The start of a new year or quarter rarely feels like a “reset” for enablement teams.
For many enablement leaders and practitioners, the year begins with work already underway.
Programmes continue. Requests may have kept coming throughout the previous period. Sales leaders may want some answers, while managers and reps may expect support in specific areas as the year commences.
The beginning of a new year or quarter changes the number on the calendar, but it does not necessarily change the pace.
There is also an often unspoken challenge in the background.
Many sales enablement teams spend so much time responding that they lose the space to think. By default, the work becomes reactive because demand may arrive faster than prioritisation can keep up.
When that happens, enablement risks turning into a service desk with good intentions.
The cost is not always obvious in the moment. It shows up gradually.
More initiatives run in parallel. Old programmes stay alive “just in case”. Content grows, and maintenance grows with it. Teams start carrying work that no longer has a clear owner, purpose, or pull from the field.
Activity fills the space and complexity builds quietly.
At that point, the risk is not that you do too little. It is that you do too much that does not compound. You spend time, but you do not build leverage.
This is exactly why direction matters most at the start of a new period. Not in the abstract, but in the day-to-day reality of what you will protect, what you will stop, and what you will double down on.
We hosted a live conversation inside The Enablement Edge Network with enablement leaders Devon McDermott, Fiona NicChoiligh, and Lawrence Wayne O’Connor to explore what enablers should be considering, in practical terms, as they start a new period, and how to make a meaningful impact in their organisations.
We anchored the discussion around two themes.
First, reset: how to step back from what has been done, create space to reflect, and re-establish intent, even when everything feels urgent.
Second, refocus: how to choose the right bets early in the year or quarter, align with leadership and other stakeholders, and stay disciplined when new requests, new priorities, and new change inevitably show up.
We all know deep down that without deliberate choices, enablement can drift into reactive work, layered sales enablement initiatives, unclear trade-offs, and an expanding surface area of responsibility.
All of this leads to an increase in effort, while impact becomes harder to trace.
Resetting early through specific practices creates conditions for clarity, giving leaders and their teams a chance to reassess what still serves the organisation, remove what no longer does, and rebuild priorities with intention.
Refocusing follows from that reset.
Once you strip away noise, you can see the real work: the constraints that slow performance, the behaviours that need to change, and the few bets that will create leverage.
Refocus is how you translate clarity into choices, with explicit trade-offs about what you will start, stop, and sustain as new demands emerge.
This piece brings together the key insights from my 1-hour conversation with three enablement leaders I deeply respect.
My aim has been to distil practical ideas, mental models, and decision frames drawn from real experience to help you operate with greater clarity and a stronger sense of direction.
Reset is a leadership act, not a moment you stumble into
Across the discussion, reset emerged as a deliberate act of leadership, not something you wait for the calendar to provide.
Enablement teams often carry an implicit operating model into the new year. Priorities roll forward. Programmes continue with minor adjustments. New requests layer on top of existing commitments.
Sometimes that is fine. If the direction is right, consistency compounds.
The risk is when teams keep moving through the motions without checking whether the direction still holds. In that scenario, work continues through inertia rather than intent. Activity accumulates, but decisions do not get revisited.
Reset interrupts that default.
It creates a deliberate moment to clarify intent before activity takes over. Leaders can use it to define what enablement stands behind now, what no longer applies, and how they will handle demand once the year accelerates.
A recurring theme in the conversation was the importance of returning to the foundation.
Reset starts by revisiting the enablement charter (or any equivalent you may have depending on your level of maturity) and accepting the simple reality that past success does not guarantee future relevance.
Devon McDermott made this point when she outlined her approach to reset at the beginning of the year:
“For me, it’s re-establishing my charter. We know what worked this year is not going to work next year, and that’s okay.”
The truth is that market conditions shift, business priorities evolve, and assumptions that once held true need to be tested again.
Taking time to reflect and revisit things allows enablement leaders and practitioners alike to question inherited priorities, legacy programmes, and unspoken expectations.
