I love Thanksgiving. We get to focus on eating food (my favorite), watching football, spending time with family and friends, but most importantly, we all get to reflect on what we have to be thankful for this year. Family, friends, and health usually top the list and this year is no different.

As we prepare for our Thanksgiving break, I have been thinking that there is no greater time to be part of the revenue and profit engine for B2B companies. I’ve compiled a list of three revenue and profit drivers that I am thankful for, because they are driving already, or have the potential in the near future to drive, real change and profit impact in the B2B space:

• Growth of Sales Enablement

Sales Enablement is committed to one thing: driving sales excellence to grow profit and revenue for their firms. Sticking with my Thanksgiving theme, which includes football, Sales Enablement is the B2B equivalent of the offensive and defensive coordinators on a team. The Sales Enablement function can identify the right capabilities, strategies, and tools to drive better outcomes.

Through our Negotiating with Backbone initiative, we’ve had the pleasure of working with some Sales Enablement specialists that truly make me excited about the impact they can have on salespeople's ability to deliver. They are the Josh McDaniels of the Sales Enablement world. They tend to be relentless in their pursuit of identifying and addressing root causes, genuine in their passion to improving sales outcomes, and obsessively focused on fixing processes that in the past have been very broken.

Thanks to the work of the Sales Enablement Society to develop this function, it has so much more potential.

• Accessibility of artificial intelligence and machine learning

Technology advancements in these tools are becoming part of our everyday business lives. Although to some, AI may seem still seem more like a concept in Blade Runner 2049, we are seeing it creep into our everyday lives with the Siris and Alexas of the world. Thanks to more open source programming, we will see more use of chat bots in sales and marketing, and machine learning is already making an impact on pricing and sales.

In fact, our own mobile learning tool uses machine learning to identify in Backbone sellers weaker negotiation capabilities and push appropriate content, questions, and resources to strengthen those skills. In this case, machine learning helps produce faster and more confident application of Backbone concepts, leading salespeople to produce better pricing and sales outcomes!

• Data, data, data

The abundance of data, and the tools and skills to make sense of it, have created an ability to segment customers into smaller and smaller segments. The plethora of benefits here is the ability to better manage the complexity of markets and identify opportunities in well-defined segments. This allows pricers to better align value on the segment level, allow for specific and targeted price changes, and create a clear path to get the right price.

This is my short list of profit drivers from what I have seen by talking to clients, technology experts, partners, and pricing geek friends (you know who you are). I’m curious…what’s on your thankful list?

Happy Thanksgiving to all!