Stop Checking Boxes: Sales Enablement Isn’t an Enforcer — It’s a Catalyst

There’s a fundamental misunderstanding in many organizations about what Sales Enablement is — and more importantly, what it isn’t.

Enablement isn’t about creating checklists, forcing trainings, or enforcing processes from the top down. We’re not the compliance police. We’re not the department of “Did you finish that training yet?”

Sales Enablement, when done right, is the strategic heart of your sales engine — the partner that enables your revenue teams to do what they do best: sell. We don’t create the sales motion. We fuel it. We support it. We refine it based on the feedback loop from the people who live and breathe it every day — your reps.

Yet in many organizations, enablement becomes a top-down mandate. Initiatives are rolled out without feedback. Trainings are deployed without real context. And salespeople, the very individuals we are supposed to empower, are reduced to passive recipients. That’s when Sales Enablement becomes a checkbox. And that’s when we lose the plot.

Enablement That Doesn’t Enable Isn’t Enablement at All

Let me be clear: Effective enablement isn’t about ownership. It’s about partnership.

We don’t own the sales process. We align to it. We don’t dictate. We collaborate. We don’t just deliver. We observe, adapt, and iterate.

Great enablement professionals are enablers of clarity, momentum, and scale. They translate company strategy into frontline action, remove friction from the sales cycle, and amplify what’s working in the field. That can’t happen without deep alignment with sales leadership and a constant feedback loop with reps.

A Lesson from the Field: One Constant Across Many Frontlines

In my personal journey, I’ve had the opportunity to work across a diverse range of industries — from oil & gas and heavy manufacturing to software consulting and home automation, from defense and transportation to biometrics, and now in the world of networking.

In every one of these domains, the sales environment has been dramatically different. Sales cycles ranged from 1 week to over a year. Deal sizes varied from tens of thousands to multi-million-dollar contracts. Yet through all that diversity, one truth remained constant: The core of effective enablement doesn’t change.

A successful organization must have a sales methodology — whether it’s BANT-P, MEDDIC, or any other — but it can’t just live in a deck. The onus is on frontline sales managers to bring that methodology to life — not by force, but by showing how it makes selling easier, smarter, and more predictable.

That’s where Enablement plays a vital role. We help turn methodology into muscle memory. We don’t enforce; we empower. We don’t command; we connect the dots.

And perhaps most importantly, Sales Enablement must work hand-in-glove with Product Marketing. These two functions are often treated separately, but they thrive when aligned. Product Marketing brings the message. Enablement ensures the message is understood, absorbed, and translated into pipeline.

Bottom-Up Is the New Top-Down

The best ideas don’t always come from the top — they come from the field. From that BDR who found a new way to pitch. From the AE who cracked the code on a tough competitor. From the frontline manager who knows exactly where their team is stuck.

Sales Enablement’s job is to be a listening post. To gather insights from the bottom up, identify patterns, and then create targeted, agile interventions that actually help people close more deals. Not just pass another quiz.

So, What Should Sales Enablement Actually Look Like?

Here’s the vision we should all strive for:

• Sales-First Mindset: Every initiative is designed with sales, not for sales.

• Embedded Partnerships: Enablement sits at the same table with sales, marketing, product, and ops — not as a separate function, but as a strategic partner.

• Real-Time Relevance: Programs evolve based on what’s happening now — not what was planned three quarters ago.

• Measurable Impact: We track real business metrics — pipeline velocity, win rates, time to productivity — not just completion rates.

Let’s Stop Checking Boxes. Let’s Start Moving Needles.

Enablement can be the secret weapon in any sales organization — but only if we treat it that way. When we empower enablement to truly enable — to listen, to learn, to adapt — we unlock a new level of performance.

So, here’s my challenge to sales leaders, ops teams, and enablement peers: stop asking, “Did they complete the training?” and start asking, “Did we actually make it easier to sell?” Because in the end, if we're not enabling outcomes, we’re just adding noise.