“The essence of Sales Enablement is to help companies grow their business faster by aligning their people, processes, and priorities.”
-Elay Cohen, CEO and Co-Founder of SalesHood
Sales enablement continues to evolve and mature rapidly. The pandemic has changed the way we sell forever—organizations have been forced to make drastic changes to their sales enablement programs, focusing on virtual enablement and virtual selling. Having a sales enablement program is no longer an option. It’s a must-have business imperative. When you can unlock the power of sales enablement through an optimized sales enablement platform that includes onboarding and new hire training, modeling, pitch practice, and feedback–something really magical happens. All of your revenue teams are aligned with the same messaging, same pitch, and the same strategy–it’s a beautiful thing. In this sales enablement guide you’ll learn about the personnel, the sales enablement processes and software, and the industry leaders you need to follow to stay attuned to the latest sales strategies and best practices.
Table of Contents
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- Definition: What Is Sales Enablement?
- 2025 Sales Performance and Sales Effectiveness Challenges
- The Pillar of a Successful Enablement Strategy
- How Does Sales Enablement Benefit Organizations
- Practical Examples and Use Cases of Sales Enablement
- Sales Enablement Vs. Revenue Enablement: Key Differences
- The Revenue Enablement Maturity Model
- How to Structure your Enablement Team?
- Why CMOs and Product Marketing Should Care About Enablement?
- When is the Right Time To Implement Sales Enablement?
- How to Measure Sales Enablement Impact?
- The Challenges Companies Face with Sales Enablement
- Key Enablement Definitions and Terms
- AI Use Cases In Sales Enablement
- The Future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Sales Enablement
- AI Coaching Success Story
- Summary
- More Enablement Resources
Definition: What is Sales Enablement?Sales enablement is the strategic process of empowering sales teams with the knowledge, tools, and content they need to sell effectively and consistently. It’s about creating alignment across your go-to-market teams—marketing, sales, and customer success—ensuring every buyer interaction is impactful and every seller is equipped to win. Sales enablement drives measurable outcomes, including higher win rates, shorter sales cycles, and improved quota attainment. By leveraging technology, coaching, and just-in-time content delivery, it transforms how sales teams work, enabling them to sell better, sell faster, and deliver exceptional value to buyers. The ultimate goal is to create predictable, scalable revenue growth while building stronger customer relationships. |
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We invite you to watch this 2-minute video outlining the Enablement Mastery book and offering more insight the benefits of sales enablement. Take SalesHood’s free, Enablement Mastery course for a more comprehensive understanding of how to master revenue enablement. Enablement practitioners love the course. “Such a great course and opportunity to connect with sales enablement peers. Elay Cohen and the entire team at SalesHood is really committed to supporting our efforts in the field. If you can, you’d be crazy not to take the course.” Giorgia Ortiz, VP Enablement
Sales enablement is important because it facilitates better use of resources across all areas of the business and aligns the sales and marketing teams. It uses a cohesive strategy for companies to increase win rates and better utilize the sales process. Read more about why sales enablement matters here.
2025 Sales Performance and Sales Effectiveness Challenges
We’re seeing a massive shift from capacity to efficiency. Companies are focused on improving sales effectiveness and sales efficiency versus hiring at all costs.
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It’s no secret that improving sales productivity is a top 205 priority. The current reality and hard truth of sales team performance today is that:
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Most of our customers come to us with very similar performance challenges. Why is this happening? Most underperforming and struggling with sales efficiency across these dimensions:
- Cycle time is too long
- Ramp time is too long
- Selling time is too short
- Win rates are too low
These statistics leave a huge opportunity for improvement with sales enablement. Poor sales performance is a direct effect of sales teams not being aligned, not modeling top seller behavior, and not having consistent sales pitch practice & feedback – which are some of the main problems sales enablement platforms aim to solve.
The Pillars of a Successful Enablement Strategy
Great sales enablement involves building a successful infrastructure of sales content, and a renewing network of feedback and improvements to the sales process that can be made in real time. There’s no single approach to creating an effective sales enablement strategy. Different companies and analysts all have varying opinions and implementation strategies, and many of them work. While great sales enablement can look different depending on industry, organization, and team structure, you can use these four pillars, defined by Sheevaun Thatcher, to guide your sales enablement programs and initiatives:
Do They have The Right Message?
It’s important to make sure that the go-to-market strategy is about everyone in the company – you want everyone in the company to be on the same page. The seemingly simple question of “what does your company DO” needs to resonate loud and clear with every member of every team. For sellers specifically this means making sure they have mastered their sales pitch. Read our Sales Pitch Practice blog to get insight on how to enable your sales reps to craft sales pitches that create meaningful conversations with prospects.
Do They Know How To Access Content and Collateral?
