Here's a stat that should keep every enablement leader up at night: Only 39% of organizations have dedicated enablement programs for frontline sales managers.

Let that sink in.

We invest millions in ramping reps. We obsess over content consumption metrics. We build certification programs, sales playbooks, and competitive battle cards. But when it comes to the people actually responsible for making all that enablement stick?

Crickets.

According to new research from SBI Growth, the math is brutal: while 70%+ of organizations train individual contributors, we're leaving frontline managers to figure it out on their own.

And here's the uncomfortable truth we need to confront: the skills that made someone your top seller are entirely different from the skills required to lead and coach a team.

We take our best closers—the ones who crushed quota through sheer force of will, natural talent, and maybe a little competitive fire—and we promote them into management roles with minimal structured onboarding. Then we act surprised when they struggle to:

We're not setting them up for success. We're setting them up for frustration.

The research reveals another gap that compounds the issue: only 38% of organizations consistently measure enablement ROI for frontline managers.

So not only are we under-investing in manager enablement—we're not even tracking whether our limited efforts are working. We're flying blind.

Meanwhile, the technology that could help is sitting on the shelf. Just 26% of organizations actively use AI tools to support managers, and only 22% rate their CRM-AI integration as mature.

We have the tools. We're just not deploying them where they matter most.

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Every enablement initiative you launch flows through your frontline managers. Every new methodology, every product update, every coaching framework—it all lives or dies based on whether managers can reinforce it in the field.

When we fail to enable our managers, we're not just leaving 61% of them behind. We're undermining every other enablement investment we make.

That new sales methodology you rolled out last quarter? Without enabled managers to coach it, reps revert to old habits within weeks.

That beautiful content library you built? Without managers inspecting whether reps are using the right assets at the right time, it becomes a digital graveyard.

If you're in that 61%, here's where to start:

1. Acknowledge the skill shift. Stop treating management as a reward for sales performance. Start treating it as a distinct discipline that requires distinct training. Coaching is a skill. Deal inspection is a skill. Pipeline management is a skill. None of them come automatically with a President's Club trophy.

2. Build dedicated manager programming. Not a module bolted onto your rep onboarding. Not a one-day workshop before SKO. A sustained, structured program that addresses what managers actually need: how to coach effectively, how to run productive 1:1s, how to diagnose pipeline health, how to develop underperformers.

3. Measure what matters. If you're not tracking manager-specific outcomes, you're not serious about manager enablement. Look at coaching frequency, rep development trajectories, forecast accuracy, and team performance variance.

4. Leverage the technology. AI-powered coaching tools, conversation intelligence platforms, pipeline analytics—these aren't just for reps. Deploy them to help managers scale their impact and focus their attention where it matters most.

Your frontline managers are the multiplier on every enablement investment you make. They're the difference between a methodology that transforms your sales motion and a binder that collects dust.

The 61% gap isn't just a training problem. It's an ROI problem. It's a retention problem. It's the reason so many enablement initiatives fail to move the needle.

Close the gap. Enable your managers. Watch everything else start to wor