Over the last couple of years I've watched a lot of good sales enablement people get caught up in reductions in force. Not because they were bad at their jobs. In several cases they were clearly excellent at them.
That's worth sitting with, because it doesn't match what the market says. Sales enablement as a category is growing. The tooling around it is growing. The expectations placed on sellers are going up, not down. And yet when budgets tighten, enablement is often one of the first functions to be looked at.
I don't think that's because enablement doesn't work. I think it's because of how most enablement functions get built in the first place.
Start with the obvious structural issue. Enablement's job is to make salespeople more effective. When it works, a rep wins a deal.
And the rep, quite reasonably, attributes that win to themselves. That's the nature of the industry. Sales is a profession built on individual performance and individual credit, and I'm not criticising that. It's part of what makes good salespeople good.
But it leaves enablement as a third-party bystander to its own results. The function doesn't touch revenue directly, it improves the person who does. So when a finance director asks what enablement contributed last quarter, the honest answer is hard to evidence, and the easy answer is a list of activity. Courses delivered. Decks produced. Playbooks published. Portal logins.
That's a dangerous position to be in, because activity is exactly what gets cut when a business needs to do more with less.
So part of this is a measurement problem. But measurement isn't the whole story, and I'd be doing enablement a disservice if I pretended it was.
I've seen enablement teams build training programmes, documentation, decks and playbooks that sales simply never used. Not because sales was being difficult, but because the material didn't help them do the thing they're paid to do.
This is where you have to understand how salespeople actually operate. Good salespeople are very good at protecting and prioritising their time. They want to spend the majority of it talking to customers, progressing deals and generating revenue. That instinct is correct. It's what you hired them for.
So anything that doesn't visibly support that becomes a tax on selling time. A long workshop is a tax. A playbook nobody references is a tax. A methodology they're trained on but never measured against is a tax. Reps don't resist enablement because they're lazy or unwilling to be helped. They resist it because it takes them away from customers and they can't see what they're getting back.
The numbers here have been stable for a long time. Forrester's research has consistently found that around 65% of the content marketing produces for sales goes unused, with some organisations finding non-usage above 80% once they audit it properly.
More recently, research published by Supered in 2026 found that 89% of organisations have a defined sales process, but only 36% of reps actually follow it. That gap between what exists on paper and what happens in a live deal is the most useful number in this whole conversation.
I've seen this happen more than once. An enablement team decides the business needs to invest in sales training. They take the lead on rolling it out. They build the programme, they put the sellers through it, and they're the ones pushing it onto the reps.
What's missing is sales leadership. The people who actually own the number weren't really involved. So nobody measures to the methodology and nobody holds sellers accountable for using it. Within a quarter it's gone. The training happened. The change didn't.
That isn't an enablement failure. It's a failure to secure the one thing that makes enablement stick, which is a sales leader who cares whether it's followed and is prepared to hold their team to it.
Because the reality is simple. If sales leadership don't measure against the methodology, the reps won't use it. Salespeople often perceive new training as extra steps and extra work, and if nobody holds them accountable, they'll quietly go back to what they were doing before.
The most successful sales teams I've seen share the same trait. They have clear metrics, sellers are held accountable to them, and those metrics live in the CRM, in the reports and dashboards leadership actually looks at. That's where adoption is really measured. Not in the fact that training was delivered, but in whether the behaviour it was meant to change shows up in the numbers.
The best example I've seen had full buy-in across both enablement and sales leadership. They got to the point where every salesperson had a metric on their dashboard showing the percentage of their opportunities where they'd applied the sales methodology. If that number dropped below the expected level, it affected their commission.
That's what genuine accountability looks like. The methodology wasn't a workshop everyone forgot about a fortnight later. It was measured, visible, and tied to the thing salespeople care about most. Unsurprisingly, they used it.
The second failure is more structural, and I think it's the one that actually explains the redundancies.
When a company has no enablement function, it becomes very obvious that it needs one. There's no onboarding material, no competitor positioning, no consistent process, no usable content. So the business hires an enablement team, and that team builds all of it.
That build is a big lift. It's genuinely a lot of work and it takes real skill.
But then it's done. And the work of maintaining it is nowhere near the size of the work of creating it. So you're left with a permanent team sized for a project that has finished. Either they look like they aren't worth the money, or they go looking for things to justify themselves. And what they usually find is more content, more training, more programmes. The exact things sales didn't want in the first place.
The need was project-shaped. The hire was permanent-shaped. Most of what goes wrong afterwards follows from that mismatch.
The best enablement work is grounded in a specific, observable problem tied to a metric someone already cares about.
Take a straightforward example. You start losing a noticeable number of opportunities to one particular competitor. Enablement builds a battle card and a toolkit that helps a rep navigate the deal the moment they discover who they're up against. It's small, it's targeted, reps can use it inside a live conversation, and you can watch the win rate against that competitor to see whether it moved.
That's a completely different proposition from "we're rolling out a new methodology this quarter". It earns its place immediately, and nobody has to argue about attribution, because the trigger and the measure were defined before the work started.
None of this is an argument for cutting enablement entirely. The businesses that do end up somewhere predictable.
Content goes stale. That battle card is still in the drive, still being used, and still quoting a competitor's old pricing. This is the part people underestimate. Out-of-date material doesn't just fail to help, it actively damages the seller. If a rep confidently quotes a competitor's price and the buyer already knows the real number, the rep hasn't gained an edge, they've lost credibility. They now look like they don't understand their own market, at precisely the moment they needed the buyer's trust. Out-of-date content is worse than no content, because reps trust it and act on it.
Technology also gets badly underused. When a business invests in Salesforce or a sales tool and adoption is poor, a large part of that is usually because nobody owned the job of making the system genuinely simple for sellers to use. That should sit with enablement. Buying the technology and expecting adoption to follow is one of the most expensive assumptions a growing business can make.
The instinct when an enablement hire looks underused is to find them things to do. Don't. Busywork is how you got the unused decks in the first place. The two useful questions are whether the remit is wide enough, and whether the economics work.
Take the remit first. Enablement is often scoped far too narrowly, usually to content and training. Widen the lens and the sales process itself is frequently where the real problems sit, along with getting people to genuinely use the technology they've been given. Those problems go unowned precisely because they aren't seen as enablement's job. Give a good enablement person that whole span, with process, adoption, positioning and content all connected, and two things happen. The impact is far greater, and the running-out-of-work problem disappears, because there was never a shortage of work. There was a remit drawn too small.
Then the economics, because this is where the honest answer on team size lives. It isn't that smaller teams can't benefit from enablement. It's a question of value and economies of scale. The cost of doing the work is broadly the same whether you have twenty reps or a hundred. But say that work lifts win rate or revenue by five to ten percent. Across a hundred reps that's transformational. Across twenty it's a much smaller number for roughly the same outlay. Same cost, very different return.
That's why the published benchmarks, commonly around one enablement head per forty-odd reps, aren't arbitrary. That ratio is roughly where a full-time hire starts to clear the return-on-investment bar. Below it the capability is still valuable, the permanent hire often just isn't. Which is the honest case for bringing enablement in when you need it and scaling it back when you don't, rather than carrying a full-time role the numbers don't yet support.
What you shouldn't do is leave it unowned and hope.
Because the clue is in the name. Enablement means enabling. It means driving more sales and helping sellers be more successful. If the work is doing that, it's very hard to cut. If it isn't, it isn't really enablement at all. It's content. And content is always easy to cut.
Use of AI Disclaimer: Whilst these are my original thoughts, I have used AI to shape them into this article.