If you’re a sales leader at a growing company, you’ll eventually get to the point where you need to start thinking about sales enablement to help your team achieve their full potential. When you have a small team, it’s easy to jump around and help 1:1 as needed, but as your sales team scales up, any weak point gets magnified. If you don’t have good hiring practices, processes, onboarding, communication systems, hand-offs, etc.– these problems scale with you and hurt the effectiveness of your team.
What is Sales Enablement?
Sales enablement is about creating the conditions for your sales team to sell more effectively by continuously improving the processes, training, knowledge, and tools needed to sell more effectively and at the same time removing barriers and friction in your system that slow people down or cause issues.
For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), a robust sales enablement strategy can be the difference between hitting revenue goals and falling behind. Modern buyers value speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service, and 80% of customers prioritize these factors – all of which sales enablement can improve. Research shows that companies with strong sales enablement see significantly better outcomes: for example, firms with dedicated enablement achieve ~49% win rates vs 42.5%, and best-in-class organizations enjoy 50% higher quota attainment and 3× greater revenue growth than peers. These benefits are especially critical for SMBs that often have limited resources and need efficient, repeatable sales processes across industries.
In this series, we’re digging deeper into the success factors that make a game-changing sales enablement program. If you haven’t already, we’d suggest reading “How to Build a Sales Enablement Program” first so you know what we’re talking about.
In this article, we’re expanding on the second step of our framework for building out a sales enablement system. This is especially written for you if you’re at a SMB or startup where sales enablement is a new concept.
Develop Ability — Build Unshakeable Capability and Confidence
Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most sales leaders hire for talent and hope for performance. They recruit the person with the best track record, throw them into the deep end with minimal onboarding, and wonder why results are inconsistent.
The reality is that talented salespeople aren’t born—they’re systematically developed. Even naturally gifted communicators need to learn your product, understand your customers, and master your sales process. The companies that consistently hit their numbers don’t just hire great salespeople; they create them.
Turning your sales team into top performers doesn’t happen overnight, and raw talent alone won’t get you there. The best sales organizations are intentionally built through strong leadership, impactful onboarding, meaningful mentorship, continuous training, and consistent coaching. It’s the difference between hoping for excellence and engineering it.
The Five Components of Ability Development
Leadership Excellence: Your Sales Managers Are Make-or-Break
Most companies promote their best salespeople to management without teaching them how to lead. Being great at selling doesn’t automatically make someone great at developing other sellers.
What Leadership Excellence Actually Looks Like:
- Managers who spend more time coaching than reporting
- Leaders who can diagnose performance issues and prescribe specific solutions
- Sales managers who inspire confidence rather than create anxiety
First steps: Institute “Manager as Coach” training for all sales leaders. Focus on three core skills: active listening, effective questioning, and performance diagnosis. Practice these skills through role-playing scenarios based on real situations your managers face.
For example, a tech company required new sales managers to complete 20 hours of coaching certification before managing anyone. Their team performance improved 35% in the first year because managers learned to develop people instead of just monitoring numbers.
Here’s a practical tool for you to try: Create a “Weekly One-on-One Template” that guides managers through performance review, skill development discussion, and goal setting. This ensures every team member gets consistent, productive coaching time.
Strategic Onboarding: Beyond Product Knowledge Dumps
Traditional onboarding overwhelms new hires with information they can’t yet contextualize. They learn about features but not customer problems, company history but not current strategy.
What Strategic Onboarding Looks Like:
- Digital delivery of foundational information before day one
- Immersive experiences that build emotional connection to the company mission
- Clear performance milestones for the first 30, 60, and 90 days
First Steps: Design a “hybrid onboarding experience” that combines self-paced digital learning with high-impact in-person activities. Use online modules for product knowledge and company information, but bring people together for culture building, team bonding, and hands-on practice.
Consider creating an “onboarding buddy system” where new hires spend their first week shadowing different team members—not just salespeople, but customer success managers, product managers, and support staff. This gives them a complete picture of the customer journey and their role in it.
