As I reflect on my 2024 blog posts, one theme stands out: excellence in revenue enablement. The primary mission should be to serve your internal customers. Every micro effort — whether in learning, adoption, management, or culture — must be laser-focused on seller success. Nothing else matters. Here is a summary:
“32 To 36 Courses” Is Not Revenue Enablement — Too often, sales learning is conducted as a reaction to negative lagging outcomes, such as “We lost a bunch of similar deals, so we need to retrain everyone.” Or more positively, a new product launch is pending, necessitating seller education … but no one thought months ago to request time in the revenue enablement learning calendar. This blog delves into the key filters for generating ever-boarding experiences: Enablement teams must ascertain if it’s necessary, who should learn, when it’s optimally delivered, and how to provide it most effectively.
Why Can’t My Sellers Adapt More Quickly? — There isn’t a B2B seller whose remit today is exactly the same as two years ago, and most quota-bearing professionals recognize that their compensation, territory, offerings, buyers, and competitors are constantly in flux. This blog guides enablers through the essential needs to communicate through change management best practices and to establish and maintain role-specific sales competency maps to transparently broadcast how selling duties are adapting, as well as lays out scenarios where it might just be foolish to expect overwhelming evolution among certain individual contributors.
What’s Lurking In Your Sales Culture? — While our research team has already been at work preparing for B2B Summit North America 2025 since October, the lessons of our 2024 event continue to resonate with revenue enablement leaders charged with high-altitude thinking around their sales culture. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Katy Tynan in combining her team’s culture energy research with the ups and downs of B2B sales-specific cultural growth. This blog explores the entire sales talent lifecycle, from hiring and onboarding through ever-boarding and career development. The TL;DR? Even in the crustiest, most traditional sales organizations, paying attention to the culture within your revenue team impacts the lagging indicators that matter to the C-suite.
How Quickly Should A Sales Rep Be Onboarded? — This common question is one of the few we’re comfortable not answering with the typical analyst response of “It depends.” Because the answer is: Onboard B2B sellers well, not quickly. Look, I’ve been a sales leader, too, in urgent need of territory coverage, who rushed reps into the field; it never works out well for reps, the company, or especially the customer. This blog highlights the fact that adult learning science contradicts how too many B2B organizations ramp sellers: by quickly teaching them too much at their start, praying that it sticks, and rapidly releasing them into the field. Instead, high-performing revenue enablement teams learn how to feather in selling and feather out learning over a more extended period of time. The year-one and long-term results are almost always better than hurried sales onboarding.
The Chief Sales Officer And Cultural Leader: Not A Contradiction In Terms — Returning to Katy and her “future of work” colleague Angelina Gennis and their wonderful research on organizational leadership and culture, this blog applies their lessons to sales-specific subcultures. The main takeaway remains true: “Today’s CSOs have unprecedented access to leadership best practices, along with the tools to amplify how they effectively motivate, inspire, and coach their team.”
First-Line Sales Managers: Promote Or Hire? — In June, we published irrefutable but controversial research findings: All else being equal, chief sales officers are better off hiring first-line sales managers than promoting from within. No, Forrester isn’t broadly advising CSOs to eliminate sales career development, but we do find that most firms are poor at effectively growing sales leaders. This blog showcases a spectrum of FLSM staffing approaches from four external organizations that serve as superb, thoughtful examples of the many options available to revenue leaders in need of new management talent.
Revenue Enablement Is Not In The Tool Business — … Because buying technology solves no problems and enablement teams have little value if they’re not agents of change and orchestrators of efficiency and effectiveness within their revenue engine. Your job as a revenue enabler is first and foremost applying insight-driven expertise to friction points within the sales organization; once your processes and people are optimized, then of course the opportunity to scale and automate enablement excellence should follow. Under no circumstance should your sellers, however, think of your team as the purveyor of shiny-object technologies.
It’s been a busy, exciting, challenging year. What will 2025 bring?
