I could have called this "Most sales trainings don't stick."

You probably would have understood exactly what I meant. But I didn't. I called it the human-AI partnership because I'm incredibly passionate about this topic, and I want to share what I've learned about making sales frameworks actually work.

My name is Caroline Maloney, and I'm the Global Head of Sales Enablement at The Travel Corporation. I lead a 70-person team globally that handles everything from QA and training to global product knowledge management, instructional design, and onboarding.

Most importantly for this conversation, I built a bespoke sales framework for my organization, and I'm using AI to wrap around it for reinforcement. Let me tell you how.

The uncomfortable truth about sales frameworks

How many times have you heard this? "We rolled out a new sales framework."

Exciting, right? You spend six months building it, another six months rolling it out, and then... nothing. Your sellers haven't adopted it the way you hoped. There's no meaningful conversion uptick. You're left wondering what went wrong.

I have a hypothesis about why sales frameworks fail, and it comes down to six main reasons.

First, they stop at training. We run the sessions, we check the box, and we assume the job is done. But training is just the beginning.

Second, they treat every seller the same. A tenured sales rep who's been crushing quotas for years needs something completely different from a brand-new hire who just graduated from college and is excited to work at a tech company. Yet most frameworks ignore this reality.

Third, many sales frameworks live outside the flow of work. Sure, you might be using Highspot or Seismic; fantastic tools, both of them. But if you're relying on those platforms alone to house your framework, you're missing out on the reinforcement that happens in real time, when sellers actually need it.

Fourth, they don't start with a test cohort. I learned this one the hard way. We can't just roll out something new to every single salesperson in the organization and hope for the best. We need to start small, learn, and iterate.

Fifth, frontline leaders aren't enabled early and often. I could write a book about this topic. Enablement leaders often completely miss the critical step of getting buy-in from frontline sales leaders.

I'm not talking about VPs of sales or directors of sales. I'm talking about sales managers, performance leads, the people who are actually working with your frontline sellers every day.

And last, KPIs are vague and determined after the fact. It's an ongoing struggle for enablement teams. We can't necessarily overlap our KPIs with sales leadership, but we have to be responsible for meaningful behavioral change in our sales team.

Above all else, there's no integration strategy to ensure that your training or framework will actually stick.

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