From generative AI use to the rise of virtual selling, there’s a lot that’s new happening in the world of sales enablement. These sales enablement statistics shine a light on up-and-coming trends that can take your lowest performers into your top-performer spots.
With 43% of buyers who use self-service digital commerce reporting higher purchase regret, today’s sales rep has the opportunity to engage with prospects in new ways that lead to a happier buying experience—but they need the tools and resources to do it.
Let these sales enablement statistics help you build a better sales enablement strategy.
General Sales Enablement Statistics
Let’s dive into some general enablement statistics affecting today’s businesses:
1. As of 2023, 90% of organizations have a dedicated sales enablement team or program.
The State of Sales Enablement Report for 2023 found that the number of businesses with a dedicated sales enablement team has grown to 90%, up from 75% in 2022.
2. 87% of buyers expect sales representatives to act as trusted advisors.
While 90% of high performers say their company enables them to be trusted advisors, only 66% of underperformers collectively say their organization offers the same kind of enablement.
3. Sales organizations say their most significant challenge is increasing revenue while minimizing costs.
Sales professionals say their top three challenges are increasing revenue while minimizing costs, effective coaching, and sales velocity. These three challenges can all be addressed with the help of today’s best practices in enablement.
4. 81% of businesses agree that enablement improves the efficiency of revenue teams.
Companies who have invested in enablement say that they see an overall boost in revenue. Of today’s sales enablement teams, their top goals are sales productivity, sales performance, and revenue optimization.
5. An average of 11 stakeholders are involved in B2B purchase decisions.
While 11 is the average number of stakeholders involved, that number can sometimes go as high as 20.
6. The average sales rep has 2,080 hours per year to sell.
However, research shows that the number of active hours they spend per year selling is 690 hours—or just 13 hours per week.
Sales Enablement Technology Statistics
Let’s dive into the sales enablement tech stack and how it’s affecting businesses today.
7. By 2026, 65% of B2B sales organizations will transition from intuition-based to data-driven decision-making.
According to Gartner, sales teams are widely moving toward data-driven decision-making, which requires analytics tracking and signifies a need for more sales
enablement software usage.
8. Only 22% of sales enablement budgets are allocated to tech.
Despite Gartner finding that more businesses intend to head toward data-driven decision-making, they also found that one of the biggest barriers to doing so is that there’s a significant lack of budget that is put toward technology that could support that move, such as sales enablement apps.
9. 33% of sales organizations say they use artificial intelligence.
While 37% of high performers say they use AI, only 20% of underperformers do. However, 80% of sales leaders say that AI has improved their salespeople’s time overall.
10. 65% of companies are currently using sales enablement tools.
While only 16% of businesses are neither using nor plan to use sales enablement platforms, 65% are already using such tools, which is up 5% from 2022.
11. Companies using sales enablement tools are 19% more likely to see an increase in their average win rate year over year.
If you’re looking to boost your quota attainment, research suggests that sales enablement tools can be a significant help. For example, Spekit users see an average of 20% higher quota attainment.
Spekit offers an enablement platform to transform reps’ training, sales, and revenue growth across your business. It provides instant access to sales content within the tools they use, surfaces playbooks for sales reps to close deals faster, and drives digital adoption through in-app support, embedded FAQs, process guidance, in-app alerts, and intelligent analytics.
12. Nearly 70% of sales reps say they’re overwhelmed by the number of tools they need to use to close deals.
According to Salesforce, sales teams use an average of 10 tools to close deals, which salespeople report feeling overwhelmed about using. In response, 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate their tech stacks to boost productivity.
Sales Reps' Productivity Statistics
Sales enablement has far-reaching effects. These sales enablement statistics dive into sales productivity.
13. 77.7% of enablement professionals are excited about how AI can boost sales performance.
According to the Sales Enablement Landscape Report for 2023, 44.59% of enablement professionals are “optimistic” about what AI can do for the productivity of sales reps. 33.11% are “very optimistic.”
14. Win/close rates are the most common way sales reps’ performance is measured.
72.97% of sales enablement professionals say the most common metric used to measure their sales reps’ performance is win/close rates. The second most common metric, sales velocity, clocks in significantly lower, with just 40.54% of sales enablement professionals saying their company uses this metric.
