Why B2B Enablement Is at a Crossroads—And What Strategic Leaders Must Do About It

In 2025, sales enablement is no longer a support function—it’s a strategic lever. Or at least, it should be.

Recent insights from Gartner’s 2025 Sales Excellence and Innovation Report offer a clear warning: if enablement functions fail to evolve into strategic consulting arms to the C-suite, they risk becoming irrelevant in driving growth, retention, and quota performance.

At Lucrum Partners, we’ve worked closely with B2B organizations attempting to modernize their go-to-market execution. What we consistently observe is this: many enablement functions are ill-equipped for what modern selling requires—behavior change, data fluency, cross-functional orchestration, and seller motivation rooted in behavioral science.

The Strategic Mandate for Enablement

According to Gartner, leading firms like Salesforce are moving away from isolated training programs and embedding enablement into every layer of the organization:

• Competency models with humanized behavior examples

• Skills-based assessments involving both managers and sellers

• Process-integrated learning nudges and social comparisons

• Linking skill development directly to compensation and career paths

The report identifies advanced enablement leaders as having the ability to:

• Influence GTM and product strategy

• Apply behavioral science to seller development

• Use integrated data to close skill gaps in real time

• Architect behavior change at scale

Yet, while the research is clear, the market still lags.

What the Market Tells Us

A quick analysis of current job listings on LinkedIn and Indeed exposes a significant gap:

• 29,000+ enablement job openings on LinkedIn (U.S. alone)

• 5,500+ open roles on Indeed

However, most roles still emphasize tasks like onboarding coordination, LMS administration, and training support. Few mention:

• Executive-level influence

• Strategic planning or analytics

• Seller motivation frameworks

• Cross-functional GTM alignment

This disconnect signals that too many companies still see enablement as a service provider—not a strategy driver.

Why This Gap Matters

According to Gartner, 41% of sellers are highly resistant to changing how they sell. And when enablement is not equipped to influence workflows, culture, compensation, and development models, behavior doesn’t change—quota attainment stalls, and sellers churn.

Put bluntly: if your enablement function can’t speak the language of the C-suite, it won’t be at the table when go-to-market priorities are set.

What David-Sized Firms Must Do Now

For smaller, growth-stage B2B companies, this gap is a competitive opportunity. David-sized firms can outmaneuver Goliaths by:

1. Elevating enablement into a strategic insights function, not just a training team.

2. Designing competency-based systems that integrate skill development into daily workflows.

3. Motivating seller change through nudges, coaching, and transparent career pathways.

4. Using enablement as a business partner to inform product, marketing, and customer success strategies.

Final Thought

Enablement isn’t just about helping reps “sell better.” It’s about designing a system that drives scalable, repeatable growth aligned to how buyers actually buy. If your enablement team isn’t capable of being your most strategic growth partner… it’s time to rethink the role.

At Lucrum Partners, we help organizations redesign their enablement models to deliver on this mandate—equipping teams to operate with executive-level precision, behavior science principles, and measurable business impact.

Let’s talk about how you can evolve your enablement engine to become a true strategic growth lever.