👋 Welcome to the 51st issue of The Enablement Edge newsletter!

Sit back, relax, and get ready for:

• 🎯 Key Mistake – Scoring sales skills before defining what good looks like
• 📊 Key Concept – Revisiting our enablement maturity model
• 📈 What's New – Revenue leaders want more from every seller
• 🎥 This Week’s Video – The 6 factors behind high-performing sales teams
• 🛠️ Piece of Tech – Best sales training and onboarding software

🎯 Key Mistake

Scoring sales skills before defining what good looks like

Let’s say you’re trying to work out where your sales team actually needs development.

Maybe discovery quality is inconsistent. Perhaps you’ve introduced a new methodology, you’re reviewing onboarding readiness, or managers want a clearer view of where coaching should focus.

A common response is to build a list of familiar sales capabilities – discovery, negotiation, prospecting, objection handling – score everyone against them, and look for the gaps.

You might end up with something like: Discovery: 3.6 / 5

It looks precise, but the problem is that “discovery” still covers a lot of different things.

A seller might ask strong follow-up questions but struggle to uncover commercial impact. They may diagnose a problem well but miss important stakeholders, or gather plenty of information without knowing when they have enough to progress the opportunity.

If all of that sits under one score, 3.6 doesn’t suggest much about what the person actually needs to improve.

A better place to begin is the role itself and the work the person is expected to perform:

Role → Competency → Skill → Observable behaviour → Expected proficiency → Evidence

Take as an example questioning within discovery.

For an Account Executive, you might define one observable behaviour as:

Uses relevant follow-up questions to deepen understanding rather than mechanically progressing through predetermined questions.

For an SDR, you might define the same skill at a different level:

Uses relevant follow-up questions to identify whether a meaningful customer problem exists and whether a deeper conversation is warranted.

From there, you can decide how well someone in each role needs to perform that behaviour.

The capability may overlap. The expected level changes with the work.

Only after defining that would I decide what evidence is strong enough to assess it. A roleplay can show whether someone can demonstrate the behaviour in a controlled situation.

Real discovery calls can show whether it appears when they’re actually selling.

By the time you get to the score, you’ve already established what the person needs to do, what good looks like for their role, and what evidence supports the evaluation.

The number then becomes much more useful because you can actually connect it to a development decision.

I go much deeper into this in my guide to sales skills assessment that I put together in collaboration with AI training company Exec.​

📊 Key Concept

Revisiting our enablement maturity model

I wanted to come back to one of the models that has become quite central to the Enablement Edge Operating System.​

We’ve made a few tweaks to it recently, and because it now sits at the core of a lot of how I think about diagnosing an enablement function, I felt it was worth bringing back to the surface.

The model was originally built around a fairly simple problem: how do you get a useful view of where an enablement function is today, and where it makes sense to focus next?

Evaluating a function effectively can get quite difficult because enablement is made up of a lot of connected parts. Sales process and methodology, content, training, coaching, technology, operations, and cross-functional collaboration can all be at very different levels of maturity.

To make that easier to look at as a system, I group those components into three broader areas:

• Execution and capability – the skills, tools, and guidance that support day-to-day performance.
• Systems and infrastructure – the operational and technological foundations behind the work.
• Alignment and orchestration – how enablement connects and coordinates across the wider organisation.

At the centre sits the outcome all of this should ultimately contribute to: customer value and business impact.

Each component can then be looked at across four stages:

Random → Organised → Scalable → Adaptive

In practice, teams almost never sit neatly at one level across everything.

You might have a very established training system while coaching is still fairly inconsistent. Your technology may be sophisticated, but the operating processes around it are much less mature. Or you may have a well-defined sales methodology without the manager routines needed to reinforce it consistently.

Such a variation is actually where the model becomes useful.

Rather than giving the function one overall maturity score, you can see the shape of the system more clearly: which areas are already working well, where the gaps sit, and which of those gaps are creating problems elsewhere.

The table makes this much more pragmatic by showing what each stage actually looks like across the different components.

For me, that is the main value of the model. It provides you with a structured way to look across the whole function before deciding where to invest time, effort, or budget next.

​Explore the full sales enablement maturity model →​

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📈 What's New in Revenue & Enablement

Revenue leaders want more from every seller

AI is rising. So are expectations of sellers.

A few findings I’ve been paying attention to recently:

• Based on BCG’s 2027 Revenue Agenda, 91% of revenue leaders expect higher seller quotas or productivity requirements, even as 65% expect headcount to grow and 72% expect larger sales and revenue budgets. AI use is already widespread, but its impact is still showing up much more clearly in administrative productivity than in conversion, win rates, or quota attainment.
• An 18-month study of 119 new sellers found that AI-heavy practice supported strong execution when conversations followed the expected path, but adaptability dropped when the buyer changed direction. A combined approach produced a better overall balance.
• In the 2026 State of B2B GTM, networks and introductions were still the most widely used core GTM channel, cited by 62% of respondents – even as investment in AI search and signal-based outbound continues to grow.

I think the next stage of AI adoption will be much less about access to the technology and much more about what organisations actually do with the capacity it creates.

​Read the full Revenue & enablement news edition →​

🎥 This Week's Video

The 6 factors behind high-performing sales teams

High sales performance rarely comes down to one methodology, training programme, technology platform, or individual capability.

In this video, I look at several patterns I’ve seen across high-performing sales organisations – including through conversations with hundreds of revenue leaders as part of our research at Enablement Edge – and explore how motivation, targeted development, root cause diagnosis, leadership, clear standards, systems, and consistent coaching can work together to support better sales execution.

These aren’t universal rules or a definitive recipe. The right combination will depend heavily on your organisation, market, team, and go-to-market model.

Think of them instead as areas worth examining when you’re trying to understand what may be supporting, or constraining, sales performance.

​

🛠️ Piece of Tech

Best sales training and onboarding software

Here is one demo request I would use when evaluating sales training and onboarding software:

“Take one capability we care about and show me how evidence travels from learning into the field.”

A platform might support a path such as:

Assigned learning → Practice → Assessment → Field evidence → Reinforcement

What I would want to understand is how connected those stages actually are.

Can practice and assessment use the same behavioural standard? If a seller struggles with a particular part of the capability, can the manager see it? Can evidence from real customer conversations eventually tell us whether that capability is showing up in the field? And if it isn’t, can that information feed back into more targeted coaching or practice?

Some platforms will manage much of this within one environment. Others will rely on integrations with conversation intelligence, CRM, or other tools. Either approach can work. What matters is whether the evidence remains connected enough to help you understand how the seller is progressing.

This is also why I wouldn’t put too much weight on completion rates when evaluating these platforms.

A team might achieve 96% course completion, which tells you that most people completed the assigned learning.

However, that tells you much less about whether they can demonstrate the capability, apply it consistently in customer conversations, or improve with further practice and coaching.

For me, the real buying test is how far the technology allows you to follow that journey: from learning something, to practising it, to demonstrating it, and eventually applying it in the field.

Check out my article on the best sales training and onboarding software to see how I evaluated the category and which tools made the list.

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

• ​Sales Skills Assessment: How to Measure, Develop, and Track Rep Capability​
• ​Best Sales Training and Onboarding Software for 2026: 8 Platforms Compared​
• ​Sales Enablement Maturity Model: The Complete Guide to Assessing and Advancing Your Function​

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Federico Presicci - The Enablement Edge Newsletter​
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