15. Only 28% of salespeople expect to hit their annual quota.
Many sales reps don’t believe quota attainment is fully possible, with less than 30% saying they expect to hit 100% of their quota. 34% think they will hit between 76% and 99%, whereas another 38% say they’ll hit 75% or less.
16. Sales reps only spend 28% of their week actually selling.
With salespeople spending less than 30% of their week actually selling, a significant goal of sales enablement becomes giving sales reps back their time and allowing them to focus on relationship building and prospecting.
17. 49% of salespeople frequently hit their quota.
Spekit found that while 28% of sales professionals always hit their quota, 49% say they frequently reach full quota attainment. 15% say they sometimes do, while 8% say they never do.
18. Low-performing sales reps are five times more likely than top performers to say they aren’t fully onboarded and productive in their roles after one year.
54% of top performers, however, say they were onboarded and productive within the first three months, compared to just 30% of poor performers.
Sales Content Statistics
Sales content may have more of an effect than you realize. These sales enablement statistics dive into sales content and its impact on the sales process.
19. Content adoption is the most common metric used to measure the performance of a sales enablement team.
50% of sales enablement professionals say the most common metric used to measure their team’s performance is the adoption of sales content. Other commonly used metrics include win rates, quota attainment, and sales cycle length.
20. Half of organizations aren’t confident they know what content engages a buyer
While half of all businesses don’t know what kind of content their buyer wants to see, organizations that understand what content engages their buyers are 38% less likely to struggle with sales velocity.
Pro Tip: With Spekit’s AI-powered content recommendations, sales reps will get the content their buyers want to see sent directly to them—wherever they are in their workflow.
21. 65% of sales and marketing content go unused.
According to Forrester, 65% of content marketing assets are unused—primarily due to misalignment between the sales and marketing teams. A content management system can help create better alignment and ensure sales teams have access to the content they need, while content analytics can help you figure out what content is being used the most.
22. 41% of respondents say that producing high-quality content is the biggest challenge to creating sales and marketing content.
Meanwhile, 20% say they can’t produce enough content, while 18% say their budget for creating content is too low.
23. 71% of consumers expect personalization, and 76% are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize.
76% of consumers even get frustrated when they don’t get the personalized interactions they want. This indicates how important it is to personalize content, whether that means sending content related to the particular industry the buyer is in, case studies from similar companies, statistics on adoption that target a buyer’s pain points, or something else that tells the buyer you know who they are and what they want to see.
24. 78% of consumers are more likely to recommend a company to a friend if that company personalizes content and interactions.
78% are also more likely to repurchase from a company that focuses on personalization, showing how personalization leads to customer acquisition and retention.
Sales Training Statistics
Sales training is a vital part of sales enablement. Let’s unpack today’s sales training landscape.
25. Nearly half of all salespeople think the skills in their current role will be outdated within two to three years.
Gartner found that 49% of sellers are concerned their skills will become outdated. With the rise of artificial intelligence and automation, that concern may be warranted, and this sales enablement statistic demonstrates the need for continuous training initiatives.
26. 62.18% of sales enablement professionals say their team is responsible for onboarding.
33.78% of sales enablement professionals say that they are still responsible, but they collaborate with other teams. Only 4.06% said that sales enablement is not involved in onboarding.
27. 53% of sales leaders say they use coaching technology solutions.
While 81% of sales reps say they get valuable coaching from their manager, only 53% of sales leaders say they use coaching technology solutions to deliver this training.
28. When using sales play tools, representatives report being 15% more likely to know how to navigate different sales scenarios.
When an employer incorporates sales play tools, they are shown to be a valuable part of sales training and an effective part of a sales enablement strategy.
29. B2B sales reps forget 70% of their training within one week.
Even if sales reps remember beyond a week, they’re not in the clear. 87% of sales professionals forget all that information within a month, according to Gartner.
30. Organizations that implement technology for sales training see a 60% average rep quota attainment.
Businesses using technology for training report a five-percentage-point increase in average rep quota attainment over businesses that don’t use tech for training.
Consumer Experience Statistics
Enablement goes beyond closing more deals or reaching quota attainment. These sales enablement metrics show how enablement impacts customer loyalty, acquisition, and retention.
31. More than half of all CSOs believe that enablement will support marketing and customer success roles in the next three years.
