I lead enablement
How do I make this one stick after the room empties?
You are accountable for behavior you have no authority to enforce. The program is yours, the content is yours, the scores are yours, and the one meeting where the behavior would actually be reinforced belongs to a manager who does not report to you.
Enablement and revenue leadership audiences
Fran Orlando, Head of Marketing, Energage
“I would say, on a more personal note, just the ability for Russell to coach somebody and elevate their thinking in terms of relationship to the rest of the business, and how to be effective in decision making, is transformative.”
What you are actually measured on
Completion is what gets reported. This is what gets remembered.
- Whether anything on a call recording sounds different ninety days after the session, and whether you can point to which part.
- Whether your frontline managers are reinforcing the standard or quietly reverting to whatever each of them personally does.
- Whether the last program you ran is still being used, or is a folder nobody opens that you will be asked about when the next budget is set.
Where it usually breaks
Enablement gets blamed for all three of these. It can only be held responsible for one.
You are enabling against a strategy the leadership team has not settled
You were asked to build a program, and the brief came from one function. Sales wanted one thing, marketing another, product a third, and you reconciled them because somebody had to. What you shipped was a compromise between three views of the company, and it is being taught to people who will be measured against a fourth.
That is not a content problem and no amount of instructional design fixes it.
Ask whether anyone can produce win rate in targeted segments against everywhere else. If not, the disagreement you are papering over is upstream of you.
The message you were handed cannot survive a live conversation
The messaging arrived as a document. It is accurate, it is well built, and it was written in a language and at a pace that a first meeting does not have. So your reps learn it, believe it, and abandon it the first time a buyer interrupts, because there is nothing in it they can say in their own mouth under pressure.
The test is the share of deals where a buyer confirmed a differentiated required capability in their own words.
When that is unknown, the material you are teaching has never been shown to survive the trip into the market, and your program is carrying the failure of an upstream build.
The reinforcement layer was never built, and it is the whole game
This one is yours, and it is the one you can actually win. Training is where behavior starts. What decides whether it is there a year later is a frontline manager asking the same questions in every opportunity review, and most of your managers were promoted for being terrific sellers and were never taught to coach.
So the standard decays to the manager's own personal habits within a quarter, the spread between top quartile and median reopens, and the program gets recorded as another thing that did not stick.
Managers get enabled before the field, never after. That sequence is not a preference, it is the difference between a program and an event.
- THEIR PART
- Trained before the field. Coached on their coaching.Then they own it.
- IF THEY ARE NOT
- It is built as training, not as change management, and it does not last.
Where people in your seat start
“A handful of people carry the number and we cannot explain what the rest do differently.”
Sales Training and GTM Transformation →
One buyer conversation your whole team can run, coached against live deals with your managers on the calls.
“My managers were terrific sellers. Coaching is a different job and nobody taught them it.”
Leadership and Manager Coaching →
The questions a manager asks in every opportunity review, and the judgment to coach a deal rather than take it over.
“Only a fraction of our calls ever get reviewed, and by whoever had time that week.”
AI Enablement and Build →
Your methodology written down precisely enough to be scored against real call transcripts, with your managers verifying what the system proposes.
What becomes true
The standard is enforced by people with the authority to enforce it. Your managers run the coaching, in the opportunity review they already hold, against live deals, with a written record of what was decided.
The methodology exists precisely enough to be inspected. If it can be written down well enough that a system can score a call transcript against it, it is real. If it cannot, it was a set of slides, and that is worth finding out before the next rollout rather than after.
Coverage stops depending on who had time. Instead of a fraction of calls reviewed by whoever was free that week, every call can be looked at against the standard, and your managers verify what the system proposes rather than starting from nothing.
The numbers
- 9
- named sellers whose behavior changed inside one coaching cycle
- 36
- companies whose go-to-market transformation workshops I facilitated
One engagement, from your seat
At Energage the team's conversations stopped at the survey and the product and never reached business impact, and there was an acquired product line nobody knew how to open a conversation about. The enablement problem underneath it was the ordinary one: there was material, and there was nothing making anybody use it on a Tuesday.
High Integrity Selling customized to their motion, then a Conversational Messaging Guide built with cross functional leadership rather than handed to them. Then the part that decides it: live opportunity coaching with the managers on the calls, coach the coach sessions, and a written accountability handoff so the standard had an owner after I stopped. Last, the methodology encoded into AI that coaches from call transcripts, which is what turned inspection from a sampling exercise into a standing one.
Documented behavior change across nine named sellers within a single coaching cycle. Product led discovery became problem led, comfortable questions became productive tension, assumptions became buyer validated facts.
What you are probably asking
We already own a methodology and a content library. What happens to it?
It stays and it is the starting material. Your team half knows that vocabulary, your managers inspect against it, and replacing it costs you the only foundation you have while teaching everyone a new set of words for things they already do. The work is built for your motion rather than delivered from a binder. What gets added is what your buyer conversation is missing, in the language your company already uses.
My managers will not show up.
Then say that out loud in the first conversation, because it changes what should be built. Where there is a coachable management layer, the full engagement runs and the behavior transfers. Where there is not, the honest version is a strong build and a named gap rather than a program sold as something that will hold. I would rather tell you that before the statement of work than have you find it out two quarters after it.
How do I show this worked before revenue moves?
Behaviors weekly. Leading indicators quarterly. Revenue last.
Behaviors, weekly. Open questions asked. The hypothesis carried inside the question. The problem framed before the solution. Facts validated by the buyer rather than assumed. Scored on recorded calls against a rubric, not on a manager's gut feel.
Leading, quarterly. Stage conversion for the coached cohort. Deal size. Cycle time, including time to qualify out. Net new deals per rep. These move first, and they move long before the board sees anything.
Lagging, twelve to twenty-four months. Win rate, sales productivity, retention and expansion. Where your board looks, and the last place a change in behavior ever shows up.
Everything above belongs to Energize and Sustain: the team running a conversation it can hold, and your own managers keeping it alive after the room empties. It is your goal. My expertise is in the helping.
Every enablement leader I meet has run something good that faded, and can name the exact meeting where it should have been reinforced and was not.
Tell me about that meeting. It is usually the shortest route to what the next program has to do differently.
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