Enablement teams that report content views and course completions are measuring the library. I think the number worth putting in front of a CRO is the hours of seller time the program gives back, and the deal moment it was used in.
What prompted this
Seismic published a recap of the opening day of its Shift 2026 conference. The most useful sentence in it came from Rebecca Reyes, Global VP of Enablement for IBM Sales: “The bottleneck has moved from preparation to performance.” Reyes said IBM first built enablement to solve an information problem, and that a governed source of truth improved trust but content alone did not create great execution.
Reyes gave three lessons from the IBM work. Context is everything, because a good asset loses value when it arrives without the client, the opportunity and the moment in mind. Guidance belongs in the flow of work, because sellers are not looking for another destination. Skills turn information into client outcomes. Each of those is a statement about timing and effect, and none of them is a statement about volume.
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The recap also carries a number. After IBM embedded Seismic’s enablement and meeting intelligence in its own AI platform, one IBM seller said prep work that once took two to three hours now takes 15 minutes. I find that figure more interesting than any view count, and I want to say why.
My argument
A view count tells a leader that a seller opened something. It says nothing about whether the seller was better prepared for a call, a renewal or a pricing conversation. Hours returned is closer to the thing a sales leader pays for. A seller who gets two hours back from a prep task spends them on another account, and that is arithmetic a CFO accepts.
Take the IBM figure at face value for a moment. Two to three hours down to 15 minutes saves between one hour and 45 minutes and two hours and 45 minutes on each prep. A sales leader already knows how many calls and reviews a team runs in a quarter, so multiplying the saving by that count produces a total in hours that anyone in finance can read without a legend.
Pair the hours with the moment. The recap describes guidance that shows up in the flow of work instead of waiting in a library, and Seismic’s CEO Rob Tarkoff said the best guidance will no longer sit in a dashboard waiting to be found. If that is where guidance now lives, then the report should say where it was used: before a first meeting, inside a live deal, during a renewal. A program that cannot name the moment cannot say what it changed.
The strongest counter-argument
Usage data is cheap, consistent and auditable. Hours returned depends on seller self-reports, and sellers are generous with self-reports when a program is popular. The IBM figure itself comes from one seller. A leader who swaps views for hours may be swapping a weak number for a soft one.
That objection is right about the risk and wrong about the remedy. Soft numbers get firmer when they are collected the same way every time. Time a sample of sellers on the same prep task before and after a program, record the task, and repeat the measurement each quarter. Put the result next to win rate and cycle length for those same sellers. The comparison does not need to be perfect. It needs to be repeated.
What I would change on Monday
Drop completions and views from the headline slide and move them to an appendix. Choose three seller tasks that eat the most time, such as account research, meeting prep and follow-up notes. Measure each one for a sample of sellers now, so there is a baseline before the next tool rollout. Then report the hours, the task and the deal stage at every quarterly review.
This also changes what enablement asks of its vendors. Adoption alone is a weak number, and a vendor that can only show adoption has told you what it measures. Ask for the before-and-after time on a named task, taken from your own sellers. Software adoption has already moved out of the training room, so the measurement has to move with it.
Opinion piece by Saurabh Ghosh. The views are the author’s own.
Source: Seismic