Gartner’s findings support the idea that sales enablement and revenue enablement aren’t just about sales. Revenue enablement, in particular, is about not just closing deals but increasing the size of those deals and boosting revenue overall, which affects all customer-facing teams.
32. 80% of sales reps say maintaining customer relationships after closing a deal is increasingly important.
With more companies saying that they value long-term relationship building over short-term wins, sales reps are turning toward customer retention as one of their biggest goals, with 92% of high performers saying that they’re at least partially evaluated on post-sale metrics like customer value and retention.
33. 75% of B2B marketers say buyers are taking longer to commit to a purchase than last year.
This change may be due to the fact that buyers report doing more research before making a purchase, as buyers are becoming more risk-averse.
34. Most buyers are 70% through their buying journey before they talk to a seller.
Most buyers are already mostly through their buying journey before they reach out to a salesperson, demonstrating the necessity of sales enablement content at every stage of the sales pipeline.
35. 33% of all buyers desire a seller-free sales experience.
This number increases when discussing younger generations. 44% of millennials prefer not to interact with sales reps when making a B2B purchase.
36. B2B buyers with moderate to high levels of uncertainty are 30% less likely to complete a purchase at all.
They are also 42% less likely to complete a high-quality deal compared to those with little or no uncertainty.
Other Sales Enablement Statistics
These additional sales enablement statistics can shine a light on what’s happening in sales enablement today.
37. Nearly half of businesses don’t use data to gain insights or make decisions.
Research shows that 46% of organizations don’t use data to gain insights or make critical decisions, which shows an opportunity for competitors to get ahead in their industry by ensuring that they’re harnessing the power of their data while others fall behind.
38. 69% of salespeople say their job is harder today.
With the majority of salespeople saying their job is harder today due to uncontrollable concerns like inflation and supply chain issues, sales enablement teams must try to be a helpful resource that lessens their load.
39. Businesses are 45% more likely to improve sales efficiency when organizations have insight into what’s working.
According to the State of Sales Enablement Report for 2023, gaining insight into what’s working in sales, such as through the analytics on sales enablement platforms, fosters alignment in go-to-market teams and boosts the overall sales efficiency of a company.
40. 47% of account executives have left a job due to poor training or a lack of onboarding.
Spekit found that top performers, in particular, respond best to a solid training and onboarding system, as 52% of top performers have left a job due to poor training and onboarding, compared to 30% of their low-performing counterparts.
41. Only 8% of sales leaders say that most of their sales reps stay on for more than one year.
63% of sales leaders say 74% or less of their sales reps stick around beyond one year, indicating the necessity of a smooth onboarding experience to support this turnover.
42. 70% of top performers say they had a good or excellent onboarding experience.
In comparison, only 15% of poor performers said that they had a good or excellent onboarding experience at their current company.
Sales Enablement Trends to Look Out For
These sales enablement statistics indicate growing trends to look out for this year. Here’s a look at some top trends.
Sales enablement tools that create less work for sales reps
With sales reps saying that their job is harder today—widely thanks to the number of tools they need to close deals—companies are looking to consolidate their tech stack. A sales enablement tool that does more and limits the need for more tech is one direction sales leaders are heading.
Personalization leads to better customer engagement
Consumers say that personalization is necessary to attract their attention today. From personalized scripts to customized content, the more personalization a sales enablement team can produce, the more a sales rep can make their sales collateral work for them.
Onboarding moves to everboarding
An onboarding experience can make the difference between a top performer and a poor performer, but with today’s sales reps saying that they’re concerned about reskilling, businesses need to move to everboarding.
Instead of just one onboarding phase, sales teams can keep reskilling by making the onboarding experience an ongoing part of their sales training.
Embracing virtual selling
Today’s buyers are doing more research than ever. Finding ways to virtually engage with prospects can ensure that your company’s products and services are where their research takes them.
Streamline Your Sales Enablement Strategies
Looking at today’s sales enablement statistics, it becomes clear—data is the way of the future. With today’s sales leaders moving to data-based decision-making, content needing to be personalized to individuals, and sales training turning to everboarding, sales enablement teams need the tools to give their sales teams the resources they need to thrive.
Spekit enables you to onboard and train, create and personalize content, and use your analytics to optimize your sales process—all from your sales professional’s workflow.
Consolidating your tech stack just got a lot easier.
