The State of GTM Enablement: Why It’s Underperforming (and What Leaders Miss)

Approximately 90% of GTM teams now implement sales enablement programs, and for good reason. Research shows that top-tier programs lead to higher win rates, improved quota attainment, a 3x ROI on training, and significantly faster employee onboarding. Yet, despite these benefits, many organizations are falling short. Why? Inefficiencies in training, disorganized content, and a lack of alignment within the revenue team are creating a crisis, one that’s costing businesses millions of dollars per year. Marketing produces assets, but sales teams struggle to find the right materials at the right time, leaving prospects with generic, ineffective information. The result? Diminished revenue performance and ROI, with only 25% of organizations able to demonstrate measurable results from their enablement programs. It’s time to address this disconnect and unlock the full potential of enablement.

Leaders believe they have enablement in place because they’ve invested in resources like sales decks, battle cards, playbooks, and one-pagers. In reality, these teams often have activity without structure. Enablement efforts tend to focus on content creation rather than building an operational system. This lack of structure results in limited governance, inadequate measurement, no clear adoption strategy, and minimal accountability. Consequently, enablement becomes a resource-intensive function that struggles to drive measurable revenue impact, leaving teams feeling frustrated and unproductive.

This inefficiency is costly. In today’s market, where operational precision and resource optimization are paramount, the gap between merely owning enablement assets and executing a consistent, scalable GTM strategy can mean the difference between meeting revenue targets and falling behind.

We explore the common breakdowns in enablement within mid-market organizations and outlines the strategic changes CROs need to make to transform enablement into a driver of predictable growth.

What Enablement Looks Like Right Now in the Mid-Market

When we audit revenue engines, we rarely find a lack of effort. We find a lack of orchestration. The current state of enablement in most growing B2B organizations falls into five distinct traps.

1. Fragmented Ownership Is the Default State

In many SMB and mid-market organizations, enablement does not have a true owner. Instead, it is pieced together by committee:

• Marketing creates content and messaging assets.

• Sales leadership asks for "better decks" or "updated battle cards."

• Customer Success is loosely included, if at all.

• RevOps is asked to "upload it somewhere" or track usage after the fact.

  
  

Who owns enablement end-to-end? This fragmentation creates predictable outcomes. Content is built without clear usage context. Sales ignores assets that don’t map to their day-to-day workflow. CS inherits materials that weren’t designed for post-sale execution.

Because enablement is everyone’s responsibility, it becomes no one’s accountability. Leadership lacks confidence that investments are working, and the field lacks confidence that the materials are relevant.

2. Tool Sprawl Masks the Real Problem

Many leaders assume enablement is underperforming because they "don’t have the right tools." In reality, most teams already have too many tools:

• A shared drive or wiki for content

• A basic LMS or onboarding tool

• Call coaching software

• CRM data meant to "guide" reps

• Ad hoc Notion or Google Docs playbooks

  
  

Without a unified framework that connects content to workflow, workflow to behavior, and behavior to metrics, tools simply add noise. Reps are forced to decide what matters, when to use it, and how to apply it on their own, all while under quota pressure. That isn’t enablement. That is the delegation of risk to the field.

3. Content-First Instead of Workflow-First

Most enablement efforts start with the wrong question: "What content do reps need?"

The right question is: "What decisions and actions must happen at each stage of the revenue process and what support is required at that moment?"

When enablement is content-first, assets are generic and static. Usage relies entirely on memory and motivation. Reps cherry-pick what they like, and messaging drifts over time.

When enablement is workflow-first, guidance appears inside the selling motion. Assets align to specific stage exit criteria. Coaching is contextual, not theoretical. Consistency becomes the default. Most mid-market teams never make this shift.

4. No Charter Means No Boundaries

Without a formal enablement charter, enablement becomes reactive. The function turns into a service desk rather than a strategic lever. Common symptoms include requests like "Can you make a deck for this deal?" or "We need a new one-pager for this vertical."

A charter should answer:

• Who is enablement for (sales only? customer success? revenue team ?)

• What problems it solves

• What success looks like

• How priorities are set

• How impact is measured

Most teams skip this step and pay for it with scope creep, lack of utilization, and diminishing returns.

5. Measuring Output Instead of Outcomes

   
   

Enablement is often measured by activity metrics: number of assets created, trainings delivered, or content views.These are not business outcomes.

What actually matters are the metrics that drive the P&L. For example,

• Time-to-productivity

• Stage-to-stage conversion

• Deal velocity

• Discounting behavior

• Retention and expansion consistency

  
  

Because enablement is rarely tied to these metrics, leaders are left with a vague sense that "we should be doing more enablement" without clarity on what to change or whether it’s working at all.

Where Leaders Get It Wrong

The failure of enablement isn't usually a failure of the enablement manager (if one exists). It is a failure of executive framing.

Treating Enablement as a Project

Most enablement initiatives are funded and run like projects. You launch the LMS, roll out new messaging, or run a quarterly training. End of project. However, enablement must operate as a continuous capability, embedded into how revenue teams execute, not something that gets "rolled out" once and revisited next quarter. When enablement is project-based, adoption decays quickly. New hires inherit outdated guidance, and leadership confidence erodes.

Failing to Tie Enablement to the Revenue Engine

Enablement often lives adjacent to the revenue model, not inside it. What’s missing is a clear linkage between enablement and stage conversion, visibility into how enablement affects deal velocity, and integration with post-sale expansion.

Without these connections, enablement becomes a cost center instead of a growth lever. CROs don’t need more enablement. They need enablement that is instrumented, governed, and accountable to revenue outcomes.

The Path Forward

Enablement is underperforming not because teams lack content, tools, or effort. It underperforms because there is no operating model, no system of enforcement, and no measurable linkage to revenue outcomes.

This is where most organizations stall and where RevOps becomes the missing layer. To fix enablement, you must stop treating it as content creation and start treating it as a core operational system.

Start by auditing your current state. Are you measuring activity or impact? Is your enablement proactive or reactive? If you are ready to move from fragmented activity to a scalable revenue engine, it is time to look at the system as a whole.

Contact me for our GTM Enablement Executive Diagnostic assessment tool that identifies gaps and provides a clear framework for optimizing your revenue engine.