Is your sales content easily accessible for your sales enablement team? Sales enablement’s job is to connect the dots and to take all the useful content that your teams produce and plug it into a library that is searchable, and makes relevant, on-message content available exactly when your sales team needs it most. If the content isn’t available sales enablement can create it based on the data and insights your sales team collects through daily conversations and interactions with potential customers and prospects.
Sales enablement collateral encompasses all the tools, material, and content that your team creates and crafts to train sales representatives. It allows the salespeople to present a company’s value proposition to the buyer effectively and includes educational content for your sales enablement team. It isn’t necessarily external or customer-facing, and it isn’t something that would be available to anyone outside your company. For example, the information presented might have data that examines competitors’ products or services. Some of the questions that sales enablement collateral might look at are:
- How do you overcome objections from buyers?
- How can you best position your product compared to the competition?
- What are the features of your product, and how do those features benefit the customer?
- Which features are most important for which types of buyers?
- What is your buyer’s current problem or challenge?
- Who is your ideal buyer?
Are You Delivering Relevant Content At The Right Time?
In today’s fast-paced sales environment, delivering the right content at the right time can make or break a deal. Buyers expect tailored, timely information that addresses their specific needs and challenges. Sales enablement ensures that your team has the tools and resources to meet these expectations by strategically equipping them with relevant content exactly when they need it.
Effective sales enablement acts like the perfect playmaker, seamlessly passing the right materials—whether it’s a case study, a product demo, or a competitive comparison—to your salespeople at the precise moment in the buyer’s journey. This ensures that sales reps can engage prospects with confidence, answer objections, and move deals forward without delays.
But it’s not just about providing content; it’s about delivering insights-driven, personalized materials that resonate with buyers. With advanced technologies like AI, sales enablement platforms can analyze buyer behaviors and preferences to recommend the most impactful content, transforming every interaction into an opportunity to build trust and add value.
If your sales team struggles to find or deliver content at the right time, it might be time to rethink your sales enablement strategy. Empower your team with the right tools and processes to streamline content delivery and win more deals faster.
Do You Know What Content Works and What Doesn’t?
In addition to looking at the data on your programs, be sure to listen to your sales reps in the field – they are your best source of information for determining what is and isn’t working. The flow of information is vital and produces immediate responses at the most critical times in the sales conversation. A sales enablement professional works as a messenger between the sales teams and HR, marketing, and all other teams found in sales organizations. Sheevaun Thatcher is one of the best sales enablement leaders on the planet. Her four pillars of sales enablement are universal, practical, and highly impactful if followed by both sales and marketing. Watch the video below to hear Sheevaun describe her four pillars of sales enablement.
How Does Sales Enablement Benefit Organizations?
The sales enablement process can benefit sales organizations in several ways, depending on how well it’s used. Below are five practices to help reinforce sales enablement best practices across your organization.
Ramping, sales onboarding and new hire training
Case study after case study proves that sales enablement software drives more impactful new hire sales training, shorter time to ramp, and shorter time to quota attainment–all of which can be done virtually. Watch the video below to learn the guiding principles of new hire sales onboarding.
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With new hire sales onboarding being remote, we’re challenged to creatively deliver amazingly rich onboarding experiences 100% virtually. It’s impossible for us to fly our teams to headquarters to get onboarded with an in-person bootcamp experience. |
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Lindsey Morga, Revenue Enablement Manager, walks us through how her team quickly pivoted to a 100% virtual new hire onboarding and sales training program during the pandemic—nearly overnight. She shares some amazing insights and practical ideas for companies looking to boost time to ramp for new sales hires. |
| Sales Onboarding & Sales Training Resources |
Better Sales and Marketing Alignment
When you establish sales enablement as a priority across the entire company, you’ll find that marketing and sales work better together, sales communications improve, and sales productivity increases. Sales teams no longer blame marketing for creating inefficient content, and marketing stops asking why sales teams don’t use their resources. Instead, it elevates best practices and everyone is aware of and invested in on-brand company messaging, the customer experience, performance analytics, quota attainment and sales success. For more insight read our Sales and Marketing Alignment with Sales Enablement blog.
Sales Team Collaboration & Sales Pitch Practice
Sharing, collaborating, sales pitch practice, and feedback is necessary for sales team members to grow, evolve and ultimately become more effective. Of all the sales enablement software out there, SalesHood differs by making peer-to-peer collaboration and learning a primary focus. At its core, an organization is driven by its employees, so we focused on making team sharing easy, intuitive and impactful. Read How to Turn Sales Pitches into Meaningful Conversations. How would weekly huddles, sales pitch practice and peer feedback impact your sales teams?
Watch this video to hear how to use Generative AI to scale pitch practice and conversation readiness.