In addition, it can strengthen alignment, because it creates a shared reference point for decisions. It gives leadership and enablement a chance to agree on what matters now, what “good” looks like in the field, and what trade-offs will be required when new requests arrive.
The discussion also surfaced why resetting is difficult in practice.
Many teams feel trapped by volume and urgency. Reactive work fills the calendar, leaving little space for deliberate thinking. The challenge lies less in recognising the need to reset and more in creating the conditions to do so.
Here, the group was pragmatic.
Reactive work is part of modern organisations, and it will not disappear. What matters is how consciously it is managed.
Devon put it plainly that reactive work isn’t going to go away.
The leadership move is to decide, up front, what proportion of capacity you will allocate to reactive demand (unplanned requests and urgent escalations) and to make that boundary explicit to stakeholders.
In practical terms, a strong early-year reset tends to include a small number of intentional moves.
1. Re-state the charter in a way the business can recognise
- What enablement exists to change in the field within a specific time frame (e.g., quarter, semester)
- Who your primary “customer” is (e.g., sales reps, sales managers, sales leadership, broader sales and marketing teams), and what you will optimise for.
- What you will not own, even if it is adjacent.
2. Convert intent into visible choices
- Name the few priorities that deserve focus now.
- Identify what no longer fits, even if it once mattered.
- Clarify what “good” looks like by the end of the first quarter, semester, and/or year.
3. Put shape around demand before demand shapes you
- Define how requests enter your world (one channel, one intake path).
- Set a simple rule for urgency versus importance.
- Agree what gets scheduled, what gets redirected, and what gets declined.
4. Create a short reflection cadence early, while change is still possible
- A quick check-in after a few weeks to see whether things are proceeding accordingly to plan.
- A second check to confirm what is working and not working in practice.
- A course correction before the quarter or semester hardens.
When reset is treated as a leadership act, it becomes the foundation for everything that follows.
You do not start the year by adding more motion. You start it by choosing direction, setting boundaries, and creating the space to focus where enablement can genuinely shift outcomes.
The retro that turns reflection into decisions
A retro is one of the most powerful practices within the broader umbrella of resetting.
By “retro”, we mean a short, structured review of recent work to surface what worked, what did not, why it played out that way, and what should change as a result.
I am giving it its own section because the panel kept returning to the same point: retros only create value when they produce learning that changes decisions. Otherwise, teams simply carry work forward by default, and the new year begins with yesterday’s assumptions still intact.
In the business-as-usual environment many enablement teams operate in, retros often get shortened, softened, or skipped altogether. When they do happen, they can drift towards storytelling, where teams simply recount what they delivered, highlight visible wins, and move on quickly.
Often, the problem with this way of approaching things is that true learning rarely follows.
A more effective retro shifts the focus.
It still makes space for wins, but it does not treat them as a “highlight reel”. It asks what actually worked, why it worked, and whether it is repeatable, so you can find what to double down on.
At the same time, it does not avoid what fell short. It looks directly at what stalled, what created friction, and what did not land as expected. That is where you find the sharpest lessons, the weakest assumptions, and the work that no longer fits the organisation’s direction.
In other words, a strong retro both reinforces what is working and exposes what needs to change.
Devon McDermott described this balance as deliberately uneven.
Wins deserve attention, especially when they reveal a pattern you can replicate. But the deeper work often sits in the gaps, because understanding failure modes tends to unlock the biggest improvements in execution and decision-making:
“In the retro, it’s focusing on what we didn’t accomplish or where we failed. The wins are important, and you should be celebrating them, but you’re likely celebrating those in real time.”
That thinking also shaped the panel’s view on timing. A focused retro at the very start of the year creates a window that is hard to find later, letting teams correct course before plans get consolidated and before new layers of work are added.
There was also a clear theme around the role of openness in making retros effective.
A retro only gets as close to reality as people are willing to go. Softened views or unspoken concerns lead to partial learning. Honest reflection, even when uncomfortable, leads to better insight and more accurate decisions.
Practically, the group favoured simple structures over complex analysis, with a clear line from reflection to decision.
A useful starting point is:
- A red, amber, green view of major initiatives.
