👋 Welcome to another issue of The Enablement Edge newsletter!

Sit back, relax, and get ready for:

• 🎯 Key Challenge – Is adding new salespeople affecting sales productivity?
• 🔍 What’s New – Sales execution is under the microscope
• 🧠 Best Practice – Turning super-closers into true coaches
• 🎥 This Week’s Video – Why sales methodologies fail
• 🎮 Piece of Tech – Gamification software is more than confetti

Fathom captures all the context of your team's sales calls, wherever work happens Ask Fathom surfaces recurring objections, risks, and themes across your team's calls, whether you ask in Fathom, ChatGPT, or Claude. Trackers automatically flag them as new calls come in. See how it works across your team's calls  → Sponsored placement – I only recommend companies I know and trust.

🎯 Key Challenge

You added 10 people to sales.

Revenue went up.

Great. Job done, right?

Well…

Not exactly.

Not until you work out if the extra capacity actually produced enough additional output to justify the expansion.

This is one of the considerations I’ve encountered on a number of occasions in my enablement career and a big reason why I wanted to do a full guide to sales productivity metrics – in collaboration with Airspeed.​

Back to our growing sales team.

Imagine the organisation averages 50 sales FTEs in one year and generates $10m in closed-won value.

The following year, average sales capacity increases to 60 FTEs, while closed-won value rises to $11.4m.

Revenue is up by $1.4m.

Taken on its own, that sounds positive.

But look at what happened to productivity.

In the first year:

$10m ÷ 50 FTEs = $200k in closed-won value per sales FTE

In the second:

$11.4m ÷ 60 FTEs = $190k per sales FTE

So the organisation added 20% more sales capacity and generated 14% more closed-won value, and the average sales productivity actually fell by 5%.

This already tells us something the top-line revenue number did not.

Now we can look at the incremental change between the two periods.

The organisation added 10 FTEs and generated $1.4m in additional closed-won value.

$1.4m ÷ 10 additional FTEs = $140k per added sales FTE

This is what I call marginal closed-won output per added sales FTE.

The $200k and $190k figures show the average productivity of the whole sales organisation before and after the expansion.

The $140k figure gives us another lens: how much additional commercial output appeared alongside each additional unit of sales capacity between those two states.

Put those numbers together and the growth story suddenly looks a little different.

Yes, the organisation got bigger.

Yes, revenue increased.

But output did not keep pace with the increase in capacity.

And that is exactly where the investigation starts.

Perhaps the new sellers are still ramping. Perhaps there is not enough pipeline to support the larger team. Perhaps territories have become thinner as accounts are divided across more reps. Perhaps managers now have wider spans of control and less time for coaching and deal support.

Or perhaps the sales organisation has simply reached a point where adding another seller does not produce the same incremental output it once did.

There is an important caveat here.

$140k per added FTE does not mean each new hire personally generated $140k.

Existing sellers, market demand, pricing, territory changes, and plenty of other factors can influence the additional output.

Timing also needs to be taken into account. New capacity has to ramp, create pipeline, and work opportunities through the sales cycle. Looking too soon after a hiring wave can make the expansion appear less productive than it eventually becomes.

I’d also compare average FTE capacity across genuinely comparable periods, instead of taking two arbitrary headcount snapshots.

Still, when a sales organisation is scaling, I find this a really helpful question to keep asking:

“Is commercial output growing at least as well as the capacity we are adding?”

Adding headcount is easy to see.

Working out whether the organisation is becoming more productive, less productive, or simply bigger takes a little more digging.

I break this down alongside 14 other sales productivity metrics in my full guide, covering pipeline creation, commercial output, sales capacity leverage, and whether productivity holds as the organisation scales.

The top revenue system I've implemented: reps reclaim 5–8h admin hours weekly, CRM accuracy up 100%, agents that act on pipeline signals, and it's all AI-native.

See how Airspeed works as a full revenue system based on call intelligence.

TAKE THE INTERACTIVE WALKTHROUGH  →

Sponsored placement – I only recommend companies I know and trust.

🔍 What’s New in Revenue & Enablement

A few developments from the past two weeks caught my attention because they all touch, in different ways, on how well revenue teams actually execute.

→ Sales strategy execution: New research from Ignite Selling and the Sales Management Association looked at 97 firms. Only 58% said most sellers could clearly explain how they would achieve a specific sales objective, while managers did better at 76%. Firms where managers could articulate the strategy were also much more likely to report hitting their sales goal.

→ B2B messaging: Allego and cognitive neuroscientist Dr Carmen Simon tested four versions of the same message with 102 people across sales, marketing, and customer success. The strongest-performing version focused on a positive outcome while giving the reader a stronger sense that they could influence it, producing better attention and recall than the alternatives tested.

→ AI inside revenue workflows: Salesforce, Outreach, HubSpot, and Zoom all pushed AI further into active revenue work, from longer-running sales objectives and CRM updates to deal progression and broader revenue workflows.

