{"id":75283,"date":"2022-01-27T09:47:02","date_gmt":"2022-01-27T14:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trainingindustry.com\/?post_type=magazine&p=75283"},"modified":"2026-01-19T10:19:16","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T15:19:16","slug":"the-evolution-of-ld-from-sales-enablement-to-sales-readiness","status":"publish","type":"magazine","link":"https:\/\/trainingindustry.com\/magazine\/winter-2022\/the-evolution-of-ld-from-sales-enablement-to-sales-readiness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Evolution of L&D: From Sales Enablement to Sales Readiness"},"author":34,"featured_media":75296,"template":"","tags":[29571,29570,29569,2239],"class_list":["post-75283","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-b2b-selling","tag-lds-role-in-sales-readiness-training","tag-moving-from-sales-enablement-to-sales-readiness","tag-sales-readiness","global_topic_tax-sales","global_topic_tax-strategy-alignment-and-planning","magazine_issue_tax-winter-2022","magazine_article_type_tax-feature"],"acf":{"sponsored":false,"gated":false,"gated_content_type":"","file_attachment":null,"gated_content":"","form_instruction_header":"To access the full article, please fill out the form below:","pardot_html_embed":"","author_override":true,"author_name":"Chris Lynch","author_image":"","author_bio":"Chris Lynch is the chief marketing officer at Mindtickle<\/a>. He oversees all global marketing functions, including product marketing, demand gen, brand and creative.","excerpt":"Rather than focus on traditional learning and development (L&D) for sellers specifically, businesses need to embrace the discipline of sales readiness.","main_content":"As the wave of digital transformation has swelled, businesses have invested trillions into projects that aim to elevate the customer experience, grow revenue or achieve bottom-line efficiencies. In fact, IDC projects companies will spend<\/a> $6.8 trillion on these projects by 2023.\r\n\r\nBut employees have been left out in the cold. Approximately 70% of employees say they don\u2019t have a strong enough mastery of the skills<\/a> needed to do their jobs and 87% of executives report readiness gaps<\/a> in their organizations. Sales employees feel this gap most acutely. As new products and competitors appear daily, companies are investing significantly to ramp them up in their job.\r\n\r\nBut simply providing a budget and resources won\u2019t work without the right strategy. Large-scale sales certification and kickoff events create an initial burst of knowledge transfer and skills development to sellers \u2014 but then they fall off in effectiveness in the following weeks because they are designed simply for completion, not knowledge retention. In fact, according to a Gartner survey, B2B sales reps forget 70% of the information that they learn within a week of training, and 87% will forget it within a month. Many call this the forgetting curve<\/a>.\r\n\r\nThis knowledge erosion contributes to a mediocre sales team. Forrester reported<\/a> recently that, between 2011 and 2019, the average seller quota attainment actually dropped from 63% to 43%. Faced with an underperforming team, sales leadership is forced to churn and burn through sales reps, relying even more heavily on their top performers. All of this may explain why 90% of sales training programs fail after 120 days<\/a>.\r\n\r\nBusinesses have also tried to address the enablement challenge with content surges. Often led by marketing, this type of program throws content at sellers at every turn. The problem? More often than not, the content isn\u2019t aligned to the sales process, and thus, isn\u2019t delivered at the right moment when it would have the most impact. So, it turns out that the massive content surge is a massive waste of time: 90% of sales reps never use it<\/a> anyway, and knowledge gaps persist.\r\n\r\nWith traditional approaches like these clearly failing, it\u2019s time for businesses to address their enablement challenge with a fundamental change. Rather than focus on traditional learning and development (L&D) for sellers specifically, they need to embrace the discipline of sales readiness. While L&D and sales enablement are functions, sales readiness is a strategy. When implemented correctly, sales readiness provides comprehensive, personalized and adaptive ways to forge the skills and behaviors that today\u2019s sellers need to succeed.\r\n\r\nLet\u2019s take a closer look at sales readiness and how revenue leaders can create it.\r\n