Sales enablement vs sales training: 5 key differences

Both sales enablement and sales training play key roles in upskilling and empowering sales teams to perform at peak efficiency. But that doesn’t make these terms identical.

This article explores the key differences between enablement and training, and identifies how these components come together to create exceptional sales reps.

What is sales enablement?

Sales enablement provides sales representatives and managers with the support and information they need to succeed in their roles. This includes creating sales content, providing resources, and implementing sales technology to streamline the sales cycle.

Enablement is a support activity, helping to keep sales reps selling by removing blockers from their role.

Watch the video.

What is sales training?

Sales training involves teaching sales skills and strategies to your sales team. This means facilitating workshops, coaching sessions, and training days with the aim of upskilling your reps.

These sales training initiatives increase seller confidence and make conversations more repeatable, allowing your team to bring in more revenue.

Differences between enablement and training

With definitions out of the way, let’s discuss some of the key differences between these two sales support initiatives.

Key focus

Sales enablement’s key focus is on improving sales processes. This involves identifying blockers in the existing workflows and implementing effective solutions.

This may involve creating new resources for the sales team to enable them to quickly check some information, or implementing a new tool into the sales process to reduce manual tasks.

Enablement also focuses on tracking and utilizing analytics. This allows the sales team to make data-informed decisions about the pipeline and monitor sales efficiency.

On the other hand, sales training focuses on creating effective and ongoing education programs for sellers and their managers. Often this means creating a curriculum of training materials and running regular workshops to keep sales rep skills up to par.

Training also focuses on coaching sales reps through particular scenarios they struggle with to improve their confidence and ability to convince customers.

Sales training is just one of the tools that enablement pros have under their umbrella to support and improve rep performance – we’ll discuss this partnership later.

Activities

Sales enablers take on a range of tasks and activities to provide results. Here are a few examples:

Identifying blockers and inefficiencies in the sales process.
Testing and iterating new processes.
Creating sales content such as battlecards, product docs, and demo videos.
Working with marketing to align on messaging and understand product benefits.
Customer research.
Vetting and implementing tools to support sellers.
Analyzing and reporting on sales metrics.
Managing change and ensuring sellers adopt new tools/processes.

Whereas activities associated with sales training include:

Designing the sales onboarding program.
Crafting specialized training sessions for sales skills.
Providing 1-to-1 coaching to reps on tricky conversations and training sales managers on coaching best practices.
Selecting, rolling out, and training reps on a sales methodology.
Developing a sales competency framework.
Keeping up to date with sales best practices.
Understanding customer needs and preferences.
Planning sales kickoff sessions.

Benefits

Both sales enablement and sales training bring great benefits to a sales department, here’s how:

Sales enablement increases alignment between sales and marketing teams, by acting as a bridge between these functions. This effectively smooths the customer experience as they move from the marketing funnel into the sales funnel.

Enablement also increases sales efficiency by reducing “down-time” where sellers are completing admin tasks instead of actively selling. This function can also improve sales strategy by providing key data to sales leaders.

Training benefits your sales team by improving sales performance. Since your sellers are consistently upskilling, their ability to successfully close deals will increase.

Another benefit of sales training is the ability to align your sales team around a set methodology. This allows for a more consistent approach to selling and can lead to a more predictable pipeline.

Finally, focusing on sales training shows investment in your sellers' capabilities, which can improve job satisfaction and employee retention rates.

Challenges

But like any team, these responsibilities also pose some challenges within organizations.

Sales enablement can lead to a longer chain of command or a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation when it comes to sales strategy, so it's important to manage this properly. Ideally, the enablement team should run adjacent to the sales team, rather than reporting to each other.

Another challenge is twofold: successful enablement requires more coordination across teams, and more stakeholders to agree on sales performance metrics. Enablement pros must work alongside sales leaders to align processes and determine KPIs for sales professionals - big benefits if you get it right, but major headaches if you don’t.

Finally, enablement needs to keep up with a constant onslaught of requests from sales, changing customer needs, and updates to marketing assets. Managing this task list can pose a challenge, especially for solo enablers.

Sales trainers also face challenges, as their initiatives can sometimes take sellers out of the playing field for workshops and coaching programs. While these trainings will likely pay off down the line, getting buy-in for this time away from closing deals can be difficult.

Another challenge of sales training is sustaining sales reps’ skills and knowledge. Sellers are human, and they’ll eventually forget some of their learnings, so it can be challenging for trainers to know when to revisit a topic.