Top Seller Modeling
Modeling top seller behavior is a sales hack that is easy to understand in theory, but hard to execute effectively at scale. That being said, modeling the performance of top sellers is a critical component to foster professional development among the sales teams and grow revenue. Top teams use sales enablement platforms and initiatives to facilitate the modeling of top sales performer behavior and share those best practices across the sales team. Through active feedback, sharing, and practicing, the rest of the sales team can replicate the strategies and processes top sellers use. Replicating top performers is a proven way to quickly achieve breakthroughs in sales productivity.
Shorter Sales Cycles
With cross-department collaboration sales practices in place, sales professionals can spend more of their time enriching each buyer’s journey. Ongoing content training provides sales reps with the most updated resources, so they have the right information at the right time during the buying process. Sellers waste less time looking for that information and can focus that time and energy on the buyer instead. That speeds up the buying process and leads to a shorter sales cycle. Shorter sales cycles plus consistent messaging and aligned teams means higher win rates. Plus, the insight from your sales enablement platform allows you to figure out what to keep doing and what to change, so that you can continue to drive higher attainment and higher revenue growth. Higher revenue is a natural byproduct of a whole company adoption. When a sales enablement manager oversees the execution, the marketing department and the sales team work together, and the numbers speak for themselves.
Practical Examples and Use Cases of Sales Enablement
Sales enablement isn’t just a concept—it’s a proven strategy that drives measurable outcomes across industries. Here are some real-world examples of how companies leverage SalesHood to streamline processes, improve efficiency, and boost revenue:
1. Doubling Selling Price and Shortening Sales Cycles: StarCompliance
StarCompliance implemented SalesHood’s platform to transform their sales training and coaching processes. By aligning their teams on consistent messaging and empowering them with tailored enablement resources, they achieved:
- A 35% reduction in sales cycles, enabling their team to close deals faster.
- A 17% increase in new logo win rates through better qualification and engagement.
- Doubling their average selling price, showcasing how structured enablement leads to higher-value deals.
2. Scaling Training, Onboarding and Messaging Aliignment: Copado
Copado, a leader in DevOps for Salesforce, utilized SalesHood to unify their global go-to-market teams. With tools for collaborative learning, process consistency, and content management, they saw:
- Improved win rates across various regions and sales teams.
- Enhanced team alignment on value-based selling, essential for navigating the complex B2B landscape.
Companies like Copado use SalesHood to ensure consistent messaging across their sales teams. By providing structured playbooks, messaging frameworks, and on-demand training, they help sellers articulate the value proposition effectively, leading to better buyer engagement and shorter sales cycles.
3. Improving Lead Conversion with Digital Sales Rooms: DataEndure
DataEndure integrated SalesHood’s Digital Sales Rooms to enhance buyer engagement and accelerate decision-making. The result? A 60% increase in lead-to-opportunity conversion, driven by personalized experiences and seamless communication with potential buyers.
4. Accelerating Onboarding for New Hires
Sales enablement platforms streamline the onboarding process by delivering interactive learning experiences. For example, a SalesHood customer reduced onboarding times by over 30%, enabling new hires to contribute to pipeline and quota faster. With just-in-time learning and GenAI Coaches, new sales reps build confidence and competence more quickly.
6. Driving Buyer Engagement Through Digital Sales Rooms
Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) like those offered by SalesHood provide a centralized hub for collaboration between buyers and sellers. DataEndure leveraged DSRs to offer personalized content and facilitate seamless communication, resulting in a 60% improvement in lead-to-opportunity conversion rates.
7. Enabling Value-Based Selling in Complex B2B Sales
Many of SalesHood’s customers utilize SalesHood’s tools to train their sales reps on value-based selling techniques, which are crucial in long sales cycles involving multiple stakeholders. The platform empowered sellers with curated content and real-time coaching, boosting their win rates in competitive scenarios.
8. Improving Forecast Accuracy with Engagement Metrics
SalesHood’s performance insights allow managers to track how well their teams adhere to sales methodologies like MEDDICC. By inspecting deal progress through buyer engagement data, leaders can make data-driven forecasts and identify at-risk deals before it’s too late.
9. Scaling Enablement Across Global Teams
Global organizations like StarCompliance use SalesHood to standardize training and sales processes across regions. With video coaching, bite-sized lessons, and real-time feedback loops, they ensure alignment regardless of geographic location.
10. Providing Sales Teams with Contextual Content
Sales enablement helps teams access the right content at the right time. For example, a software company used SalesHood to deliver tailored pitch decks and case studies to sellers within seconds, enabling them to respond to prospect needs more effectively and close deals faster.
11. Enhancing Partner Enablement
Companies with channel or reseller networks use enablement tools to train and certify partners. SalesHood offers functionality for creating partner-specific resources, ensuring that channel sellers are well-equipped to represent the brand and close deals.
