How SAP relaunched with zero extra headcount

There's a question I like to ask whenever I'm in a room full of enablement and revenue operations professionals:

How many of you work for a company planning to launch a new product in the next 12 months?

Almost every hand goes up.

Then I ask a follow-up:

Keep your hand up if you feel like your field is already ready to deliver that product to market at full potential.

The hands drop. Almost all of them.

That gap, between the product shipping and the field actually being ready to sell it well, is where so much go-to-market potential gets lost. And I'd argue it's a structural problem.

One that enablement and revenue operations teams are uniquely positioned to solve, if they're willing to move upstream.

The real reason product launches underdeliver

Here's what I've seen happen, more times than I'd like to admit. The product ships on time. Eighty percent of the features are there, the field assets are ready, and yet the actual go-to-market underdelivers.

Why?

Because the assumption baked into most launch processes is that the field will somehow bridge the gap. That your account executives will figure out the positioning questions that leadership never resolved.

That your solution architects will demo a product they haven't had time to properly explore. That the momentum of launch day will carry everyone through.

It doesn't. And the teams left holding the mess are usually us.

What I want to make the case for is a different role for enablement and RevOps. One where we're involved earlier, contributing more meaningfully, and doing the kind of work that actually shapes whether a launch succeeds. Think of it as moving from cleanup crew to architect.

We're in a genuinely unique position to do this. We see how SDRs are running outbound. We understand how solution consultants structure demos. We know how account executives are managing their territories.

That cross-functional visibility, that ability to see the whole field at once, is something very few other teams have. And if we bring that perspective upstream into the launch process, we can surface the hard questions before they become expensive problems.

The pressure test: five ways to check a launch is ready

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GTM AlliancePawan Kumar Suresh

What we did at SAP Customer Experience

Let me give you some context, because I think it helps to see this grounded in a real situation rather than theory.

I work for SAP Customer Experience, specifically the part of the business that handles marketing automation. We came into SAP through the acquisition of a company called Emarsys, and I joined in 2024 to co-lead the integration into SAP CX. In February this year, three things happened simultaneously.

We rebranded. We launched a new product, which we now call the Engagement Cloud enterprise edition. And we integrated our field organizations, collapsing a 200-person Emarsys field team into the broader CX field.

Three things at once. It was, to put it mildly, a lot.

We didn't get extra headcount to manage it. What we did get was a chance to rearchitect how enablement and rev ops showed up in the process. And that meant doing some internal lobbying first, making the case that the current way of operating simply wasn't going to deliver the numbers the business was expecting.

What follows are the three plays we used. I'd encourage you to think about how you might adapt them for your own context.

Play one: the GTM lift assessment

Before anything else, I want to flag something important. This kind of assessment isn't something you'd run for every product update or minor feature release. If your product is constantly shipping innovations, and most of ours are, you need to be selective.

My recommendation is to establish two tiers of product launches. Tier A launches are the ones that will make or break your number this year. Those deserve the full treatment. Everything else can be handled with a lighter-touch approach. And one of the first contributions enablement and rev ops can make is helping the organization decide which launches belong in which tier.

For your Tier A launches, the GTM lift assessment is where you start. The purpose is simple: surface the hard decisions and disagreements early, rather than letting them land on the field at the worst possible moment.

Here's how we ran it. In July 2025, we brought together senior leaders from services, revenue, marketing, and product. Every C-suite and C-minus-one leader was asked to complete a pre-workshop survey. Crucially, we ran it anonymously. That matters more than it might sound.

When we looked at the results, the variance was striking. Our marketing team scored brand fit very highly. Other teams disagreed significantly. If we hadn't done this anonymously, people would have felt linked to their scores, almost as if they were marking their own homework. Anonymity lets the real picture emerge.

We presented the results as a radar chart, a composite of all the different responses, at the start of our in-person session. The point of that chart isn't the average score. It's the shape. The variance between different leaders' views is where the real insight lives.

Questions like: do we genuinely have the competitive right to win in this space? Is there real alignment between our brand positioning and how the revenue team is thinking about this? Those conversations are uncomfortable. But having them in a structured workshop in July is a lot better than having them surface through lost deals in Q4.

Play two: the structured workshop

Once you've run the assessment and you understand where the disagreements are, the next step is getting the right people in a room to work through them.

We had over 20 executives involved, and we organized the work into five streams. I won't go through every detail, but the most important learning here is this: pre-agree on the output before the workshop starts.

Each stream had a templated output format, which meant the discussions produced clear actions and, more importantly, clear dates. By when does this disagreement need to be resolved? Who owns it? What does "resolved" actually look like?

The five streams we worked through covered positioning, launch strategy, commercialization, implementation model, and migration strategy. That last one matters a lot if you have an existing product in the market. What happens to the customers already on the old version? Get ahead of that question early, because your field will definitely be asked it.