Katelyn Cox, Director of Inside Sales & Sales Enablement at ZenGRC, discusses this lifecycle of sales knowledge:

Watch the video.

Finally, sales training can pose challenges when elements of a new sales methodology need to be linked into your CRM system. Updating fields and keeping data consistent can be time-consuming and frustrating when going through a change. But working with your revenue operations team should lighten the load.

Measurement

These initiatives also use different metrics to determine their success. Sales enablement metrics include:

Time to do ‘x’ task
Sales productivity
Number of calls/emails sent
Sales content usage
Adoption rate of new tech
Time to respond to customer inquiries

On the other hand, sales training metrics include:

Sales confidence
Win rate
Sales velocity
Customer satisfaction
Sales team feedback

But as always, there’s some nuance and overlap between these two areas, as they have similar aims when it comes to sales productivity.

Enablement and training: Two sides of the same coin?

Now that we’ve explored the key differences between sales enablement and sales training we have to admit: they’re essentially two sides of the same coin.

They have quite a lot in common, including typically being owned by the same team (or even individual), let’s explore this.

Ownership

Sales enablement professionals typically take on both enablement and training responsibilities within an organization.

This allows them to take a strategic approch to improving sales productivity – balancing time out of the field with smoother processes to ensure that sales reps are more capable and efficient.

Therefore, enablers must be well-versed in skills associated with sales content creation, tech optimization, onboarding processes, and creating sales training programs.

Stakeholders

The key stakeholder of both enablement and training initiatives is the sales team. This means sales enablement pros work alongside sales leadership to determine sales metrics, and the team’s overall focus.

Enablers also work with sales managers to train them on sales coaching, discuss blockers their teams are facing, and create dashboards to improve performance visibility.

Finally, the sales enablement team works closely with the sellers themselves to identify their pain points and challenges. Whether that’s needing a battlecard created on a new competitor or facing challenges getting contracts approved.

With that information, the sales enablement function builds and executes their plan to correct these blockers and make the sales organization’s vision come true.

Purpose

The purpose of a sales enablement strategy is to optimize the sales process, at the end of the day, this is also the purpose of a sales training program.

These two pillars make up a structured approach to increasing revenue growth at a company, by assisting sellers to perform at their best. From coaching to sales collateral, KPI tracking to sales methodologies – it all aims to boost close-won rates in your org.

Cost

Sales enablement and sales training are investments in your sales team. This means they can be costly. Your sales enablement team’s wages, tools, and other resources often require their own dedicated budget.

But like any investment, this cost pays off through increased sales efficiency and revenue growth.

Do you need a sales enabler and a sales trainer?

As we mentioned, sales enablement professionals often take on enablement and training responsibilities. But in some cases, you may want to consider splitting these responsibilities within your organization.

Enterprise organizations

In large enterprise organizations, it may be necessary to split these responsibilities. When you have a large global salesforce, enabling all of your reps can be challenging, so having dedicated trainers and enablers may allow better resource allocation through specialization.

However, this depends on the organization as other companies may find their enablement function works fine without this role specialization.

New sales methodology

When rolling out a new sales methodology, your team may want to consider hiring the methodology creator’s sales trainers to run a workshop with your team.

This ensures that your sales team gets accurate information about the methodology from experts, which is especially helpful when your enablement team isn’t familiar with the ins-and-outs of the method yet.

Often these trainers will lay the groundwork for your sales teams to use this new methodology, but it’s up to your internal enablement team to provide follow-up workshops, coaching, and sales collateral.

Specific sales training

Another reason to hire sales trainers is when you’d like to focus on a specific sales skill or mindset. Hiring an expert trainer in that area will allow your sales reps to gather insight straight from the horse's mouth, and trust the expert knowledge they’re receiving.

Running expert-led workshops semi-regularly will build the credibility of your sales enablement program and allow reps to upskill quickly.

External trainers are also a great choice for sales kickoff meetings to set your sales team up for success at the start of the year.

FAQs

What is the difference between enablement and training?

Enablement involves providing sales teams with the tools and resources they need to be efficient in their roles. Training involves teaching and coaching sales teams' on skills and methods of success.

Does sales enablement include training?

Yes and no. Sales training is one element of sales enablement activities and is often included in a sales enabler’s job description. However, sales training is also a distinct activity, especially when an external sales trainer is hired.