12. Boosting Team Accountability Through Mutual Action Plans
Mutual Action Plans (MAPs) help sellers and buyers stay aligned throughout the sales process. SalesHood customers report higher deal closure rates when MAPs are integrated into their workflows, as they create transparency and streamline decision-making.
Sales Enablement vs. Revenue Enablement: Key Differences
Sales enablement focuses primarily on equipping sales teams with the tools, training, and content they need to engage buyers effectively and close deals. It is a function centered around optimizing the sales process, improving individual performance, and aligning sellers with the needs of buyers. Traditional sales enablement solutions emphasize onboarding, skill development, and providing reps with resources like playbooks, sales content, and deal-specific coaching. The core goal is to enhance the productivity and success of the sales team, ensuring they can execute consistently and efficiently.
Revenue enablement, on the other hand, takes a broader, more holistic approach. It extends beyond the sales team to include every function that contributes to the revenue lifecycle—such as marketing, customer success, and even product teams. This approach focuses on creating seamless alignment across go-to-market teams to ensure a consistent and engaging customer journey, from initial contact to retention and expansion. Revenue enablement leverages advanced analytics, shared goals, and collaborative processes to optimize every stage of the customer lifecycle, emphasizing long-term customer value over transactional success.
In essence, while sales enablement is about empowering sales teams to close deals, revenue enablement ensures that every team involved in driving revenue is aligned, creating a unified strategy to acquire, retain, and grow customer relationships. It reflects the evolution of enablement as organizations increasingly prioritize customer-centric strategies and lifetime value over short-term wins.
Sales Enablement vs. Sales Operations
“What’s the difference between sales enablement and sales operations?” To answer your question, ask yourself one more: Who is the focus? Is it sales-focused, or is it buyer-focused? Another way to look at it is in terms of an external audience or internal audience.
- Sales operations encompass all the pieces that go into making sales happen: the quotas, the territories, how many sales executives you need to hire, and so on.
- Sales enablement is about enabling your sales team to help buyers. It provides them with all the tools and skills they need to present your solution in a way that shows buyers how your company can help them. It is about ensuring that your salespeople have the right resources, training, and information to optimize their interactions with buyers during every step in the buying process.
See that shift in focus? It goes from a technical, numbers-based consideration to one that reflects human needs. When in doubt, think of it this way. Sales operations is responsible for planning and organizing sales teams and everything that accompanies that, from sales territory optimization to sales compensation, from analytics to sales technology. In contrast, sales enablement works with the people who are doing the sales; it encompasses onboarding, training, certification, coaching, sales communication, sales material assets, and finally measurement and optimization of sales performance results. SalesHood’s sales enablement platform helps identify the top sales performers, adding a bit of competition and gamification, which is frequently identified as a key element of improvement. Everyone wants to be recognized for doing well! Understanding that sales enablement is responsible to sales rather than for sales can also solidify the difference.
The Revenue Enablement Maturity Model
In today’s competitive sales landscape, the concept of revenue enablement has evolved from a nice-to-have to a critical component of a company’s growth strategy. Modern revenue enablement extends beyond traditional sales enablement to cover a wide range of roles, including Account Executives (AEs), Sales Development Representatives (SDRs), Sales Consultants (SCs), Customer Success Managers (CSMs), and even partners. To guide organizations through this complex process, SalesHood developed a Revenue Enablement Maturity Model based on decades of working with high performing companies and revenue teams. This model provides a structured path from foundational to transformative enablement, providing organizations a proven path to meet their revenue targets through a well-defined and repeatable process.
The SalesHood Revenue Enablement Maturity Model is broken down into four stages, each building on the previous one. In this post, we’ll dive into each stage, exploring the processes and outcomes at each level, and how this model can serve as a roadmap for organizations aiming to maximize revenue impact.
Click to learn more about the framework.
How to Structure your Enablement Team?
Here are the key takeaways and best practices to sales enablement organizational design:
- Establish clear roles for enablement team members to avoid overlap.
- Maintain a 1:10 to 1:15 ratio of enablement professionals to salespeople.
- Focus on balancing strategy, content creation, and technology.
- Foster cross-functional collaboration between sales, marketing, and other teams.
- Leverage automation to improve efficiency and scalability.
- Continuously measure performance to refine enablement strategies.
- Balance the team’s focus between strategy, content creation, and technology to optimize performance.
Here’s an image of a sample organizational chart.
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Read the the blog to learn more. Sales Enablement Organizational Structure: Ownership, Reporting, and Ratios
Why CMOs and Product Marketing Should Care About Enablement?
When Is The Right Time to Implement a Sales Enablement Strategy?