- A short set of questions: what failed, why it failed, and what should change as a result.
- A short list of decisions that follow from the discussion.
And to make this practical, it helps to define a minimum viable retro that is easy to run and hard to dilute:
- Review no more than 3–5 major initiatives or programmes.
- Identify one failure mode for each “red” or “amber” item (for example: unclear ownership, weak reinforcement, poor stakeholder alignment, or a mismatch with the sales motion).
- End with three decisions: what to stop, what to change, and what to double down on.
- Designate an owner and a date for each decision to ensure the retro effectively translates into action.
Used this way, the retro becomes a powerful forward-looking reset tool.
Change is faster now, so energy management is part of the strategy
Change has always been a constant in organisational life. What’s different today, however, is the speed – and managing energy well is critical to keeping up with the pace in a sustainable way.
In many sectors, markets fluctuate more rapidly than ever, product cycles compress, tools evolve quickly (especially driven by AI integration and adoption), and, as a result, expectations and priorities are forced to shift alongside them.
What used to feel like a sequence of changes now feels like multiple moving parts changing at once. The result is not just “more change”, but more overlap, more rework, and less time spent in a stable mode.
Many enablement teams still carry a mental model of change that assumes a clean cycle: change arrives, teams mobilise, delivery happens, and stability returns. That cycle rarely rings true at today’s pace.
The reality is messier and more demanding. Change does not arrive in neat waves, but it overlaps.
While you roll out one initiative, the ICP may shift, a product update lands, the sales motion gets adjusted, or tooling changes. We all know that enablement doesn’t ship into a fixed environment.
When leaders treat change as something that comes in waves, teams work as if a rest is just around the corner. They push hard to “get through it”, expecting things to settle afterwards. But the settling never really comes and, over time, that cycle wears people down and quality slips, even though effort stays high.
Fiona NicChoiligh captured this overall reality succinctly in our conversation:
“The idea that we brace ourselves for change, get through it, and then rest doesn’t match how we work anymore. Change is just constant.”
Such a reframing matters at the start of the year.
Sustainable performance depends less on pushing harder and more on building the capability to operate well while conditions continue to shift. Energy management sits at the centre of that capability – especially when adaptability becomes an almost daily requirement rather than an occasional spike.
In addition, enablement teams sit at the intersection of multiple departments, absorbing demands from sales teams, product, customer success (depending on the scope of the function), and senior leadership at the same time.
Without deliberate management, those demands compound quickly, and attention fragments across competing priorities.
What also emerged from the conversation was that leadership behaviour has a direct and outsized impact on the energy and morale of enablement teams.
Teams take cues from how leaders handle demand and expectations day to day.
When leaders absorb every request, carry visible stress, or treat everything as urgent, that behaviour spreads quickly. Work can become noisier, priorities blur, and morale drops.
When leaders stay composed, set clear priorities, and make trade-offs explicit, they reduce perceived uncertainty in the midst of change and create steadier execution. Early in the year, those signals shape the team’s rhythm more than most leaders realise.
The discussion finally surfaced the challenge of operating without complete certainty.
Modern enablement often requires action with partial information, because clarity arrives late or changes mid-flight. This does not mean you should ignore alignment or planning, but it means you should avoid waiting for a perfect definition before doing anything.
When teams wait for complete clarity, momentum slows, stress can rise, and opportunities to influence early decisions are missed.
Acting early does not equate to blind action. A few minimum conditions still need to be in place, such as a clear outcome, stakeholder buy-in, and a way to reinforce and measure adoption. Without those basics, programmes can fail before they properly start.
From a practical standpoint, managing energy early in the year – and throughout it – requires a few conscious moves:
- Take stock of where energy is going. Look for recurring work that consumes attention without producing clear decisions or field impact.
- Watch for overload signals early. More work-in-progress, slower follow-through, rising escalation, missed handoffs, and a drop in coaching consistency often show up before performance does.
- Establish small, repeatable rituals that protect pace. Set limits on concurrent initiatives, hold short weekly check-ins on what to stop, start, or sustain, and create a fixed slot for reflection so it does not depend on spare time.
