π Welcome to another issue of The Enablement Edge newsletter!
In this one, weβre talking about:
- β οΈ 1 Key Mistake β Calculating enablement ROI without a clear evidence chain
- β
1 Best Practice β A cohesive multichannel cadence will improve outbound efforts
- π€ 1 Key Piece of Tech β Best sales enablement platforms in 2026
- ποΈ 1 Key Resource β Buyer intent signal library
Letβs go!
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β οΈ Key Mistake
One of the most common mistakes in enablement measurement is trying to reduce ROI to one clean number.
Itβs easy to see why this happens.
Someone asks: βWhat is the ROI of enablement?β
It sounds like a simple question. Itβs also the kind of question you can easily imagine coming from a CRO, CFO, or CEO.
But in enablement, that question gets messy fast β particularly because people are often talking about different things without realising it.
One person may be asking about the ROI of a specific programme. Another may be thinking about the enablement function as a whole. Someone else may be questioning whether the tech stack is worth the spend.
Those are related questions, but they are not the same question.
And when we treat them as one, the measurement logic starts to break.
In addition, when we try to force ROI to a single number, the danger is false precision.
A single ROI number can make a weak attribution story look more rigorous than it really is. It can flatten different kinds of value into one financial figure. And it can hide the fact that the underlying evidence may not be consistent across initiatives.
Thatβs why I think the real mistake starts before the formula.
It starts when teams assume sales enablement ROI is one universal figure waiting to be uncovered.
As I point out in my recent guide published in collaboration with expert revenue operators at revlogic, before you calculate anything, you need to define the level you are actually measuring:
- Programme ROI β usually the cleanest place to start. The initiative is narrower, the audience is clearer, the cost base is easier to isolate, and the expected outcome is often specific enough to evaluate with more confidence.
- Function ROI β broader and more layered. Here, you are looking at the combined effect of programmes, systems, tools, support, and operating rhythms over time. That makes the value story more important, but also harder to reduce to one tidy figure.
- Tool ROI β a separate measurement lane. The question is whether a specific tool improves productivity, workflow quality, decision-making, adoption, or execution enough to justify its cost and role in the stack.
Then, there is another important aspect here that I think is easy to miss.
Even a well-scoped ROI number only captures part of what happened. It tells you something after the investment has been made and enough time has passed for outcomes to emerge.
It does not show very well whether the programme was landing properly while it was in motion, whether managers were reinforcing it, or whether field behaviour was moving in the right direction before the commercial metrics shifted.
So the more useful move is to treat ROI as a part of the story (towards the end of it), not the whole story.
The strongest measurement narrative usually shows a chain:
What was expected β what was delivered β what changed in execution β what happened in the business β what financial interpretation makes sense
That gives leadership something much more useful than a single number pulled out of a complicated system.
If you want to go deeper, I break the full logic down in the article, including the three ROI layers, the core ROI formula, the concept of return on expectations (ROE), the role of contribution versus attribution, and how to build a much more credible ROI narrative around enablement.
This piece wouldnβt have been possible without revlogicβs support. They help B2B revenue teams improve pipeline generation, value selling, rep ramp, and overall GTM execution combining proven sales principles with bespoke AI solutions.
See how the Enablement Edge operating system works in practice
Design, execute, and refine enablement initiatives faster using a structured operating system β combining diagnostics, practitioner intelligence, execution-ready assets, and a peer network.
Attendees will also receive a 7-day free access to explore the operating system directly.
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β
Best Practice
A strong multichannel cadence usually starts with one thing done well: the first touch.
Unfortunately, in a lot of outbound motions, the first email is treated as just the opening step. Then the rest of the sequence gets built channel by channel, often in a disjointed way, and even more often reduced simply to valueless pings.
A follow-up email here. A call task there. A LinkedIn message added later. A voicemail dropped in somewhere along the way.
In todayβs noisy market, that kind of disconnected approach rarely creates enough relevance or momentum to drive strong conversion.
A better way to design the motion is to treat the first meaningful touch as the anchor for everything that follows.
In my multichannel outreach guide β which draws best practices from leading sales engagement platform lemlist β I make the case that the first message, most commonly the first email, should carry the core observation and hypothesis.
That message should then shape what happens next: the call opener, the LinkedIn follow-up, the voicemail, and the next emails.
This makes all the difference because buyers do not experience outreach as isolated activities inside your sequencing tool. They form a cumulative view of whether the overall motion feels coherent, relevant, and connected to a problem they actually recognise.
If every touch introduces a different angle, the outreach starts to feel fragmented and harder to interpret.
However, if each channel reinforces the same underlying idea, the message becomes easier to recognise, understand, and respond to.