At what point in your company’s growth should you consider sales enablement? Some company and sales leaders would say from the beginning. Even if you don’t have a dedicated department due to a lack of resources, you should still have a plan for attaining one. You can begin incorporating sales enablement efforts without a dedicated sales enablement department and then tie that integration to a plan for growth. Some companies find that over time the individual helping with sales implementation and enablement efforts as a side responsibility ends up devoting more and more hours to the practice. The insights and data-driven results speak to the value of investing in the process. You need to remain competitive, especially when so much content is available for consumption, and the speed of its output keeps climbing. If you want to build a sustainable business, being aware of and investing in sales enablement capabilities from the start is critical.
Investing in Skilled Sales Enablement Specialists
Skilled sales enablement specialists can help increase alignment across departments and drive increased productivity and, in turn, increase revenue. They understand the value of the process and can communicate its necessity in a compelling manner that helps bring stakeholders and decision-makers on board. There are currently over 279,000 sales enablement specialists on LinkedIn with an array of skill levels and competencies with backgrounds in Sales Training, Product Marketing, Sales Engineering, Learning & Development, Sales Managers, Salespeople & Sales Operations. 
Investing in sales enablement leadership
Just like a skilled sales enablement specialist, a sales enablement manager should have certain skills. Your sales enablement manager, sales ops leader, VPs of sales, sales manager and other sales leaders should be focused on developing leadership skills that drive the practice. A strong sales enablement manager needs to know how to:
- Speed up sales enablement impact
- Get executive and stakeholder buy-in
- Align enablement to your go-to-market
- Correlate programs activity to performance activity
- Get teams conversationally competent
- Create virtual onboarding for remote teams
- Build strategic business cases for resourcing
To learn how to be a strategic sales enablement leader and start executing sales enablement strategy the right way check out our Sales Enablement Leadership Course.
Modern Sales Enablement with Just-in-Time Enablement
Successful sales enablement strategies are tailored to your team’s specific needs and help provide the team with the sales enablement tools they need to increase effective sales. In contrast to a sales onboarding process, or training and coaching alone, an effective implementation process is ongoing, rather than yearly or intermittent. An effective sales enablement process examines and analyzes all the resources available to sales to ensure that it efficiently and effectively helps sales reps drive successful deals and convert leads into customers.
Watch this video by Elay Cohen to better understand what modern sales enablement looks like. It’s a best practice to map enablement across the entire sales process and customer journey.
How to Measure Sales Enablement Impact?
To scale high-impact sales enablement, activity and business impact need to be measured from benchmarking to performance correlation. Measuring the impact of sales enablement involves evaluating its influence on key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your organization’s goals. Here are some effective ways to measure sales enablement’s success:
1. Sales Productivity Metrics
- Time to Quota Attainment: Measure how quickly new hires reach full productivity. A decrease in ramp-up time indicates effective onboarding and training.
- Selling Time vs. Admin Time: Analyze how much time reps spend on actual selling activities versus administrative tasks. Sales enablement should streamline processes to maximize selling time.
2. Revenue Metrics
- Quota Attainment Rates: Track the percentage of reps consistently meeting or exceeding quota. Higher attainment rates signal effective enablement.
- Average Deal Size: Monitor changes in deal size to evaluate if enablement efforts improve reps’ ability to position value and close larger deals.
3. Sales Cycle Efficiency
- Sales Cycle Length: Assess whether enablement tools and training shorten the time it takes to close deals.
- Conversion Rates: Track lead-to-opportunity and opportunity-to-close rates to determine if enablement efforts help reps engage and advance deals effectively.
4. Content Effectiveness
- Content Usage Analytics: Measure how often sales content is accessed and used by reps during the sales process.
- Content ROI: Evaluate the impact of content on deal progression, such as how often buyers engage with specific materials and whether they lead to conversions.
5. Training and Coaching Outcomes
- Knowledge Retention Scores: Use assessments to gauge reps’ understanding and application of enablement training.
- Behavioral Changes: Observe whether reps adopt best practices and apply skills learned during training.
6. Customer-Centric Metrics
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Scores: Measure how well sales reps meet customer needs, indicating the alignment between enablement and buyer experience.
- Customer Retention Rates: Evaluate whether improved sales alignment results in stronger long-term customer relationships.
7. Performance Insights
- Leverage analytics platforms to gain insights into the correlation between enablement initiatives and sales outcomes. Platforms like SalesHood can provide granular data on training completion, content engagement, and deal progression tied directly to enablement activities.
By focusing on these metrics, organizations can clearly link sales enablement initiatives to tangible business outcomes, demonstrating ROI and identifying areas for improvement.
