Building an Enablement Program: Start With Performance, Not Training
My perspective on how to build an effective enablement program.
Building an Enablement Program: Start With Performance, Not Training
Building a Sales or Revenue Enablement program can be exciting. There are platforms to select, content to create, onboarding programs to build, methodologies to implement, and training to deliver.
But none of those things should be the starting point.
Before building the courses, buying the technology, or scheduling the training, we need to answer a much more important question:
What performance are we trying to enable?
I've always believed that learning is an important part of Enablement, but learning itself isn't the ultimate objective.
Learning is the means. Performance is the objective.
That philosophy changes how we approach building an Enablement function.
Whether you're starting from scratch, rebuilding an existing function, or evaluating the maturity of your current program, here are 11 areas I believe should be considered.
☐ 1. Start With the Business Outcomes
Before asking, "What training do our sellers need?" start with the business.
What is the organization trying to accomplish?
That could include:
Increasing revenue
Improving pipeline generation
Increasing win rates
Shortening sales cycles
Improving seller productivity
Reducing ramp time
Increasing retention or expansion
Improving product adoption
Entering a new market
Launching a new product
Then ask a second question:
What behaviors need to occur to help produce those outcomes?
This follows a fundamental principle of the Kirkpatrick Model: start with Level 4 Results and work backward toward the behaviors, capabilities, and learning necessary to achieve them.
Enablement shouldn't begin with a training calendar.
It should begin with the business strategy.
☐ 2. Identify Your Stakeholders
Enablement is inherently cross-functional.
Depending on the organization, key stakeholders might include:
Sales Leadership
Revenue Operations
Product Marketing
Product
Marketing
Customer Success
Customer Care
Sales Engineering
Channel and Alliances
Executive Leadership
HR or Talent Development
But identifying the names on the org chart isn't enough.
We need to understand what each stakeholder owns, what outcomes matter to them, what they expect from Enablement, what Enablement needs from them, and where decision-making authority resides.
Product Marketing may own messaging. Revenue Operations may own process and data. Sales leaders own execution. Frontline managers reinforce behavior.
Enablement frequently sits at the intersection of all of them.
That makes stakeholder alignment one of the foundational pieces of the function.
☐ 3. Define the Audiences You Enable
Who exactly are we enabling?
"Sales" is usually too broad an answer.
The organization may include:
Account Executives
BDRs and SDRs
Account Managers
Customer Success Managers
Channel sellers
Sales Engineers
Customer Care teams
Frontline Managers
Sales Leaders
Each audience performs a different job and may require a different Enablement experience.
Go beyond job titles. Consider tenure, experience, geography, customer interaction, workflow, required competencies, current performance, and where learning needs to happen.
Adult learning principles remind us that effective instructional design begins by understanding organizational goals, learner characteristics, required knowledge and skills, and what learners ultimately need to be able to do.
One-size-fits-all Enablement rarely fits anyone particularly well. This is a lesson I had to learn the hard way.
It's tempting, especially when resources are limited, to build one program and try to make it work for everyone. But an experienced Account Executive, a newly hired BDR, a CSM, and a frontline manager may all need something different from Enablement. The objective may be shared, but the path to performance doesn't always have to be
☐ 4. Diagnose the Performance Gaps
This may be one of the most important steps.
When a stakeholder says, "My team needs training," don't immediately start building a course.
Ask why.
What is happening today?
What should be happening instead?
What are high performers doing differently?
What is preventing everyone else from doing it?
Sometimes the answer is knowledge or skill.
Sometimes it isn't.
The problem could be process, technology, unclear messaging, lack of manager reinforcement, poor incentives, confusing content, insufficient practice, or something entirely outside Enablement.
ATD recommends conducting a needs assessment before investing time and resources into a training solution specifically to identify the performance gap and determine whether training is actually the appropriate intervention.
Not every performance problem is a training problem.
Strategic Enablement requires being willing to discover that training isn't the answer.
☐ 5. Define the Behaviors and Learning Objectives
Once the business outcome and performance gap are understood, we can determine what people need to do differently.
I like thinking about it as a simple chain:
Business Outcome → Desired Behavior → Required Capability → Learning Objective
Suppose the organization wants to improve opportunity conversion.
One desired behavior might be stronger discovery.
That requires sellers to develop capabilities such as uncovering business impact, identifying decision criteria, asking stronger follow-up questions, and connecting customer problems to value.
Only then should we determine the learning objective.
Instead of:
"Understand effective discovery."
Consider:
"Demonstrate the ability to uncover business impact, decision criteria, and compelling events during a simulated customer conversation."
One measures exposure.
The other describes observable performance.
ATD similarly recommends using the results of a needs assessment to define behavioral outcomes before writing specific learning objectives.
☐ 6. Establish the Enablement Operating Model
Now we have to determine how Enablement itself will operate.
Consider:
Enablement charter
Scope of services
Intake process
Prioritization criteria
Service-level expectations
RACI
Governance
Annual and quarterly planning
Launch calendars
Stakeholder communication
Capacity planning
Without an operating model, Enablement can quickly become an order-taking organization. Trust me. I've been there. It's easy to fall into the trap of reactive work.
