Sales Enablement Has a New Mandate

There’s something uncomfortable sitting just beneath the surface of most sales organisations.

 We’ve spent years getting better at training sellers, and yet performance hasn’t moved as much as we expected.

This isn’t because the training is poor. In many cases, it’s actually very good.

The truth is that we’ve been solving the wrong problem. Or at least, only half of it.

For a long time, the mandate for sales enablement has been clear. Build capability. Help sellers understand the product, the customer, and the sales motion. Give them the tools to practise. Support managers to coach. Reinforce behaviours over time.

All of that still matters, and may actually be more important now than ever before.

But if you spend any real time with a sales team, something quickly becomes obvious. Selling is not what sellers are spending most of their time doing.

It has become the thing they are trying to do in between everything else:

• Preparing for meetings.
• Updating CRM.
• Writing follow-ups.
• Navigating internal processes.
• Searching for content that definitely exists, but nobody can quite find.

Individually, these tasks are reasonable. Collectively, they become something else entirely. They become friction, and friction - more than capability - is what’s holding performance back.

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