Leading and lagging sales performance indicators should be systematically reviewed and assessed. Sometimes, it’s too late to just look at quota attainment and closed deals. Activities like emails, calls meetings scheduled and pipeline created are great leading indicators to measure and coach. Leading indicators provide insights into what’s working and what’s not working. Measuring impact doesn’t have to be complicated. With our sales enablement software, you can easily track leading vs lagging indicators and run correlation reports that quickly and accurately measure and visualize the impact of implementing sales enablement best practices.
The Challenges Companies Face with Sales Enablement
Sales enablement faces several challenges as organizations strive to align their sales teams with evolving buyer expectations and market dynamics. Here are some of the biggest challenges:
1. Lack of Alignment Across Teams
- Sales, marketing, and customer success teams often operate in silos, leading to misaligned goals and inconsistent messaging. Ensuring seamless alignment is critical but difficult without clear communication and shared objectives.
2. Proving ROI and Impact
- Sales enablement leaders often struggle to demonstrate the direct impact of their initiatives on revenue. Linking training, content, and tools to measurable outcomes like deal closure rates and revenue growth remains a top challenge.
3. Low Adoption of Tools and Content
- Sales teams may resist using enablement tools or fail to engage with training content. This could be due to complexity, lack of perceived value, or insufficient reinforcement by leadership.
4. Evolving Buyer Expectations
- Modern buyers expect personalized and consultative interactions. Equipping sales teams to adapt to these expectations and engage buyers effectively at every stage of the journey is a constant challenge.
5. Data Overload Without Insights
- While sales enablement platforms generate vast amounts of data, organizations often lack the ability to derive actionable insights. This limits the potential of enablement efforts to optimize performance effectively.
6. Scalability Across Global Teams
- For organizations with distributed sales teams, delivering consistent training, resources, and support globally while addressing regional nuances can be complex.
7. Keeping Pace With Technology Advancements
- Rapid advancements in AI, analytics, and automation require enablement teams to continuously adapt their strategies and tools to stay competitive.
8. Shortened Sales Cycles
- As sales cycles become shorter, sales teams must absorb information and apply it quickly. Enablement programs need to be concise, impactful, and easily accessible to meet these demands.
9. Retention of Training Knowledge
- Sales reps often forget or fail to apply what they learn in training. Ensuring continuous reinforcement and practical application remains a significant hurdle.
10. Cultural Resistance to Change
- Introducing new processes or tools often meets resistance from sales teams accustomed to existing ways of working. Driving cultural change and fostering buy-in across the organization is an ongoing challenge.
Addressing these challenges requires a combination of innovative technology, strong leadership support, and a customer-centric approach to enablement. Solutions like AI-driven coaching, streamlined content activation, and mutual action plans can help overcome many of these barriers.
Key Sales Enablement Terms and Definitions
Sales Training
Sales training is a key component of sales enablement. It’s part of a never-ending cycle of enriching your team, and most importantly, it is ongoing. Training cannot only happen on an annual or biannual basis. When considering how to design your team’s training, you must consider modular content and compact elements. Create training content that your team can access via sales enablement technology and can consume in short bursts of time. Some examples of sales training tools might include role-playing scenarios, training videos, or call or email scripts.
Sales Coaching
Continuous sales coaching is an integral feature of successful teams. Streamlining scorecards and content for managers can maximize coaching outcomes by efficiently using their time and resources. Sales enablement workflows can help with this. An example would be Mutual Closing Plans (MCP Huddles), which is an available component that comes with SalesHood’s sales enablement software.
Sales Coaching Assessments
Having regular coaching assessments that track each individual rep and individual coaching conversations allows your team to see the data behind which coaching is most effective and efficient. Specific coaching assessments managers can access also ensures consistency in the approach and assessment of individual team members as they progress.
Sales Effectiveness
What are your win rates? Are your sales reps and managers hitting their quota and delivering sales? What are you doing as an enablement leader to improve sales effectiveness?
Digital Sales Rooms
Digital Sales Rooms are virtual spaces where sales teams and customers can collaborate, access content, and track engagement in real time, streamlining communication and sales execution. See a guided tour.
Micro-Learning
Micro-learning delivers bite-sized, focused training modules that can be consumed quickly, helping sales teams gain actionable knowledge and improve skills on-demand.
Peer-to-Peer
Peer-to-peer learning leverages the collective knowledge of sales teams, allowing individuals to share insights, best practices, and strategies to drive mutual success and continuous improvement.
Sales Content
Sales content refers to all the sales collateral provided by the marketing and sales enablement team to your sales team. The content might provide best practices or checklists of tasks and should include everything necessary to allow the salesperson to focus on the buyer and help the customer buy your company’s product.
These sales enablement tools can be utilized and leveraged to implement sales enablement across the entire company. SalesHood’s sales enablement software is purpose-built for sales enablement leaders. Find out why you should choose SalesHood.
