π Welcome to another issue of The Enablement Edge newsletter!
Sit back, relax, and get ready for:
- 𧩠Key Concept β Is your sales organisation efficient?
- π€ Piece of Tech β The best digital sales rooms in 2026
- π₯ This Weekβs Video β The sales performance principle most organisations ignore
- β
Best Practice β Finding pipeline leaks and building from there
- β Key Mistake β Training completion is not proof of readiness
Letβs go!
Live walkthrough
Inside the operating system powering modern enablement teams
Join a live walkthrough of the Enablement Edge operating system and see how it helps teams move from diagnosis to focused intervention, consistent execution, and continuous refinement.
Itβs designed to help you make better decisions and execute faster.
ποΈ SIGN UP FOR THE WALKTHROUGH
𧩠Key Concept
One of the most useful conceptual distinctions Iβve been working on lately is the difference between sales effectiveness, sales productivity, and sales efficiency.
They are obviously connected, but they still get confused much more than they should. Sales efficiency, in particular, tends to get misunderstood far too often.
A team can hit the number and still be inefficient.
They can win enough deals, yet need too many meetings, too much seller time, overly long sales cycles, or too much discounting to get there.
Sales efficiency focuses on the resources required to produce commercial outcomes.
It asks:
β How much did it cost to create pipeline?
β How much did it cost to win a customer?
β How much seller effort did the deal consume?
β How much price or margin did we give up to close?
In the image below I clearly explain how sales efficiency relates to effectiveness and productivity.
Understanding this helps clean up a lot of bad diagnosis.
If the win rate is low, you may have an effectiveness problem.
If revenue per rep is low, you may be looking at a productivity problem.
But if the team is still getting results while each deal takes too long, demands too much effort, or relies too heavily on discounts and concessions, that is an efficiency problem.
βIn my recent guide on sales efficiency metrics β which I put together in collaboration with revenue acceleration partner revlogic β I also stated how important it is to not treat βefficiencyβ as one neat dashboard number.
In reality, it is more useful to focus on specific questions across the motion:
- How expensive is pipeline creation?
- How much does it cost to acquire a deal?
- How long does conversion take?
- How many resources do each win consume?
- How much value are you giving up to close?
That is a much better way to understand whether growth is scaling appropriately or simply becoming more expensive, more labour-heavy, and harder to sustain.
Live walkthrough
Inside the operating system powering modern enablement teams
Join a live walkthrough of the Enablement Edge operating system and see how it helps teams move from diagnosis to focused intervention, consistent execution, and continuous refinement.
Itβs designed to help you make better decisions and execute faster.
ποΈ SIGN UP FOR THE WALKTHROUGH
π€ Piece of Tech
Iβve just published a detailed guide to the best digital sales room software in 2026, and one idea kept coming back to me while researching it.
The real job of a digital sales room is to help buyers keep making progress when you are not there.
A lot of teams still treat digital sales rooms as polished content hubs.
Taking full advantage of your DSR involves so much more.
Most importantly, it should help buyers review the right material, involve the right people, understand what happens next, and keep the deal moving between meetings.
In other words, it should help them decide, align, and act.
That is why these tools really start showing their strength in more complex sales motions.
When deals involve multiple stakeholders, multiple steps, internal sharing, mutual action plans, legal or procurement input, and buyer work that happens away from the seller, email is often no longer enough to support the buying process effectively.
Conversations become fragmented, important content gets buried, next steps become less visible, and sellers lose a clear view of where the deal really stands.
A good digital sales room creates a shared working environment around the deal.
That can mean a clearer place for buyer-facing content, next steps, stakeholder visibility, engagement signals, handoff context, and, depending on the platform, even proposals, contracts, or onboarding continuity.
And there is one more practical caveat here.
A digital sales room will not fix deeper content chaos or weak commercial discipline on its own. If your content is messy, your ownership is unclear, or nobody governs templates, CRM sync, and adoption, the room can easily become a nicer wrapper around the same underlying problems.
βMy full buying guide goes much deeper into what this category actually is, when it makes sense, when it doesnβt, how to evaluate it properly, and how the main platforms differ from each other and which one may suit your context best.
π₯ This Weekβs Video
More activity does not automatically create better performance.
