A recurring requirement is for sales teams to move away from a stock pitch, to know their prospect's business, and circumstances in greater detail, and to play an educator role in the sales cycle.  This is a considerable challenge for a large percentage of sales folks who have managed to get by for many years with a reasonable understanding of the products and services they represent, along with a passable understanding of key messages and differentiators.

Buyers have become more demanding, more sophisticated in their expectations.  A sales person turning up with a standard presentation and minimal appreciation of the prospect's challenges, will not get very far in the sales cycle.

The evolving profile of a successful sales person includes a more directive approach, a willingness, and ability, to take control of a meeting, sufficient confidence to carve out time to ask the prospect meaningful questions, and the experience to recognize the peaks and troughs of a sales conversation.

Sales enablement is also facing new demands.  Top performers are frequently the best source of high value, relevant skills and experience, that need to be shared with the remainder of the sales force.  But there is a challenge there.  Top performers are too busy being top performers to be able to dedicate time to team coaching and mentoring.  Efforts are made by sales management to implement a variety of systems that are intended to capture best practices while acting as a repository for sales tools.  But populating those systems is often left to a marketing team that may not have sufficient time to do a thorough, on-going job, or lack the credibility to be taken seriously by the sales team.  Considering that as much as 90% of marketing materials are not used by sales teams, according to the American Marketing Association, and supported by research from IDC, short-term performance gains can only really be driven from within the sales force itself.

The challenge is to capture those many nuggets of sales wisdom that the top performers rely on, in a time-efficient and cost-effective way, and then be able to present that content in formats that are compelling, easy to access, and available in the right place, at the right time, for the rest of the team.

IDC has plentiful research on these topics, with many key documents free to download.  It makes very worthwhile reading.