What I take away from hose is the following:

• A strategy still has to be translated into decisions and behaviours people can act on.
• Messaging can be tested rather than chosen purely on what sounds strongest internally.
• And once AI starts doing more of the work, teams need much clearer rules around what it can change, what needs approval, and where human judgement still belongs.

The full edition also covers manager capability, behaviour change, coaching, evolving revenue roles, and the other signals I’m watching.

​Read the full Revenue & enablement news edition →​

🧠 Best Practice

Something interesting I noticed in my career is that some of the hardest sales managers to enable can also look like some of the most effective.

They jump onto important calls.

They handle the difficult objection.

They step into negotiations.

They tell the rep exactly what to do next.

And, quite often, they save the deal.

I think of these managers as super-closers.

The problem is that the behaviour can produce great short-term results while silently creating dependency across the team.

If difficult situations are routinely escalated upwards, reps get fewer opportunities to develop the judgement needed to handle them themselves.

For enablement, the first step is helping managers recognise when this pattern is becoming their default.

Some signals are fairly easy to spot:

• The same manager keeps getting pulled into important customer conversations
• Reps escalate difficult situations before forming their own view
• Deal reviews regularly end with the manager prescribing the next move
• The same capability gaps keep appearing despite plenty of manager involvement

In many cases, the manager is simply doing what made them successful as an individual contributor: solving commercial problems quickly.

So the aim is to give them a different way to help.

A simple before / during / after approach can work well.

• Before the call: Ask the rep to explain their strategy, likely risks, and where they genuinely need support. Agree in advance who will lead which parts of the conversation.
• During the call: Keep the rep in the driving seat wherever possible. The manager joins with a defined purpose instead of automatically taking over when things get difficult.
• After the call: Debrief what happened. Ask what worked, what the rep would change, and what they think should happen next.

One coaching question I particularly like is:

“What would you do next if I wasn’t here?”

It forces the rep to exercise their own judgement and gives the manager something much more useful to coach.

Enablement can reinforce this through manager training, deal-review templates, call coaching, and 1:1 structures that encourage diagnosis before advice.

There will obviously still be deals where manager involvement is valuable. Executive presence, experience, or commercial authority can genuinely improve the outcome.

The main consideration here is whether the manager is supporting the deal while developing the rep, or simply becoming the person every difficult deal eventually depends on.

I explore this, alongside the wider capabilities required of modern sales managers, in my full guide to sales management competencies.

🎥 This Week’s Video

Why do sales methodologies such as MEDDPICC, Challenger, or Sandler lose momentum after rollout?

This video explains how sales processes, manager coaching, reinforcement, tools, and leadership behaviour determine whether a methodology becomes part of everyday selling or gradually fades.

​

🎮 Piece of Tech

When people think about sales gamification software, the obvious image is a leaderboard on a big screen.

But the more I looked into this category, the more I realised that the leaderboard is really just the tip of the iceberg.

What matters more is the whole system around it.

A good gamification programme needs a few things to work together, starting with what you are actually trying to influence.

Perhaps you want sellers to create more pipeline, add more stakeholders to opportunities, follow up more consistently, improve CRM discipline, or hit specific onboarding milestones.

Then you need to think about how that behaviour will be measured, who it makes sense to compare, what sellers should see as they progress, how achievement will be recognised, what managers should do with the resulting performance signals, and who will keep the programme running once the initial novelty wears off.

And that is important when you start looking at the technology, because the platforms in this category put their emphasis in quite different places:

• Spinify and SalesScreen, for example, put competition design, progression, recognition, and rewards at the heart of the product.
• Ambition and LevelEleven connect gamification much more closely to scorecards, manager coaching, goals, and wider performance management.
• Hoopla leans heavily into visibility and celebration, distributing live results across screens and other channels.
• Maslo Boost goes further into challenge administration and reward fulfilment, particularly for European teams.

So even though all of these products can broadly be described as “sales gamification software”, they support quite different ways of running a set of ongoing programmes.

Once you know what you want to influence, how you want people to experience it, how managers should use the information, and how the programme will be maintained, the features that actually matter become much easier to identify.

I recently compared a number of tools across their workflows, pricing, integrations, implementation effort, strengths, and limitations in my full guide to sales gamification software.

Make better enablement decisions.
Execute faster. Deliver greater
business impact.

Get a structured system for diagnosing problems, designing programmes and turning enablement priorities into implementation-ready work – with diagnostics, Execution Sets, specialised AI assistants, practical resources and practitioner support.

See what's inside  →

★★★★★

Used by enablement practitioners to make better decisions and execute faster

These are my 3 resource picks for this issue from The Enablement Edge Blog:

• ​15 Sales Productivity Metrics for Measuring Sales Capacity and Output​
• ​Sales Management Competencies: What Great Sales Managers Know and Do​
• ​Best Sales Gamification Software in 2026: 6 Platforms Compared​

Got 15 seconds? Please share your feedback by hitting the buttons below. Tell me what you liked and how I can make The Enablement Edge newsletter better.

Federico Presicci - The Enablement Edge Newsletter​
​If you expected more from these emails, please let us know (so we can improve) or Unsubscribe to not hear from us again.