In this video, I explore the idea of worthy performance and explain why the best enablement programmes improve execution while reducing unnecessary effort, friction, and complexity.
βIf you enjoy this type of content, Iβd love to have you on the channel as a subscriber. I release new videos every week on topics across the full spectrum of sales enablement and GTM.
π Best Practice
I recently led an Enablement Edge Network discussion with enablement leader Lawrence OβConnor on how enablement teams can identify sales pipeline leaks, explain the cost of those leaks, and focus their work where it will actually matter.
One of the main ideas from the discussion Iβd like to share here is that itβs critical to focus on identifying the gaps in your sales cycle and their root causes before you build any programmes.
This gets at the core of a very common enablement failure mode.
A team sees a problem in the sales process, and the proposed solution starts forming almost immediately:
- Demo conversion drops, so the answer becomes demo training
- Discovery feels inconsistent, so the answer becomes a discovery workshop
- Pipeline slows down, so the team creates another training, asset, or playbook to support outbound.
But as Lawrence argued in the discussion, the visible point of failure is not always the point of cause.
A post-demo drop-off may not be a demo problem.
It may be a qualification problem.
A weak business case may not be a messaging problem at all.
It may be a discovery problem.
A stalled opportunity may not be a closing problem.
It may be that the champion was never developed properly, or that the deal was moved forward before the buyer had a real reason to act.
That is why itβs smarter to use the identified leak in the pipeline to guide the investigation, then let the evidence decide the intervention.
In practice, that usually means going at least one stage back.
If a deal is falling apart after the demo, look at what allowed it to reach the demo in the first place:
- Was the seller speaking to the right persona?
- Was the account truly ICP-fit?
- Did the buyer have a real reason to act now?
- Was there an actual champion, or just an interested contact?
- Was the demo anchored to an executive priority?
Those are often better questions than βHow do we improve the demo?β
Effective diagnosis will require a combination of data and field anecdotes.
Things like:
- Conversion rates by stage
- Call recordings
- CRM notes
- Manager and seller feedback
- Deal reviews
- Patterns by segment, source, territory, and motion
Such work is what helps you separate a capability gap from a targeting issue, a process problem, a manager reinforcement gap, or something else entirely.
So before you build the workshop, redesign the playbook, or launch another intervention, pause long enough to ask: where is the leak actually starting?
That question will usually improve the quality of the work more than any quick solution.
βThe full briefing goes much deeper into how Lawrence and I approached performance gaps diagnosis, quantifying the commercial cost, creating a change statement leaders can discuss internally, and turning the diagnosis into enablement work the business will actually support.
β Key Mistake
Lately, one thing Iβve been thinking about is how much of the work across the wider Enablement Edge ecosystem has pulled me into frameworks, research, guides, and operating models.
It also reminded me how I somewhat lost sight of one of the things that made this ecosystem valuable in the first place: real experiences from real enablers who have tried something, got part of it wrong, and learned something useful the hard way.
That is exactly why I put together the first What I Learned Series edition of the Enablement Edge Network.
The lessons were many and extremely valuable, but Iβll focus here on one of the main ones that emerged from multiple responses.
Namely, that training completion is not proof of readiness.
On paper, completion looks reassuring, but as contributors like Kimberley Morland, Corine Hernandez Varga, Ryan Kolofsky, and Aaron Spencer describe from very different angles, that still tells you remarkably little about whether people are actually ready to perform differently in the field.
Treating completion as if it were evidence of adoption, confidence, or behaviour change is a mistake. And itβs an easy mistake to make.
Completion is easy to measure.
Readiness is harder to see and demonstrate, which is exactly why many teams donβt even venture there.
What I found especially valuable in these contributor reflections is how clearly they show what gets missed when enablement stops at the launch event.
Reps may understand the methodology, but not apply it naturally.
Managers may attend the rollout, but still not coach to it.
Teams may complete the programme, then revert to the old way of doing things the moment pressure returns.
So the content lands, but the desired behaviour never really gets adopted.
If youβd like to learn more about how top leaders approached things different after having made costly mistakes across onboarding, methodology implementation, manager enablement, coaching, and general change management, you can download the briefing here.
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