Why Sales Training and Enablement Fail: They Don’t Work Together

Companies spend billions on sales training and enablement, hoping to boost sales performance. Yet, despite these significant investments, a staggering 58% of sales reps are struggling to meet their current quotas. This challenge isn’t due to a lack of talent or effort, but rather a fundamental flaw in how organizations are equipping their salesforce.

Sales training is designed to provide sellers with the skills and knowledge they need to excel, while sales enablement offers the tools and resources to support their performance in the field. The problem arises when these two crucial elements are treated as separate systems, leaving salespeople without a cohesive way to turn training into action. Whether in retail, pharma, or agriculture, many organizations face the same issue: when sales training and enablement fail to work together, the entire system breaks down, leading to underperformance.

The root of this disconnect lies in how organizations treat training and enablement as isolated functions. The solution requires rethinking these systems so they not only complement each other but also integrate seamlessly into the seller’s daily workflow. By allowing data to inform and enhance every step of the seller experience, companies can create a unified engine that drives consistent, measurable sales performance at scale.

The Fragmented Approach

Sales training tends to focus on knowledge transfer: delivering information about products, communication strategies, or industry-specific skills. Sellers are often trained in a classroom or through digital mediums, giving them an influx of new information. However, training is frequently seen as a “one-off” solution. Sellers attend, complete, and move on. But knowledge fades without regular reinforcement, and sales performance suffers.

Sales enablement, on the other hand, is about day-to-day support—think of it as the tools that help sellers perform their tasks better. These tools might include CRM systems, content libraries, or communication channels that provide relevant resources when needed. In theory, they should help sellers apply the training they received. Yet, in practice, because there’s little to no overlap between training and enablement, sellers don’t get the reinforcement they need in real time.

The result? Confusion and inefficiency. Salespeople forget key lessons and information, fail to apply the right strategies in the field, and ultimately, the company’s investment in both training and enablement is wasted. Instead of these systems working as a tandem engine for sales performance, they operate in isolation, diminishing their effectiveness.

Why This Fails the Salesforce

For deskless sellers, particularly in industries like pharma or agriculture where compliance, accuracy, and timeliness are critical, the stakes are even higher. A sales rep who forgets compliance training could make costly errors. A retail associate who fails to remember cross-selling techniques might miss a sale opportunity. Without ongoing, practical reinforcement, sales performance drops.

In 2023 at one pharmaceutical company, sales reps underwent extensive training for a new product launch, learning its benefits and compliance requirements. However, despite the thorough training, sales didn’t improve at all. When the company started digging deeper it turned out that their sales enablement platform failed to reinforce the training in real time. Reps received no prompts or reminders to apply their new knowledge during sales calls and continued using outdated scripts. As a result, they struggled to communicate the product’s value, leading to missed targets and poor performance.

This lack of synchronization between learning and doing leads to missed targets, lower productivity, and operational inefficiencies. Operations leaders and HR teams find it difficult to measure the true impact of training efforts, let alone optimize them.

The Power of Integrated Sales Training and Enablement

So what’s the solution? The answer lies in integrated performance enablement—a system that connects sales training and sales enablement, ensuring that knowledge transfer and real-time task execution work together.

Imagine a system that sends task-based prompts immediately after a training session. Say, a seller completes a training module on cross-selling techniques; right after, they receive a real-time nudge via their CRM to apply these techniques during their next interaction. This is how an integrated system should work: learning, followed by action, reinforced by performance support.

Furthermore, such a system would also provide data-driven insights. As sellers engage with real-time prompts, we see managers analyzing which training modules lead to the biggest gains in productivity and invest more in that type of content. This feedback loop helps organizations refine their training content based on what truly moves the needle in sales performance. It’s a dynamic, ongoing process of learning, doing, and improving.

One of the biggest benefits of integration is the shift from reactive to proactive support. In a reactive model, companies wait until performance drops before offering guidance. In contrast, an integrated system anticipates performance gaps and provides proactive nudges that help sellers avoid mistakes before they happen.

Moving Forward

If your sales training and enablement efforts aren’t producing the desired outcomes, now is the time to audit your current systems. Ask yourself:

• Do training programs directly inform day-to-day sales activities?
• Are your salespeople receiving real-time, actionable prompts that reinforce their learning?
• Can you measure the impact of each training program on performance in a meaningful way?

If the answer to any of these is “no,” it’s likely that your systems are working in silos. Investing in a performance enablement solution that combines training with ongoing task-based support is critical. Such a solution should offer real-time feedback, reinforce key behaviors, and create a continuous improvement loop based on real sales performance data.

Building this kind of system in-house can be complex and resource-intensive, involving coordination across multiple departments. But it’s doable. However, third-party platforms like Rallyware provide an out-of-the-box solution designed to align training with enablement, helping to close the gap between knowledge and action.

Final Thought

The future of sales performance hinges on uniting sales training with enablement. By integrating these systems, companies can equip their deskless workforce with both the knowledge and the tools they need to excel daily. When operations leaders and HR teams adopt this holistic approach, they unlock higher productivity, improved compliance, and a stronger, more successful salesforce. Even more, uniting these two departments around a shared goal—driving bottom-line revenue—has consistently fostered powerful leadership and organizational alignment.

Don’t let your investments in training and enablement fall short. Instead, focus on the power of integration, where learning and doing become one continuous cycle, propelling your sales performance forward. Sign up for the Rallyware demo to see how our performance enablement system empowers millions of sellers around the world to achieve their best results.