Sales enablement can drive behaviour change by addressing three conditions: sellers must recognise when to perform the behaviour, be able to perform it without unnecessary difficulty, and see a worthwhile reason to repeat it.
In practice, that means:
- Make the behaviour obvious.
- Make the behaviour easy.
- Make the behaviour worth doing.
Organisations often assume that when sellers aren’t performing a behaviour, they lack the required knowledge or skill. Training then becomes the default solution.
Sometimes there is a genuine capability gap. In many cases, however, the behaviour was never clearly prompted, the process creates too much friction, or nothing meaningful happens when sellers follow it.
Start with a precise target behaviour
Before trying to change behaviour, define exactly what someone should do and when they should do it.
“Improve discovery” is not a behaviour. It is a broad outcome.
A more useful definition might be:
“Before proposing a solution, ask the buyer at least one question that explores the business impact of the problem.”
That definition gives enablement a specific action to support.
It also clarifies when the behaviour should occur and connects it to the outputs and outcomes it should influence.
Behaviour rarely happens in the abstract. Sellers apply skills during particular calls, deal stages, account-planning activities, and manager conversations.
If the moment of application remains unclear, even well-trained sellers may fail to recognise when they should use what they learned.
The starting questions should therefore be:
- What observable behaviour are we trying to create?
- Under which conditions should it happen?
- At what point in the seller’s workflow should it happen?
- What would provide evidence that it occurred?
Once those questions have clear answers, enablement can diagnose what is preventing the behaviour.
Behaviour requires motivation, ability, and a prompt
The Fogg Behavior Model proposes that behaviour occurs when three elements converge at the same moment: motivation, ability, and a prompt.
If a behaviour doesn’t happen, at least one of those elements is missing or insufficient.
Applied to sales enablement, this creates a useful diagnostic:
- Prompt: Did anything make the required behaviour apparent at the right moment?
- Ability: Could the seller perform it without excessive difficulty?
- Motivation: Did the seller believe it was worth doing?
These elements influence one another.
A highly motivated seller may persist with a difficult process. When motivation is lower, however, the same behaviour must be easier to complete.
Fogg describes this as a trade-off between motivation and ability: harder behaviours require greater motivation, while easier behaviours can happen with less of it.
Together, these elements create a simple behaviour loop:
Rather than assuming that every adoption problem requires another training programme, enablement can examine these three conditions in a logical order.
This also creates a better starting point for deciding how training should transfer into on-the-job performance.
Make the behaviour obvious
A seller may understand a new sales methodology, process, or expectation and still fail to apply it at the right moment.
The problem in this case may be the absence of a prompt.
A prompt is the cue that tells someone to act now. It can be a request, reminder, signal, workflow step, manager question, or environmental cue.
As Fogg explains, without a prompt, the intended behaviour won’t occur, even when motivation and ability are otherwise sufficient. Prompts work best when they appear in the context where action should happen.
In sales enablement, a prompt might be:
- a discovery-planning question embedded in a call template;
- a stakeholder-mapping field introduced at the relevant opportunity stage;
- a manager question used consistently during pipeline reviews;
- a short checklist displayed before a proposal is created;
- or a CRM notification triggered when an opportunity reaches a defined condition.
This is different from announcing the behaviour once during training or sending a general reminder afterwards. The prompt should appear when the seller can act on it.
For example, asking sellers to document decision criteria in a training session creates awareness. Prompting them to confirm the criteria before an opportunity advances creates a usable behaviour cue.
The closer the prompt sits to the moment of action, the less the seller must rely on memory.
Make the behaviour easy
When behaviour doesn’t change, organisations often conclude that employees need more capability.
They commission additional workshops, produce more content, or ask managers to provide more coaching.
These interventions may be appropriate when sellers genuinely lack the required knowledge or skill. However, training is one of the more demanding ways to increase ability.