Sales enablement content is critical to your organization’s efforts. It’s the single most powerful tool that enablement teams can provide the sales team. As discussed in a previous enablement content post, a great content library has to be like a professional kitchen – where every tool is easy to reach, intuitive, and exactly where you want it at the most crucial and often time sensitive moments. It’s also important that it’s searchable and well-organized.
Content Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management – There are endless CRM program options available to companies and organizations of all types. An effective CRM integrates with other systems that your company is currently using. Notable tools might include sales tracking and marketing campaign engagement.
Content Management System (CMS)
Storing all your content in a single place allows your team to access sales content and information when they need it most without wondering where it’s stored. Although content management systems are often seen as falling under a marketing umbrella, they are a perfect example of why and how sales enablement is a company-wide mindset.
Sales Enablement Programs
Sales enablement is about helping teams onboard faster, along with improving effectiveness and productivity and measuring it constantly. It is about fostering a culture of learning, where teams practice their skills. It encourages mentorship and creates a space for people to learn from each other. That said, not all sales enablement is equal. Many organizations are plagued with bad sales enablement initiatives that include:
- No way to prove what’s working
- Poor executive & GTM alignment
- Managers are not engaged
- One size fits all
- Disconnected processes and systems
- Stick vs Carrot (WIFM)
- Too many random acts
- Taking a “checkbox” approach
As you start building your team and working with other departments, have an open dialogue about what sales enablement means to you and your team. Create a conversation where team members can discuss their experiences and voice any questions they have or things they don’t understand. Understand their mindsets. Talk about what an engaging and successful process looks like, as well as how a negative process looks. Having these conversations will help increase openness and buy-in among employees. You can also use it to set the stage for implementation down the road.
AI Use Cases in Sales Enablement
AI capabilities help revenue teams execute a more efficient and effective customer journey. Across all components of our revenue enablement platform, from onboarding and readiness to content creation and curation to prospect engagement, you can use AI to drive faster ramp times, conversational confidence, and consistent messaging.
On the readiness front, AI helps certify reps faster and get them conversationally competent, no matter where they are. For content, AI assists in creating, downloading, and curating content to make it easily accessible to sales teams. When reps are engaging prospects, AI automatically creates call recaps, helps reps present themselves consistently, and adds descriptions to shared content.
AI contributes to driving a more consistent and efficient customer journey by helping reps be more productive and effective. While some editing may still be needed with AI-generated content, it saves significant time by doing much of the heavy lifting that reps would otherwise have to do manually.
AI helps tie together the trifecta of readiness, content governance, and prospect engagement in sales enablement. It makes each part of the platform more efficient and will increasingly help link the pieces together in meaningful ways.
For example, AI can help proactively recommend the right content for reps to add to their client sites during prospect engagement. It can also eventually feed learnings from rep interactions back to enablement teams to inform future training.
AI is becoming critical as enablement teams shrink and are expected to do more with less resources. Features like AI Coach allow companies to rely more on the AI for certifying and coaching reps. Without AI, many overwhelmed enablement teams will get left behind.
The Future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Sales Enablement
The future of sales enablement, from SalesHood’s perspective, lies in blending human ingenuity with advanced technology, particularly leveraging Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), to create a more effective, scalable, and insightful sales ecosystem. Here’s a vision for how this unfolds:
1. AI-Driven Personalization at Scale
AGI enables a deeper understanding of individual sales reps’ strengths, challenges, and learning styles. With SalesHood’s solutions, this could translate into tailored coaching programs, just-in-time content recommendations, and automated feedback loops that adapt dynamically to each salesperson’s needs.
2. Seamless Buyer-Seller Alignment
SalesHood’s Mutual Action Plans (MAPs) already drive alignment, but AGI will enhance this by predicting and addressing potential friction points in the buyer journey. It will act as a proactive partner, guiding sales teams to foster stronger, trust-based relationships with buyers.
3. Predictive Sales Insights
AGI will take SalesHood’s Performance Insights to the next level by analyzing complex datasets across customer interactions, sales behaviors, and market trends. This will help organizations predict deal outcomes, identify revenue opportunities, and allocate resources more effectively.
4. Automated and Insightful Content Activation
AGI can transform how sales teams interact with content. Instead of searching for materials, sales reps will receive real-time recommendations based on buyer behavior, engagement signals, and deal context, ensuring the right message is delivered at the perfect moment.
5. Continuous Enablement Through AGI Coaches
SalesHood’s AI Coaches, powered by AGI, will evolve into highly intuitive partners that not only train but also mentor and provide emotional intelligence support. These coaches will simulate real-world selling scenarios, giving sales reps hands-on practice and instant, actionable feedback.
