• It requires hard trade-offs in ICP focus, messaging discipline, and GTM design.

Most organizations would rather avoid those debates — and default to building enablement reactively after problems emerge downstream.

But that avoidance always costs more later:

• More content revisions
• More sales training refreshes
• More churned customers
• More “alignment meetings” trying to fix misfiring teams

The Fix: Build Enablement Into System Design

The companies that win at revenue enablement aren’t better at producing battlecards. They’re better at architecting GTM systems where enablement is native, not reactive.

That means:

• Integrated ICP design: Cross-functional agreement on who the system is built to serve.
• Revenue positioning frameworks: Clear articulation of value tied to customer outcomes, not product features.
• Pipeline architecture: GTM motions mapped to real-world buyer journeys.
• Feedback loops: Continuous integration of CS, sales, and product insights into evolving enablement materials.
• Operational discipline: Shared accountability for how the entire GTM system runs.

At Samesum, this is exactly the work we focus on. Pre-enablement isn’t a side project. It’s the foundation.

Because when you solve for alignment upstream, every downstream motion — from content creation to sales execution to customer success — compounds instead of conflicting.