Sales enablement leaders are under more pressure than ever. You’re tasked with boosting seller performance, driving revenue growth, and delivering measurable results—all while working with tight budgets and limited resources. In 2025, doing more with less isn’t just a goal; it’s a survival strategy.
But here’s the good news: constraints breed creativity. The right strategies can transform limited budgets into big wins, turning challenges into opportunities for innovation and efficiency.
In this post, you’ll discover 25 proven ways to make every dollar count. From enhancing seller productivity and leveraging AI tools to aligning with marketing and demonstrating ROI, these ideas are designed to fuel growth without breaking the bank.
Ready to maximize your impact in 2025? Let’s dive in.
Drive Enablement Growth in 2025
Productivity and Performance
1. Assess for Skill Gaps First
Organizations with highly effective sales training are 5.5x more likely to use assessments proactively to identify which skills need development. This is one of three key drivers of effective sales training and should not be overlooked. A proper assessment helps you pinpoint critical skill gaps, allowing you to confidently prioritize your budget.
2. Focus on Seller Productivity
Imagine a world where each of your sellers showed up ready to work each day, knew exactly what their greatest impact activity (GIA) for the day was, executed well on that activity which delivered outsized results, and were held accountable for doing this by an accountability partner. You’d finally be able to actually do more with less. I’m talking about more sales and higher revenue with no added head count.
The fact is, you can instill a small number of habits and behaviors in your sales team that can have a dramatic impact on their productivity, output, and success. For example, calendaring time, having a consistent morning routine, TIME sprinting, and having an accountability partner can dramatically improve productivity and output.
3. Grow Your Most Important Accounts
Prioritize your existing high-value accounts by developing targeted growth plans, offering tailored solutions, and strengthening relationships to increase account penetration and revenue. There’s often ample untapped opportunity to grow accounts for those sellers willing to put in the effort.
4. Leverage Sales Managers
An important leverage point for many companies is their sales managers. Let’s say a sales manager has seven direct reports. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that’s 280 hours of time and effort each week that a front-line manager directly influences. If a sales manager doesn’t direct, focus, and maximize that effort and energy, there’s a huge potential for mass amounts of waste. If you enable your sales managers, you can drive the performance of your entire sales force.
5. Focus on the Front End of the Pipeline
Adopt an “Always Be Prospecting” mindset. Pipeline shortages are common, and sellers who excel at finding new opportunities will consistently outperform the rest.
6. Enhance Deal Qualification
Not all deals are created equal. Ensure your sellers are spending their time on the best opportunities by improving qualification criteria and pursuit intensity. Hint: apply FAINT qualification to your deals.
Training and Development
7. Utilize Your Staff for Training
Tap into your in-house trainers, L&D staff, or sales enablement teams. A train-the-trainer program can get them up to speed and allow them to deliver effective sales training, saving external costs.
8. Implement Role-Based Learning
Not all sellers should receive the same training. Align training with the competencies and skills required for each role to maximize effectiveness.
9. Center Learning on Doing
Engage in interactive, experiential learning that focuses on application, practice, and feedback. This approach reinforces skills better than passive learning methods.
10. Answer “What Does Good Look Like?”
Sellers want to see what best practice looks like in action. They want to collaborate and learn from their peers. A simple strategy we’ve seen clients implement is a best practice library with recordings and summaries of what good looks like in specific situations. Some organizations even take it a step further and ask sellers to watch the best practice before having a follow-up meeting to discuss how they can incorporate these same ideas into their real-life sales situations.
11. Don’t Ditch In-Person Training
In an effort to reduce budgets, we see organizations implement full self-study or full virtual programs, expecting sellers to complete self-directed learning and implement what they learn. While the entire learning journey certainly doesn’t need to be live in-person (and, arguably, shouldn’t be), you shouldn't ignore the benefits of an in-person experience. In fact, 93% of organizations with highly effective training use in-person, instructor-led methods.
Whether it’s a sales kickoff (SKO) event or smaller group instructor-led training sessions, in-person learning can be incredibly effective, especially when centered around practice and feedback versus lecture (see point #9). As you’re considering your budgets, don’t jump to cutting out all travel expenses for training. Instead, think about how you can get the most out of this time together.