A practical first step should be to include a 30-60-90 Plan to make their next steps and expectations clear at all times. For example you could try something like:
- 30 days: Complete product certification, shadow 10 customer calls, make first discovery call
- 60 days: Conduct 5 demos independently, close first deal, present customer feedback to product team
- 90 days: Achieve 50% of quota, mentor newer team member, contribute one process improvement idea
Customize to make it relevant and meaningful to your context.
Structured Apprenticeship: Beyond “Shadow and Hope”
Most mentoring programs pair new hires with top performers for a few weeks and call it apprenticeship, but top performers aren’t always great teachers, and shadowing without structure doesn’t build competence.
What Structured Apprenticeship Looks Like:
- Formal mentorship with trained mentors who want to teach
- Progressive skill-building exercises with increasing complexity
- Regular assessments that ensure learning is actually happening
First Steps: Create an “Apprenticeship Playbook” that breaks down complex sales skills into learnable components. For example, don’t just have new hires observe discovery calls—have them practice specific questioning techniques, get feedback, and gradually take on more responsibility.
For example, a manufacturing company created “skill stations” where new salespeople rotated through different scenarios: objection handling, technical demos, contract negotiations. Each station had a certified trainer and specific learning objectives. New hires couldn’t advance until they demonstrated competency at each station.
Continuous Skill Development: Training That Sticks
Most sales training is event-based. A workshop here, a seminar there…with no reinforcement or practice. People forget 90% of what they learn within a week if it’s not reinforced. Practice and reinforcement is essential.
What Continuous Development Looks Like:
- Regular skill assessments that identify specific gaps
- Microlearning sessions that reinforce key concepts weekly
- Practice opportunities that simulate real selling situations
First Steps: Implement “Weekly Skill Sprints”—15-minute team sessions focused on one specific skill that needs to be improved. Practice it, discuss it, then use it in real calls that week. Track which skills are being used and celebrate improvement.
Try creating your own monthly system:
Week 4: Debrief results and identify improvements, implement and monitor
Week 1: Introduce new skill through training and practice
Week 2: Refresh, demo, and practice skill through role-play
Week 3: Apply skill in real customer interactions
Real-Time Coaching: Make Feedback Immediate and Specific
Annual performance reviews are too infrequent, and general feedback like “great job” or “needs improvement” doesn’t help people get better.
What Real-Time Coaching Looks Like:
- Immediate feedback after calls, meetings, and presentations
- Specific observations about what worked and what could improve
- Forward-looking coaching that prepares people for upcoming challenges
First Steps: Train managers to use a feedback model so that it is always specific enough to be useful. For example, the “SBI-I Model” can be used for feedback: Situation (when/where), Behavior (what you observed), Impact (effect on outcome), Intent (what should happen next). This makes feedback specific and actionable.
You might try something like implementing “Call Debriefs” where managers listen to one sales call per week for each team member and provide written feedback within 24 hours. Focus on one thing that went well and one specific improvement opportunity. Measure changes for improvement or issues each week.
Your Next Steps
Building ability isn’t about implementing all five components simultaneously. Introducing too much change at once will overwhelm you and your team. Start with leadership development because great managers multiply the impact of everything else. Here’s a recommended path to get you started:
Week 1-2: Assess your current managers’ coaching skills through observation and feedback from their teams.
Week 3-4: Begin manager coaching training focused on the fundamentals: listening, questioning, and giving specific feedback.
Month 2: Redesign your onboarding process to include both digital efficiency and in-person connection.
Month 3: Launch structured apprenticeship with clear learning milestones.
Ongoing: Build continuous skill development and real-time coaching into your regular rhythm.
Remember: Ability development is an investment, not an expense. Every hour you spend developing your team’s capabilities pays dividends in performance, retention, and results.
The companies that consistently outperform their competition aren’t lucky, they’re systematic about developing talent! Your turn.
Next week, we’ll dive into Step 3: Augmentation from our framework—how to extend your team’s capabilities.
