Sales enablement vs sales operations: what’s the difference and why it matters

It takes more than skilled reps and flashy slide decks to successfully drive revenue growth. Every high-performing sales team has a smart strategy and efficient operations behind it.

Sales enablement and sales operations are both essential elements, though often misunderstood or even mistaken for the same thing. Knowing the difference between the two can make a big impact.

When sales enablement and sales operations work together, you’re bound to smooth out your sales process, boost productivity, and drive consistent revenue growth, which is the ultimate goal.

In this article, we’ll tackle what each function does, how they’re different, and why aligning them both can make a big difference for your overall sales performance.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement is all about providing sales teams with the content, tools, training, and support they need to sell effectively. You need to equip your people with the right information at the right time in the buyer’s journey.

Here are some core responsibilities of sales enablement:

• Onboarding and training: New reps need to be prepared to ramp quickly, so the right onboarding can make all the difference to get your team closing deals.
• Content management: This is about creating materials to support the sales team like case studies, one-pagers, and email templates. PandaDoc, for example, can help your team create, collaborate on, and share all critical documents in one central location.
• Coaching and support: Both new and seasoned reps need to be coached and provided playbooks, feedback, and exercises to make sure they are always improving their messaging.
• Marketing alignment: A solid sales enablement strategy means keeping up to date with relevant content and messaging, which means connecting with the marketing team for the appropriate materials.
• Tool adoption: When you implement platforms like LMS, content hubs, engagement tools, etc., you will set your team up for success.

Sales enablement fundamentally boosts sales efficiency by enhancing the performance of sales representatives. This ultimately leads to higher win rates and more predictable revenue.

Want to dive deeper? Read all about the ins and outs of sales enablement here.

What is sales operations?

Sales operations, also known as “sales ops,” are all about managing systems, processes, and data so that the sales team can function smoothly and at scale. It’s more analytical and systems-focused to support sales strategy and execution.

Here are some core responsibilities of sales ops:

• CRM management: This means setting up and standardizing CRM usage across the team.
• Reporting and analytics: You can better guide your strategy when you track important metrics like pipeline health and forecast accuracy.
• Compensation planning: Your commission structures need to align with your business goals, and sales ops has a role in planning this.
• Account and target planning: Your reps need to have the right accounts, plus they need clear and realistic sales goals (think: reasonable quotas).
• Process optimization: This is all about smoothing out workflows and making sure sales methods are consistent across the board.

Think of sales operations as the strategy and logic behind the sales organization. This function handles the behind-the-scenes mechanics so that sales teams can focus their time on selling.

Want to cut quote time and close more deals? Read all about sales operations CPQ here.

What’s the difference between sales enablement and sales operations?

Both functions work to drive sales performance, but they do so in different ways. Here’s a quick breakdown:

You can think of sales enablement as the practice that empowers sellers to do their job better, whereas sales ops is focused on making the entire system those sellers work within more efficient.

Here’s what Katie Drury, Head of Revenue Enablement at PandaDoc, says about these two functions:

“Sales Enablement facilitates the room for knowledge to flow through. This includes defining the content management structure, new hire onboarding, product readiness & release management, methodology, playbooks, tool training, and more! Operations owns creating the processes & reporting in which we train on. This includes configuring our tools, reporting out on results, defining comp and forecasting, capacity planning, and creating a streamlined customer journey in partnership with marketing. Operations creates the system and structures for our team to work and Sales Enablement owns making sure Account Executives and managers have the knowledge and skills to be able to execute against this structure.”

How do sales enablement and sales operations work together to improve sales performance?

You now know what each of these functions is, but what happens when they work together? The short answer is that they create a connected support system that covers both the people and the processes.

This means no more silos and instead, effective collaboration that ultimately leads to sustainable growth.

Here are a few ways they work together:

1. Shared data leads to better training

Sales ops can track performance metrics like win rates, conversion ratios, and deal velocity. Then, sales enablement can use this data to find gaps in skills and create targeted coaching programs.

2. Training supports process changes

If sales ops can identify inefficiencies, enablement can reinforce new processes that address them. This means better workflows and more deals closed.

3. Content performance is optimized through analytics

By analyzing real-world application, the operations team helps improve the sales materials (e.g., case studies) created by the sales enablement team.

4. Technology is adopted more effectively

When sales ops rolls out new tools or CRM updates, sales enablement is the team that can make sure reps comprehend how and why they should be using those tools. This reduces downtime and resistance to change.

5. Cross-functional alignment becomes easier

When both enablement and operations teams collaborate, other departments like marketing, finance, and customer success can align more easily. This means consistent and customer-centric experiences throughout the buyer’s journey.

Power your sales process with the right tools

Sales enablement and sales operations both play vital roles in building a scalable, high-performing sales engine. With enablement empowering reps with knowledge, content, and training so they can succeed, operations make sure the systems and processes are running smoothly and efficiently behind the scenes.

When you align these two functions, you get a more productive team and consistent revenue growth.

PandaDoc supports both sides of that coin. With document workflow automation, we create automatic processes to help your teams reduce repetitive, manual tasks while minimizing errors. Our platform helps your reps move faster and gives your ops team the visibility and control they need to scale smarter.

We’ve got you covered with everything you need to keep deals moving forward, from customizable templates to eSignatures.

Want to see how PandaDoc can help you optimize the sales process and close more deals? Request a free demo today.