Everything becomes urgent, and when everything is urgent, prioritization becomes confusing. The team can find itself moving from request to request, delivering a lot of work without necessarily having enough time to determine which work will have the greatest impact.
That's the difference between being busy and being strategic.
A strong operating model creates enough structure for Enablement to evaluate requests against business priorities, available capacity, audience impact, and expected outcomes. It gives the team a framework for deciding not only how work gets done, but what should get done first and why.
The goal isn't to eliminate reactive work. That's unrealistic. Enablement will always need to respond to product launches, competitive changes, leadership requests, field challenges, and unexpected business needs.
The goal is to prevent reactive work from consuming the entire function.
☐ 7. Evaluate the Enablement Technology Ecosystem
Technology matters, but technology should support the strategy rather than define it.
Evaluate the capabilities already available across areas such as:
Content Creation: Articulate 360, Camtasia, Powtoon
Learning Delivery: LMS platforms and virtual learning environments
Sales Enablement: Platforms such as Highspot
Conversation Intelligence: Platforms such as Gong
Practice and AI Role-Play: AI-powered simulation and coaching tools
Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams
Project Management: Monday.com, Trello
CRM: Salesforce, Dynamics
Analytics: Tableau, Power BI
Knowledge Management: Confluence, SharePoint
Before adding another platform, ask:
What capability do we need that our existing technology cannot provide?
An Enablement technology stack should solve problems, remove friction, provide insights, and help people perform.
It shouldn't simply become a collection of licenses.
☐ 8. Build the Right Team
Technology doesn't build Enablement programs. People do.
Depending on the size and maturity of the organization, an Enablement function may require access to expertise in:
Enablement strategy
Instructional design
Content development
Facilitation
Sales process and methodology
Product and technical knowledge
Enablement systems
Data and analytics
Program and project management
AI and automation
Change management
Not every organization needs a dedicated person in every role. But someone needs to own or provide those capabilities.
And there is another group that should be considered part of the broader Enablement ecosystem:
Frontline managers.
Enablement cannot sustainably coach every seller after every learning experience. Managers are critical to reinforcing expectations, observing behaviors, providing feedback, and helping learning transfer into day-to-day performance.
☐ 9. Build an Enablement Experience, Not Just Training
A training event can introduce knowledge.
Sustained Enablement requires more.
Think about the complete performance journey:
Learn → Practice → Apply → Coach → Reinforce → Measure
That ecosystem might include:
Onboarding
Everboarding
Instructor-led training
Virtual learning
Microlearning
Certifications
AI simulations
Role-plays
Sales plays
Job aids
Battlecards
Talk tracks
Call coaching
Manager coaching
Office hours
Peer learning
Just-in-time performance support
The goal isn't simply to get information into people's heads.
It's to help them access and apply the right knowledge and skills when they need them.
This is also where content governance matters. Someone must determine ownership, accuracy, version control, expiration, tagging, findability, and where the organization's source of truth lives.
Creating content is easy.
Maintaining useful content at scale is much harder.
☐ 10. Determine How You Will Measure Success
Don't wait until after launch to ask how success will be measured.
Establish measurement during the design process.
You might consider four levels:
Activity: Did people participate?
Learning: Did they acquire the knowledge or skill?
Behavior: Are they applying it?
Business Impact: Did performance improve?
Those questions align naturally with Kirkpatrick's progression through Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results. More importantly, the model encourages organizations to begin with the desired results rather than treating evaluation as something that happens after training.
Depending on the initiative, business measures might include:
Ramp time
Pipeline generation
Conversion
Win rate
Sales velocity
Average deal size
Retention
Productivity
Product adoption
One important distinction:
Completion is not performance.
Someone completing 100% of an LMS course proves that they completed the course.
It doesn't prove they can perform the skill.
☐ 11. Create a Continuous Improvement Loop
Finally, Enablement should never really be finished.
Markets change.
Products change.
Competitors change.
Customers change.
Technology changes.
And our people continue developing.
That means the Enablement function needs its own feedback loop:
Diagnose → Design → Deliver → Reinforce → Measure → Improve
Regularly ask:
What's working?
What isn't?
What are people using?
What are they ignoring?
Which behaviors are changing?
Where are managers seeing improvement?
Where are sellers still struggling?
What should we improve, scale, redesign, or retire?
Modern evaluation should be cyclical rather than a one-time report, using evidence from results and behavior to inform future design, stakeholder alignment, and strategy.
Enablement Is a Performance Function
When we put all of these pieces together, I believe a strong Enablement program can be viewed across four interconnected layers:
STRATEGY
Business Outcomes → Stakeholders → Audiences → Performance Gaps
DESIGN
Behaviors → Capabilities → Learning Objectives → Programs → Content
EXECUTION
People → Processes → Technology → Delivery → Coaching → Reinforcement
IMPACT
Adoption → Behavior Change → Performance → Business Outcomes → Optimization
The tools will change.
The technology will change.
Even some of our approaches to learning will change.
But the fundamental question should remain:
Are we helping people perform better in ways that help the business perform better?
Because ultimately, that's the job.
Learning is the means. Performance is the objective.