The future of sales enablement is simpler than you think

There's a pattern I've noticed at enablement conferences over the last few years. The tools get more sophisticated. The frameworks get more layered. The conversations get more strategic.

And yet, when you strip everything back and ask the honest question – are reps actually using what we're building for them? – the answer is often uncomfortable.

I've been in this space long enough to know that we've collectively overcomplicated things. And I think it's time we talked about that.

We're living in a change economy

The pace of change inside most companies today is unlike anything we've seen before. Product updates that used to ship quarterly are now shipping weekly. New competitors are emerging from adjacent categories – companies that used to be complementary partners are now encroaching on your space.

AI is accelerating all of it, making it faster and cheaper to build, test, and release.

And as the rate of change has increased, so has the pressure on your reps to keep up. Fifty-seven percent of reps believe competition has gotten harder. That number isn't surprising when you consider how much consolidation is happening across industries, and how quickly AI is enabling new entrants to move into established markets.

The playbooks that worked two or three years ago are already showing their age. The model where you had time to build a full program, run in-person training, execute a proper launch campaign – that model was built for a world where your product launched every six months.

When your product team is shipping something new every other week, that model simply can't keep pace.

The data is telling us something we need to hear

We partnered with the Sales Enablement Collective to produce one of the first research reports of its kind – focused not just on team sizes and budgets, but on what's actually working. The findings were revealing, and honestly, a little sobering.

Eighty-six percent of respondents said that the most important factor in any enablement program's success is how easily reps can access content. Find it, reference it, use it in the moment. Most people in the room when I shared this nodded immediately – it makes intuitive sense.

Here's where it gets uncomfortable. Ninety-two percent of those same respondents believe their reps use less than 60 percent of the content they create. Internal content, external content – most of it isn't getting used.

Fifty-five percent cited low adoption by reps as the primary reason they've switched platforms.

And fifty percent of teams believe that 40% or more of their content is already out of date.

So you're creating a lot. You're working hard. You're investing in platforms and programs and frameworks. And still, the content isn't getting used, a significant chunk of it is stale, and adoption keeps being the reason things don't stick.

That's a pattern worth sitting with.

Have we overcomplicated enablement?

When I look at the landscape – the tools, the frameworks, the methodologies – I think the honest answer is yes. We've added layers on top of layers. We've built elaborate systems for organizing content that reps don't browse.

We've launched programs on top of programs. We've switched platforms, sometimes within the same category, looking for the solution that finally makes it all click.

I define enablement simply: it's the process of helping a rep be able to sell. You can dress it up with more sophisticated language, and there are certainly more elegant definitions out there. But when I kept coming back to what actually matters, that's where I landed.