- Lead your own energy first. Build a short personal reset routine you can rely on (even five minutes between meetings), and be deliberate about how you show up. Your team will mirror your signals. If you carry urgency into every interaction, you amplify it. If you bring calm, clear priorities, and steady pacing, you create space for better decisions and healthier execution.
When energy is treated as a real constraint, leaders make different decisions. They become more selective about commitments, more thoughtful about sequencing, and more deliberate about filtering incoming requests.
Such a shift early in the year creates the conditions for sustained impact, rather than short-lived bursts of output.
Focus through subtraction before you add anything
By the time a new period begins, most enablement teams are already carrying more than they realise.
Work tends to accumulate in fairly predictable ways, and it often shows up first in the places with the highest maintenance cost.
Take onboarding, for example. You build a session or a deck for a specific launch, a specific quarter, or a specific push. It works in the moment, so it gets reused. Then it gets copied into the next onboarding cohort, and before long, it becomes “standard”, even though the context that made it useful has changed.
The same thing happens with competitor content. A battlecard gets created when a competitor is loud in the market or when a few deals are lost. Six months later, the landscape looks different, but the asset still sits in the onboarding path, still gets shared, and still shapes how reps talk.
Then there are the “just for now” requests. Someone asks for help with a manager enablement session, a dashboard walkthrough, a deal support workshop, or a one-off play. You say yes because it is useful. A month later, it quietly becomes a recurring commitment, even if nobody explicitly agreed to that.
None of this is reckless and it usually starts with good intent. The issue is that work rarely comes with an expiry date, so enablement ends up maintaining things the organisation has already moved past.
Across the discussion, there was broad agreement that focus rarely comes from adding more but from making deliberate decisions about what no longer deserves attention.
Beyond an operational clean-up, subtraction came through as a leadership discipline.
Without this step, planning conversations often move towards what to launch next, and new initiatives stack on top of existing ones. Attention spreads thin, reinforcement weakens, the maintenance tax grows, and impact becomes harder to achieve and demonstrate.
Lawrence Wayne O’Connor described this accumulation effect vividly:
“Over the course of a full year in enablement, it’s like a sandwich where you keep adding layers. At a certain point, you’re running three or four different initiatives, or three or four different jobs.”
What makes this challenging is that most of the work began with good intent.
Few programmes are obviously low value when they are created, and the problem emerges later, as priorities shift and the organisation moves on, while enablement continues to carry the weight.
Subtraction addresses this gap directly by introducing a forcing function into planning conversations.
Before taking on something new, leaders ask what needs to stop, pause, or simplify. That question makes trade-offs visible and turns focus into a shared decision rather than an internal struggle.
It also changes how stakeholders engage with enablement because when trade-offs are explicit, requests become more grounded and capacity conversations move from abstract concerns to concrete choices.
A useful way to make subtraction actionable is to treat it like portfolio triage. For any recurring programme, asset, or commitment, determine whether it should be:
- Kept (still aligned, low maintenance, clear pull from the field)
- Fixed (still aligned, but needs simplification, ownership, or reinforcement)
- Paused (useful, but not now)
- Sunset (misaligned, low pull, high maintenance, or no clear owner)
The discussion also highlighted content and onboarding as common pressure points (hence the earlier examples in this section).
Fiona NicChoiligh described onboarding as a “maintenance monster”, particularly when content becomes outdated. Her team chose to remove content rather than keep it alive by default, even if that created a temporary gap.
The logic was simple: outdated guidance can do more harm than missing guidance.
From a practical standpoint, subtraction works best when supported by a few simple mechanisms.
1. Run a short stop-doing audit early in the year
Use clear criteria, not sentiment:
- What has no clear owner?
- What has low pull from the field (low usage, weak adoption, little manager reinforcement)?
- What creates a recurring maintenance tax?
- What solves a problem the business no longer has?
- What duplicates another function’s remit?
Output: 3–5 items to pause or sunset, with an owner and a date.
2. Turn every new request into a trade-off decision
Do not carry the trade-off alone. Make it explicit:
- “If we take this on, what should we pause or stop?”