12. Develop a Culture of Learning
Leading organizations build a culture of learning from the beginning where sellers feel invested in and are offered regular learning to enhance their skills and reach top performance. In organizations with the most effective sales training, we see:
- Continuous learning is strongly encouraged and supported by leadership
- Ongoing reinforcement is provided
- A series of training experiences are delivered over time (e.g., learning journeys)
- Onboarding of new hires transitions directly to everboarding
13. Reinvigorate Your Onboarding
Among sales organizations, onboarding tends to receive tepid reviews at best. However, organizations with effective onboarding are 6.3x more likely to prepare their new sales hires to succeed. Where should you focus? According to our sales onboarding research:
- Improve training on your company’s sales process and methodology
- Emphasize teamwork and collaboration
- Provide coaching to improve sales performance (see #15)
14. Tailor and Contextualize Training
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Start with proven methodologies and tailor them to your organization’s context rather than building from scratch. This approach saves time and money.
15. Prepare Sales Managers for Coaching
Organizations with effective training are 5.2x more likely to prepare managers for coaching. This drives team success and leverages the manager’s influence (see #4).
Technology and Tools
16. Implement AI—Even in Small Doses
AI tools can improve efficiency and productivity, even with limited budgets. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of AI and apply it where it can have the most impact. According to our research on AI in the sales process, that includes reducing time spent doing manual tasks, allowing a focus on high-value tasks, and uncovering buyer challenges and pain points.
17. Create a Self-Serve Content Library
Empower sellers with on-demand access to relevant materials like playbooks, case studies, training videos, and tools. Centralizing these resources in an easy-to-use library can reinforce and enhance learning.
18. Streamline the Tech Stack
There are plenty of sales enablement tools on the market, but too many can lead to confusion and low adoption rates. Consider auditing your current tech stack to eliminate redundant or underutilized tools. Your budget and your sellers will thank you.
Measurement and ROI
19. Prove ROI with Pilot Programs
Budgets are shrinking, and you may need to make a strong case for your training initiatives. Start with a smaller pilot group, track their results, and demonstrate how you can replicate them across the entire sales team, leading to defensible ROI. For example, one of our clients piloted a program with a small group in the US to prove and refine the case. They were then able to take that and get budget for global training roll out.
20. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
As Peter Ostrow writes on the Forrester blog, “32 to 36 courses is not revenue enablement.” You’re better off doing fewer training programs really well than trying to be everything for everyone. Focus your efforts, and whatever you do, invest your time and energy on making it the best it can be.
21. Measure Training Results
If you want to grow your enablement budget, you need to show how your investments impact overall sales and revenue growth. The best way to do this is to first define the business results you want to impact (win rate, margin, account growth, pipeline size, deal velocity, etc.) and then put a plan in place to measure these things. As you implement your initiatives, you want to show the impact on these areas. Over time, you’ll have a strong case for growing the budget on the initiatives that are driving the greatest business results.
22. Drive Training Engagement
Drive program success by proactively engaging learners, establishing clear accountability, and maintaining consistent communication touchpoints. Your training program’s impact depends on robust implementation—don’t just launch and hope. Take charge of adoption by creating structured engagement pathways that keep sellers actively involved and accountable for their development.
Strategic Alignment
23. Align Marketing and Sales Enablement Efforts
Maximize the impact of your budget by ensuring that marketing and sales enablement teams are working in sync, rather than siloed. When these teams align on strategies, messaging, and resources, they create a seamless buyer experience while maximizing budget efficiency. This collaboration ensures consistent messaging across all touchpoints and prevents duplicate content creation, allowing both teams to amplify their impact on revenue outcomes.
24. Approach Enablement Through Change Management
Change management provides a systematic framework for guiding individuals, teams, and organizations from their current state to a desired future state. Since sales enablement initiatives are fundamentally change initiatives, they require careful planning to prepare and support people through the transition. By implementing structured change management techniques, you can better guide teams through organizational shifts, ultimately improving adoption rates and achieving strategic outcomes.
25. Involve Key Stakeholders
Sales leaders play a critical role in driving change and in the adoption of training. The more leaders can be involved in tying the initiatives to strategic priorities and communicating the importance of these across the organization, the greater success you will have.
Ready to Maximize Your Budget in 2025?
Sales enablement leaders have their work cut out for them to meet the growth mandate set forth by many organizations and to do so on limited budgets. This post is meant to give you some practical, budget friendly ideas to maximize your success in 2025.
