Most buyer enablement is sales enablement with a new name
Somewhere in the last three years, most B2B marketing teams renamed something. The sales enablement programme became buyer enablement. The content library became a buyer resource hub. The battlecards got a softer tone.
I understand why. Buying has changed, and buyer enablement is the right response to it. But in most businesses I work with, the thing that got renamed did not change. Marketing still produces the material. Sales still carries it. It is still aimed at the one person we already have a relationship with. Same function, same direction, same person, new label.
Buyer enablement is the practice of removing friction from how a buying group builds consensus, justifies a change and decides internally. Read that again and notice who it is about. Not our sellers. Not our champion. The group, and the conversations it has without us.
A simple test
Take the material your business call buyer enablement and ask three questions of it.
Who wrote it? If the answer is marketing alone, it can only answer the questions marketing knows to ask.
Who is it aimed at? If it is the champion, it is sales enablement. The champion is already convinced. The people who are not are finance, operations, IT, legal and the future users, and most of your material was never written for them.
Which questions does it answer? If it answers why us, it is persuasion. Buyer enablement answers what happens next: what implementation involves, who does the work, what it costs to change and what it costs not to, and how the risk is handled if it goes wrong.
Most programmes fail all three, and not because anyone is doing bad work. They fail because they were built by one function for another function, and the buyer's questions do not live in either.
Where the buyer's questions actually live
A buying group trying to decide is not really asking about your product. It is trying to picture the whole of working with you.
Finance wants to know what it truly costs, including the cost of disruption, and what happens to the numbers if it goes wrong. Operations wants to know who does the work during implementation and what stops while they do it. IT wants to know what it touches and who supports it. Legal and procurement want to know what they are signing and where the exits are.
The future users want to know whether their day gets better or worse.
The answers to those questions sit in your product team, your service team, your finance team, your implementation team and your customer success team. Very few of them sit in marketing, and fewer still in sales.
Kristina Jaramillo calls the space between those teams "the seams", and it is exactly where the buyer's questions fall.
So genuine buyer enablement cannot be a marketing programme. It is a buyer-centric strategy the whole organisation has to build together, because the buyer experiences the whole organisation, whether or not we organise ourselves that way.
Why it is hard, and why it is worth it
It is hard because nobody owns it. Every function I just listed is measured on its own work, and none of them is measured on whether a buying group it never meets was able to reach a decision. So it falls to whoever is closest, usually marketing, and shrinks to what one function can deliver alone.
I have seen programmes like that be called buyer enablement. They produced good content and changed very little, because the questions that stalled the deals were never ones we they in a position to answer on our own.
It is worth it because this is where deals actually go. Between 40 and 60% of losses in complex B2B go to no decision at all (Dixon and McKenna, The JOLT Effect). In my experience, a large share of those are buying groups that could not assemble answers to questions sitting across five of our teams.
What changes when it is done properly
The organisation starts with the buying group rather than the funnel: who is in it, what each person needs in order to say yes, and which of our teams holds that answer. The teams that hold the answers build the material together, in the buyer's language, for the conversations we will never be in. And someone owns the whole of it. Not the content. The outcome: whether the group was able to decide.
That is a different approach, not a better version of the old one. It asks a different question of every function. Not how do we help sales win this, but what does this group need from us to decide, and which of us has it.
It is also why the Relativity Framework® is built around cross-functional teams working through the go-to-market together, rather than any one function doing its part in isolation.