- Or more directly: “What do you want me to take off my plate to get that done for you?”
This reframes capacity as a shared choice rather than an internal constraint.
3. Use a lightweight sunset plan so work actually leaves the system
A sunset plan can be one page:
- What is stopping, and why (misalignment, low pull, maintenance cost)
- Who is impacted
- What replaces it (or “no replacement” if deliberate)
- What gets archived versus removed
- When it comes out of onboarding, calendars, and documentation
- A short message to stakeholders and managers
When subtraction comes first, real focus is more likely to follow. Teams regain space to think, leaders protect energy, and sales enablement efforts concentrate on a smaller set of bets that can be reinforced properly and have a real chance of moving the business forward.
Refocus by finding the constraint in the sales system
Once teams create space through reset, reflection, and subtraction, the next question becomes unavoidable: where should enablement place its bets?
Across the discussion, focus emerged as a diagnostic exercise rather than a planning one.
Broad priority lists and annual roadmaps tend to spread effort thin. Clear focus comes from understanding where performance breaks down in the sales system and intervening with intent.
The conversation repeatedly returned to the sales process as a starting point.
When deals slow, stall, or get lost at a specific stage, that friction often signals a constraint.
It can show up as weaker stage conversion, longer cycle time in a stage, a rise in “no decision”, or late-stage deals that lose energy without a clear reason.
Lawrence Wayne O’Connor summarised the starting point simply:
“If you look at stages of the sales process and where deals are getting stuck, that usually tells you where enablement should focus.”
This lens shifts attention away from activity and towards leverage.
When a large volume of deals lingers in a stage, or progression takes longer than expected, the issue is rarely random.
It usually points to a specific breakdown, such as weak discovery, unclear value articulation, poor qualification, ineffective stakeholder mapping, or a lack of decision framing with the buyer.
One nuance that is important to clarify here: diagnose with segmentation, not averages.
Constraints often sit in a specific motion (new logo versus expansion), a region, a segment, or a deal size band.
If you treat the funnel as one uniform system, you can end up fixing the wrong problem.
The discussion also emphasised the importance of stopping at diagnosis before jumping to solutions.
Enablement impact weakens when teams move straight to building programmes or rolling out frameworks, without understanding the underlying performance gap.
The critical step sits between outcome and intervention.
Leaders need clarity on what success looks like, what outputs (tangible artefacts produced by reps/managers that are observable and inspectable and fully in their control) drive it, which behaviours produce those outputs, and why those behaviours are not showing up today.
Only then does it make sense to select the right enablement lever, whether that is sales training, coaching, content, tools, process, or reinforcement mechanisms.
Lawrence shared a practical example of this diagnostic approach.
His team noticed deals stalling between two stages and traced it back to a quality gap in discovery. They introduced “payoff-focused” discovery questions, instrumented call tracking to measure whether reps used them, and then tested whether stage progression moved.
The intervention was small, but specific, and in deals where payoff-focused questions were asked early, progression improved materially.
A related theme in the discussion was that you do not need perfect data to start, but you do need a way to measure once you act.
If the measurement is not in place, the initiative risks becoming another layer of work without a clear answer on whether it helped.
Several speakers also highlighted the value of treating early-year initiatives as experiments rather than heavy commitments.
Small, time-bound interventions create faster feedback loops. They allow teams to test assumptions, measure movement, and adjust quickly without locking themselves into large programmes too early in the year.
Practically, this approach translates into a simple refocus loop:
- Pick one outcome metric (conversion, cycle time, deal size, win rate, expansion attach).
- Segment before diagnosing (motion, team, region, segment, deal size).
- Find the constraint (where conversion drops, where time balloons, where deals decay).
- Form a behaviour hypothesis (what is missing or inconsistent in execution).
- Choose the smallest lever likely to shift it (often coaching first, then training, then sales enablement tools/assets if needed).
- Instrument measurement before rollout (quality of the outputs, adoption of the behaviour, manager reinforcement, and business results).
- Run a short test (two to four weeks, one output and associated behaviours focus, clear owner).
