The purpose of sales enablement is to equip sales teams with tailored resources, training and support, enabling them to sell better and faster. Yet, high turnover in sales is often rooted in poor training and onboarding. With 70% of salespeople lacking formal training, sales enablement isn’t a “nice to have” — it’s a necessity.
Imagine investing months onboarding a sales rep only to lose them because they didn’t have adequate training. Or equipping your team with the latest tools, only to then see performance lag. Sound familiar? That’s because these challenges are all too common for sales leaders.
What’s the problem? Traditional and reactive enablement models no longer work in today’s constantly changing sales landscape. The good news, however, is that today’s advancements, including the emergence of AI and predictive sales enablement solutions, are shifting how we fundamentally approach sales enablement and opening new doors for sales success.
As we enter 2025, let’s explore three major trends that are leading this transformation.
Individualized and Prescriptive Onboarding
For decades, companies have focused on onboarding all their employees in the same way. If you’re lucky, there may be supplemental training for specific roles like an account executive, business development rep or customer success management track. However, this is often not the case. Even when it is, it’s rare for the training to be tailored to each hire’s specific learning style, proficiencies or skill gaps.
Consider this: 84% of sales training is forgotten in the first three months. The reality is that even the best tools won’t make a difference if sales leaders don’t first start by understanding how their teams learn and operate at an individual level.
This is a real problem and the only way to overcome it is if sales leaders throw out the one-size-fits-all playbook and embrace individualized and prescriptive onboarding. Instead of broken reactive models, sales leaders are beginning to prioritize what is called “proficiency mapping,” or identifying skill gaps and proficiencies to understand where a seller might struggle or make mistakes that could impact revenue.
By shifting away from outdated models, sales leaders can develop tailored onboarding strategies that align with each hire’s unique strengths and areas for growth, ultimately accelerating ramp time, improving performance and ensuring training sticks.
Kinesthetic Learning Replaces Classroom Learning
Traditional classroom training is quickly becoming obsolete. While it has its place in the sales enablement world, companies are shifting away from passive methods and seeing far better results from kinesthetic learning, or “learning by doing.”
Through active methods like workshops, role-playing and live exercises, leaders can engage their teams more effectively and help them apply skills in real-world scenarios. I’ve seen firsthand how the kinesthetic approach can decrease ramp times by up to 50% and increase annual contract value by over 40%.
AI for Sales Practice and Coaching
With 43% of sales professionals already using AI in their workflows, one of the biggest shifts we’re going to see in 2025 is the increased adoption of generative AI to scale personalized training and coaching for sales teams.
With game-changing capabilities like diagnosing skill gaps, identifying learning styles, simulating realistic customer interactions and delivering real-time feedback, AI takes the guesswork out of enablement. This technology can help improve performance in an individualized and scalable way without compromising revenue opportunities.
AI can also be a great tool to help underperforming go-to- market teams gain visibility into revenue-impacting mistakes before they occur. Even the most tenured employees benefit from continuous practice and coaching. With the ability to meet each individual where they are on their career stage and level of mastery, AI offers a dynamic and scalable solution for continuous learning and development.
To stay competitive, leaders must embrace these trends to stay ahead of the ever-changing sales enablement landscape. By prioritizing individualized onboarding, active kinesthetic learning and AI-driven coaching, teams will be well equipped and ready to succeed in 2025 and beyond.
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