Fogg identifies three broad routes: train the person, provide a tool or resource that makes the behaviour easier, or reduce the behaviour to a simpler version. His guidance is clear that simplifying the behaviour is often easier than building new capability.
For enablement teams, that means examining and removing obstacles to seller performance before creating more learning.
Ask:
- Are the expectations precise enough?
- Does the process contain unnecessary steps?
- Can sellers find the right guidance when they need it?
- Are resources easy to understand and apply?
- Do sellers have examples of what good looks like?
- Does the CRM support the behaviour or make it burdensome?
- Is the requested behaviour too broad to perform consistently?
Suppose sellers are expected to create stronger mutual action plans. A comprehensive training session may help, but it won’t fix an overcomplicated template with 25 fields, unclear ownership, and no connection to the way opportunities are managed.
A shorter template, a completed example, and clear criteria for when to use it may produce more behavioural movement than another workshop.
Perceived difficulty matters too. A process can be technically simple while still appearing burdensome. Clear instructions, sensible defaults, useful examples, and a visible first step reduce that perception.
Enablement should therefore distinguish between two problems:
- The seller cannot perform the behaviour: develop the necessary knowledge or skill.
- The seller can perform it, but the environment makes application difficult: remove friction and provide support in the workflow.
Treating both as training needs wastes effort and leaves the underlying barrier untouched.
Make the behaviour worth doing
A behaviour can be clear and easy but still fail to happen if sellers see no meaningful reason to act.
At the point of action, sellers need a reason they consider worth acting on. What happens afterwards then shapes whether they repeat the behaviour and whether it becomes part of normal work.
The consequence needs to feel significant enough to matter, arrive close enough to the behaviour to create a connection, and occur consistently enough for sellers to expect it.
That doesn’t mean every desired action needs a financial reward.
Motivation may come from:
- receiving useful coaching based on the work completed;
- seeing that the behaviour improves a live opportunity;
- gaining recognition from a manager;
- avoiding rework later in the sales process;
- making a customer conversation more productive;
- receiving faster support or approval;
- or seeing progress against a meaningful standard.
The consequence must also reinforce the right behaviour.
If leaders ask sellers to qualify opportunities rigorously but celebrate pipeline volume regardless of quality, the operating environment sends a stronger message than the enablement programme.
Similarly, if managers never inspect or discuss a newly introduced behaviour, sellers learn that applying it is optional.
Making a behaviour worth doing therefore goes beyond incentives. It includes the signals, feedback, outcomes, and managerial attention that follow it.
Use the three levers as a diagnostic order
Making the behaviour obvious, easy, and worthwhile shouldn’t become another rigid framework applied without judgement.
The sequence works best as a diagnostic order.
Start by checking whether sellers encounter a clear prompt at the right moment. If they do, examine whether the behaviour is simple enough to perform. Then consider whether the expected consequence provides enough motivation.
The flow chart below illustrates this diagnostic sequence:
This order helps prevent expensive solutions to simple problems.
A missing prompt doesn’t require a new curriculum. An unnecessarily complex process doesn’t automatically require more coaching. A conflicting incentive cannot be fixed through a job aid.
In some situations, motivation may clearly be the primary problem from the beginning.
Sellers may understand the behaviour, have the tools to perform it, and encounter regular prompts, but believe it harms their ability to hit their targets.
In that case, enablement shouldn’t mechanically work through the first two levers. It should address the conflict directly.
The model is there to improve the diagnosis, rather than prescribe the same intervention every time.
If the behaviour you are trying to change forms part of a broader, systemic performance problem, this diagnosis can then inform the mix of training, coaching, content, tools, process, and reinforcement used in a wider sales enablement programme.
When a desired sales behaviour fails to appear, avoid starting with “What training should we create?”
Start with three more useful questions:
- Was the behaviour obvious at the moment it was needed?
- Was it easy enough to perform?
- Did doing it lead to something that mattered?
Those questions shift enablement from delivering activity to designing the conditions in which better behaviour can occur.