That is how multichannel outreach starts to work properly.
Email can carry the clearest written hypothesis. The phone can test and accelerate it. LinkedIn can build familiarity around it. Voicemail can point back to it. But the thread needs to stay intact across all of them.
A useful principle to align with is that the thread matters more than the touch.
Instead of asking, βWhat should we send on LinkedIn?β or βWhat should the voicemail say?β, you start asking better questions:
How do we reinforce the original idea?
What extra context would make it clearer?
Which channel gives this touch the best chance of being noticed?
And are we actually adding value, or just asking again?
This way of thinking and operating will certainly lead to higher conversions into pipeline.
If you want to go deeper, I break the full model down in the article, including channel roles, cadence types (High, Low, Zero personalisation), the O.P.S.E.P. framework for strong first emails, and how to carry one narrative thread across the full sequence without turning multichannel outreach into disconnected noise.
π€ Key Piece of Tech
Iβve just published a detailed evaluation of sales enablement software, focused on one practical question:
Which broad enablement platform is actually the right fit for your team?
Most platforms now claim to support content, training, coaching, analytics, buyer engagement, AI recommendations, and workflow guidance. On paper, many of them start to look similar.
But in reality, they are not solving the same problem:
- Some are built for enterprise content governance and scale.
- Some lean more into readiness, onboarding, practice, and coaching.
- Some are stronger for buyer engagement and deal collaboration.
- Some stand out when sellers need value-selling tools, business cases, and ROI support.
- And some are pushing enablement directly into CRM, email, calendar, and other daily seller workflows.
It is for this reason that I wanted the guide to avoid the usual feature checklist approach.
Before comparing the tools, I first drew a clear boundary around the category.
For this evaluation, I focused on broad sales enablement platforms β systems that credibly bring together four capability areas:
- Content and knowledge activation
- Readiness through training and coaching
- In-deal execution support
- Measurement and optimisation.
With that lens, I then shortlisted the following tools: Seismic, Highspot, Showpad, Allego, Mindtickle, SalesHood, Mediafly, GTM Buddy, and Spekit.
Each one has a different centre of gravity, but they all attempt to solve a broader enablement problem rather than one narrow slice of it.
That also means I deliberately excluded narrower point solutions from the main shortlist.
CRM platforms, sales engagement tools, conversation intelligence software, LMSs, coaching tools, knowledge bases, and standalone digital sales rooms can all support enablement. But they are not the same as a broad enablement platform.
Itβs also important to say that there is not a βbestβ sales enablement tool in absolute terms.
The guide is designed to help teams make a better-fit decision based on how they sell, how mature their enablement function is, and how much governance and implementation effort they can realistically support.
Iβve based the evaluation on a mix of direct experience, conversations with enablement leaders and practitioners, discussions with sales managers and reps, public product information, and deeper independent research.
(I have not used every single platform in a live environment, which I think is important to say plainly in a piece like this.)
If youβre evaluating the category seriously, the full guide goes much deeper into the platforms mentioned above, including their positioning, strengths, trade-offs, pricing model, implementation effort, and where each one tends to fit best.
ποΈ Key Resource
One of the biggest shifts in modern outbound is that GTM teams now have access to far more buying signals than they used to. Things like:
- Website visits.
- Review-site activity.
- Content engagement.
- Category research.
- Job changes.
- Product usage.
- CRM activity.
- Conversation intelligence.
In theory, this should make prospecting and prioritisation far more precise.
And to some extent, it does.
The problem is that most organisations still struggle with what happens after the signal appears.
Signals are easy to collect, yet they are much harder to interpret consistently.
In different teams, the same signal can trigger completely different reactions depending on who sees it.
If you donβt create a shared way to organise and interpret signals between marketing, sales, partnerships, and operations, itβs going to be very difficult to translate those into higher conversions from leads to potential buyers.
To support this interpretation layer and help you create a common language, I produced a well-organised buyer intent signal library which you can easily download.
Each signal in the library includes four parts:
- why it matters
- where it usually appears
- when it becomes more meaningful
- what teams should avoid overinterpreting
It also follows the same high-, medium-, and low-strength framework from my buyer intent guide, helping teams separate stronger buyer evaluation behaviour from weaker research activity.
See how the Enablement Edge operating system works in practice
Design, execute, and refine enablement initiatives faster using a structured operating system β combining diagnostics, practitioner intelligence, execution-ready assets, and a peer network.
Attendees will also receive a 7-day free access to explore the operating system directly.
ποΈ SIGN UP FOR THE WALKTHROUGH
These are my 5 resource picks for this issue from The Enablement Edge Blog:
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