- Decide (scale, adjust, or stop).
When data maturity is low, the same loop still applies. Use call recordings, deal reviews, and manager and rep input to identify repeated friction, then add lightweight measurement as you go.
The goal is not a perfect diagnosis on day one, but rather an honest mechanism for learning what moves the constraint.
If enablement operates with this level of specificity, effort naturally concentrates around the moments that matter most, with a higher chance to link enablement work to business outcomes.
Influence direction early by leading with a point of view
Early in a new period, priorities tend to remain fluid across the board.
Leadership teams are forming views. Strategic conversations are taking shape. Signals from the field are emerging, even if they may not have yet been fully interpreted.
This typical situation creates a narrow window where enablement leaders can shape direction before decisions get locked in elsewhere.
Influence at this stage rarely comes from waiting for clarity. It comes from arriving with a point of view anchored in what is changing internally, in your market, and with your customers.
By “point of view”, we mean something specific: a clear recommendation, supported by a small set of signals, with explicit trade-offs.
Many enablement leaders fall into a delivery-first posture early in the year. They focus on what is being built, launched, or rolled out. Execution matters, but those inputs rarely land in senior leadership conversations. What senior leaders respond to is sound interpretation and judgment.
Lawrence Wayne O’Connor reflected on this shift directly:
“When I first started, I was talking about all the initiatives we launched and all the content we created. My CRO basically said, ‘That’s great, but how does that help me?’”
We all know that enablement earns influence when it connects activity to outcomes and surfaces implications leaders may not yet see.
A clear point of view invites reaction, creates dialogue, and positions enablement as a thinking partner rather than an order taker.
The conversation also highlighted the role of insight in shaping that point of view.
Win/loss themes, call patterns, adoption signals, and manager coaching activity can all provide useful inputs.
These signals do not need to be perfect, but they should be directional rather than anecdotal.
The goal is to triangulate a small set of evidence, state your confidence level, and offer a recommendation that leaders can react to.
Lawrence shared a simple structure for building a point of view that travels well in leadership rooms.
When writing it, it helps to treat it as a one-page brief:
- What is changing (internally, in your market, or with customers)
- What you recommend doing in response
- The two or three signals behind the recommendation (for example, a stage bottleneck, repeated call themes, or a win/loss pattern)
- The trade-off required (what needs to stop, pause, or de-prioritise to make space)
- The upside if you are right, and the downside if you miss or do nothing
- The success marker (one or two key performance indicators, plus a time horizon)
A useful rule of thumb: be willing to be wrong.
A considered point of view, even if imperfect, is more likely to earn you a seat in the conversation than waiting for someone else to hand you clarity.
When enablement leads with a point of view, it moves from responding to priorities to shaping them. That shift reinforces credibility, strengthens partnership, and sets the conditions for meaningful impact across the months that follow.
Leading enablement in constant motion
By the time a new period starts, the challenge is rarely knowing what to do. The challenge is choosing what to protect, what to stop, and what to double down on, while priorities shift and demands keep arriving.
Across the discussion, one idea connected everything else: effectiveness in enablement depends on how leaders operate in constant motion, at a faster pace than most teams were built for.
As Fiona NicChoiligh shared:
“Change fitness is about building a muscle. It’s learning how to stay effective while things are in flux.”
(She also recommended this Forbes piece on the topic).
In this report, we touched on the following:
- Resetting early.
- Running a retro that produces decisions.
- Managing energy and pace.
- Subtracting legacy commitments.
- Diagnosing constraints in the sales system.
- Leading with a point of view to influence early.
Together, they form a way of leading that keeps enablement effective even as conditions keep shifting.
Starting a new period with intent does not require certainty. It requires a few deliberate moves made early and made visible: set boundaries for reactive demand, make trade-offs explicit, and commit to a small number of bets you can reinforce properly.
If you do nothing, work carries forward by default, and enablement becomes more reactive and more layered over time. If you act early, you create clarity, shape direction with an effective sales enablement strategy, and give your team room to execute well.
The environment will not get quieter. The difference lies in how deliberately you lead within it.