6. Enhanced Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing
AGI will bridge gaps between sales and marketing by analyzing the performance of sales content in unprecedented detail. This ensures that every piece of content created delivers measurable impact, fostering alignment across go-to-market teams.
7. Scalable Sales Execution
With AGI, SalesHood will enable companies to replicate top-performing behaviors across their entire organization. AGI will analyze patterns from high-performing reps, democratize best practices, and ensure consistency in execution across teams and regions.
SalesHood’s vision embraces AGI as a co-pilot for sales teams, enabling them to close deals faster, deliver predictable revenue outcomes, and foster long-term customer relationships. It’s not just about automating tasks; it’s about empowering salespeople to focus on what they do best—building connections and delivering value—while AGI handles the rest.
AI Coaching at Copado
The key question Copado faced was how to use AI to be more efficient and deliver what their field needs when they need it. They wanted to move from passive learning, such as watching videos and reviewing slide decks, to active participation where reps could practice skills and get instant feedback.
With SalesHood’s AI Coach, Copado’s reps can now practice and get feedback in minutes, rather than waiting days for manager input. This has fundamentally shifted their approach to enablement, allowing for smaller, bite-sized learning spread out over time. Reps find it easier to consume and actively engage, instead of just reading or zoning out during a video.
By doing active learning much earlier in the process, Copado’s reps get better at their skills sooner, leading to increased efficiency. A prime example of this was preparing for Dreamforce. Copado had seasoned product people, sales reps, and SDRs with varying levels of experience all conversation-ready. Watch the short two highlights video or click to watch the full interview.
Enablement AI Thought Leadership
Today’s sales enablement leaders are pioneers in defining sales enablement. They are all revenue multipliers making huge impacts at their companies and in the industry.
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Check out our AI “Movers and Shakers.” Witnessing this revolutionary shift, many of our customers embarked on pioneering initiatives integrating AI into their sales coaching and sales execution programs with remarkable enthusiasm and impact.
Following a thorough analysis of AI usage and performance data, we identified go-to-market leaders distinguished for their execution of groundbreaking sales enablement initiatives, harnessing the power of SalesHood’s cutting-edge AI technology. Our cohort of AI innovators spearheaded numerous real-world AI sales coaching and sales execution use cases within their revenue teams, yielding substantial increases in sales productivity. Their strategic deployment encompassed a wide variety of AI programs, including pitch practice, objection handling, deal coaching, meeting effectiveness and many other use cases – all powered by SalesHood’s AI Coach.
Also, make sure to follow these Leaders Making it Happen and these Inspiring Women in Sales Enablement as they continue to innovate in the field of Sales Enablement.
Summary
Beware of checkbox enablement. With the explosive popularity, many sales enablement platforms were created with too much of a focus on completing certifications or ticking check-boxes rather than true skills learning and training. For your sales enablement process to be successful, your teams need to engage and learn from each other – consistently, preferably daily. If your sales enablement platform is not driving interaction, modeling, and pitch practice it will not help your team.
Sales enablement is the strategic process of equipping sales teams with the tools, training, and resources needed to engage buyers effectively and close deals efficiently. By aligning content, coaching, and technology with business goals, organizations can drive consistent revenue growth and enhance buyer experiences. Ready to transform your sales team’s performance? Explore how SalesHood can help today!
More Sales Enablement Resources Curated For You
From sales coaching, to sales training, to sales enablement best practices, we’ve compiled our most useful sales enablement resources and tools for your organization’s sales enablement strategy and its implementation.
Sales Enablement Blogs & Guides
- Strategic Sales Enablement Plan Template
- How to Build a Sales Enablement Strategy
- Creating a High-Impact Sales Enablement Program
- How to Survive as a Sales Enablement as a Team of One
- Sales Enablement Leadership Course
- The Essential Sales Onboarding Guide
- Enabling Front-Line Managers
- Hypergrowth Sales Enablement Playbook
- Creating Organizational Buy-In
Sales Enablement Videos
- Four Pillars of Sales Enablement
- Sales Enablement with Intent & Impact
- Winning Over the CEO with Sales Enablement
- Virtual New Hire Training
- Virtual Selling Guide – Your Guide to Virtual Selling Readiness
- Measuring Metrics and KPIs To Quickly Move The Revenue Needle
- From Strategy to Execution with a New Sales Process & Methodology
Getting Started with Sales Enablement
Sales Enablement is an organizational mindset and commitment to readiness and excellence, starting with the CEO and touching every employee in your company: sales, marketing, business development, partners, engineering, support, human resources, leadership team, etc A high-impact sales enablement strategy brings departments and leaders together around shared priorities, performance metrics, and expectations and is powered by the right sales enablement platform; book a demo to see SalesHood in action.
