The Three Waves of Sales Enablement: A New Model for Enablement

In Alvin Toffler’s book, “The Third Wave,” he discusses society’s transition from the Industrial Age (Second Wave) to the Information Age (Third Wave), with the Agricultural Age as the First Wave. Training and enablement programs can be viewed as similar waves along a continuum.

As you progress across the x-axis, enablement programs become more flexible and situational. Moving up the y-axis, these programs gain more executive altitude, becoming more strategic and impactful to the company’s growth agenda. To move up and to the right in this model, your enablement organization must become faster, more flexible, and more responsive, equipping the field to address acute, must-win business challenges and market opportunities.

The First Wave: Learning Paths

The first wave in training and enablement is represented by traditional Learning Paths, the original development programs. Like the Agricultural Age, Learning Paths were once a breakthrough. Programs such as onboarding, competency map-based training, role change, and tenure-based options, as well as global rollouts of new processes or technologies, could differentiate one organization from another.

Learning Paths follow a planned, cataloged, and calendared process, teaching people what they will need to know in their daily jobs and careers. These programs could take months or even years to roll out across an organization. Companies that executed Learning Paths well became magnets for top talent and gained a market performance edge.

Over time, Learning Paths have become standard at most companies and remain foundational to any good learning and enablement program. However, just as the first wave of agricultural society gave way to the second wave of industrial society, Learning Paths transitioned to more situational, Territory Plan-based learning and enablement.

The Second Wave: Territory Plans

The second wave of sales enablement is the Territory Planning wave. Programs in this wave are based on sales managers’ decisions about what their teams and territories need to make quota. It also includes examining key performance indicators (KPIs) for individual reps to determine training needs, especially with the prevalence of CRM data.

For example, a manager may see that their revenue number depends on acquiring new customers, while another may rely on expanding existing customers. Key performance indicators can also reveal which reps are struggling in critical areas such as:

• ​Prospecting and Pipeline Creation: Identify reps with “starving funnels” who need help convincing prospects to change and choose you.
• ​Proposal and Deal Closing: Find reps with “constipated pipelines”—lots of proposals but too many stalled, no-decision deals—who need support building better executive-level business cases.
• ​Negotiations and Discounting: Review deal profitability to find “unscrupulous discounters” who can close business but give too much away, needing help protecting pricing and margins.
• ​Renewals and Price Increases: Determine where big subscriptions or contracts are coming due to find “business defenders” whose year depends on avoiding churn and retaining key clients.
• ​Upsells and Cross-Sells: Analyze existing customers to identify white space opportunities for upgrades and add-on sales, and identify “land and expanders” to help grow existing accounts.

Once you know what each manager needs for their territory and identify cohorts of sellers lagging in these areas, you can provide programs more closely aligned to the company’s revenue and growth targets.

Territory-based plans require a training and enablement curriculum for the five main KPIs above. Aligning messaging, content, skills, and coaching to each area gives flexibility to assess individual needs and assign respective programs. This approach is manageable and ties training to measurable outcomes, using data to determine needs and monitor improvements.

In this way, training and enablement programs can be better tied to outcomes and overall company performance. This is the Second Wave of training and enablement—moving toward more situational relevance and higher executive altitude.

The Third Wave: Situational Programs

The third wave in society was the move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Similarly, training and sales enablement is now poised for a third wave: Situational Programs.

These initiatives are tied to the most urgent and strategic needs of the company—high-stakes situations that arise within a quarter and must be addressed immediately. In these cases, you can’t wait multiple quarters to roll out a program; by then, it will be too late.

Examples of situational needs include:

• ​Price increases vital to growth, but must be handled well to avoid churn
• ​Product launches with short windows of opportunity to leverage a competitive advantage
• ​Market changes where customers seek essential insight and advice
• ​Business strategy shifts that must be communicated well for maximum positive impact
• ​Competitive moves requiring a fast, meaningful response to protect your installed base

These events are furthest up and to the right on the chart because they happen fast and have significant consequences. They are often driven from the most senior executive levels, with all eyes on the response and outcome.

Sales enablement at this level requires aligning the entire organization on the right story and the right skills to tell that story in weeks, not months. This demands flexible and responsive content, deployment options, and “fit for duty” demonstrations of proficiency.

In this blog series, more details are provided on executing Situational Sales Enablement at your company.

Watch our on-demand webinar, The Power of Situational Enablement, to learn more about this new model for training and enabling your team.

Read the other articles in the series:

• ​Winning the Moment with Just-In-Time Situational Sales Enablement

Next up: Examples of Situational Enablement