A sales enablement maturity assessment across 104 functions, and the finding I didn't expect

I've been asking enablement leaders and CROs the same question for a couple of years now. What's the return on the money you spend on this function?

Nine times out of ten I get a blank look and a shrug.

These aren't weak operators. Most of them run good teams and ship work that lands.

They've just never been required to answer that question, so they never built anything capable of producing an answer, and I say that as someone who spent the first decade of his career in exactly the same position.

After enough shrugs I wondered whether I was generalising from a handful of conversations, so I built a sales enablement maturity assessment and started collecting data.

What the sales enablement maturity assessment measures

Ten dimensions, scored one to four. How the function plans. How it measures. How it's perceived. Where it reports. How it's paid. Whether anyone diagnoses a problem before building a programme.

Four points on each dimension, so forty is the ceiling.

Over the past year, 104 enablement functions have completed it. Two caveats before anyone throws them at me. The sample is self-selected, so people who choose to take a maturity assessment probably already suspect they've got a problem, and that pulls the average down. And it's self-reported, so nobody audited these answers against the organisations they describe.

Neither of those changes the comparative picture, which is the part worth having.

The proof gap

Six per cent of the functions in this sales enablement maturity assessment can say, without qualification, that their work is linked to revenue and that the link is measured.

Six in a hundred.

A third see no visible link at all between what they do and revenue. Just under half see some correlation but nothing clearly defined or measured. Thirteen per cent can point at a few activities with a clear connection.

I keep coming back to that middle group, because it's the biggest one and it's the most uncomfortable place to be. That's the function that believes it's making a difference and can't demonstrate it. A year of good work, real behaviour change, genuine improvement, and no way to put a number on any of it when the budget conversation comes round.

You don't get credit for impact you can't evidence. That isn't fair and it isn't going to change.

Proximity is not power

Here's the finding I didn't expect, and the one that made me rethink an argument I'd been making publicly for years.

Reporting line scored 3.15 out of four. That's the highest score in the entire study, by a distance. Four in five of these functions already report to a VP of Sales or straight to C-level.

Correlation to recognised revenue scored 1.92.

So the average function in this sample sits in the room where revenue gets decided, and cannot describe its own contribution to it.

That's a worse position than it sounds. A function with no access has an obvious problem and an obvious fix, which is to get closer. A function with access and no proof is visible. It's being watched. It gets evaluated every quarter in a language it doesn't speak, and it walks into a pipeline conversation carrying completion rates.

The judgement still gets made. It just gets made in the room, with you sitting there, instead of in your absence.

We spent ten years fighting for the invitation. Almost nobody spent that time preparing for the conversation.

The org chart isn't the variable

I wanted to test that properly, so I split the sample into the top quarter and the bottom quarter and compared them dimension by dimension. I expected reporting line to be the thing separating them.

The gap was 0.01.

Not a tenth of a point. One hundredth, out of four. The strongest functions in this sample and the weakest ones report into roughly the same places, in roughly the same proportions. Compensation barely moved either, at 0.23.

Everything that did separate them sits in the eight dimensions describing how the function chooses to work. Alignment to the business strategy, 0.89. Long-range planning, 0.80. Whether work is planned or reactive, 0.74. Whether anyone establishes the root cause before building the programme, 0.68.

All behaviour. None of it structural.

I've made the reorg argument myself. I've sat in rooms and said enablement needs to report elsewhere before it can be strategic, and this data says I was solving for the wrong variable. If you're waiting for the org chart to change before your function gets serious, you'll probably get the change and keep the problem.

The flip side is the useful bit. Nothing on that list requires a reorg, a budget increase, or anyone's permission.

Nobody has this solved

The highest score anyone reached was 32 out of 40. The average was 22.6, the median 23, and seventy-eight per cent landed in a single band between 18 and 24.

I've cut this a few ways now and the top of the range is simply empty. There's no group in this data running a genuinely revenue-led enablement function. Not one.

So this isn't a handful of struggling teams sitting next to a group who've cracked it. Almost everyone is clustered in the same place, doing roughly the same things, hitting the same ceiling. Which is either quite bleak or quite freeing, depending on the morning you're having.

The bar is lower than you think.

Where the proof actually gets decided

One more thing from the data, because it explains most of the rest.

Seventy-six per cent of these functions rarely or never establish the root cause of a problem before they build a programme.

That matters more than it first appears. Measurement isn't a reporting decision you make at the end of a quarter, it's a design decision you make before the programme exists, and it determines what evidence will exist nine months later. If you measure completion, you can only ever report completion. There's no clever analysis at the end that turns attendance data into a revenue argument.

No diagnosis means no baseline. No baseline means nothing to measure movement against. The proof was made impossible at the design stage, months before anyone asked for it.

Proving impact isn't technically hard. It's just decided a long way upstream of the moment you need it.

Get the sales enablement maturity assessment report

I've written the whole thing up properly. Twelve pages, free, and there's no pitch inside it.

It has the ten dimensions ranked weakest to strongest with the scoring model, so you can place your own function against the 104 rather than guessing where you sit. It has the top and bottom quartiles compared line by line. And it closes with four changes you can make without a reorg, a budget increase, or anyone's permission.

If you've read this far and recognised your own function somewhere in it, the scoring model is the part I'd start with. It takes about five minutes and it tends to make the conversation with your CRO a lot more concrete.

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