The Enablement Optimization Podcast
The Enablement Optimization Podcast is for the people doing the work. Not consultants theorizing about it. Not vendors selling into it. The practitioners, the directors building enablement functions from scratch, and the managers making programs land across thousands of sellers. Backed by the Sales Enablement Collective, a community of 18,000 enablement professionals. Hosted by Leanne Leone and Chris Walker.
How to coach a team to challenge AI instead of trusting it (with Susan Lin)
AI makes every outcome look good. Susan Lin says this plainly, and for a people leader it changes what counts as evidence. Before Copilot and ChatGPT sat on every desk, teams were judged on results, and a strong deliverable usually signaled a capable person. Now she looks past the finished work and asks how it was built, starting with the prompt and ending with where the data came from. A confident answer can still be the wrong one, and the only way to tell is to see how someone worked with the tool.
Episode 9 - How to link behavioral competencies to measurable revenue impact (with Molly Sestak and Bert Vanhaecke)
Enablement teams have long struggled to show that training changes how deals close. Bert Vanhaecke of Lighthouse ran a year of calls, about 15,000, through AI scorecards built on defined competencies and found a 70% correlation with win rates. Molly Sestak of Showpad adds a measurement model that traces revenue outcomes back through field behavior change to training completion, so teams can see exactly where a program fell short.
Episode 8 - How to turn a brand story into a sales story (with Dhvani Unadkat)
Sellers carry more decks, battle cards, PRFAQs, and objection-handling material than they can use, and much of it was written to project the brand. Dhvani Unadkat began in celebrity PR in India before moving into product marketing at Amazon and then PayPal.
Episode 7 - How to make enablement a driver of revenue not a footnote (with Russ Martin)
Enablement usually sits at the edge of a revenue leader's decisions, nudging them without ever shaping the number. Russ Martin, a former CRO and SVP, admits he underused every strong enablement leader he ever worked with.
Episode 7 - Why revenue leaders keep underusing enablement (with Russ Martin)
For most revenue leaders, enablement sits at the edge of the decision, something that nudges an outcome rather than drives it. Russ Martin, a former CRO and SVP of revenue, admits he ran his own teams that way for years, treating "it's going okay" as a good enough answer.
Episode 6 - How to keep AI-built decks on brand at scale (with Ulrik Bo Larsen)
AI made it trivial for sellers to generate passable decks, and that convenience pulled go-to-market teams back into single-player work and final-final-v3 attachments.
Ulrik Bo Larsen, who built Falcon to over 400 employees before selling in 2019 and now runs Pitch, warns that the deeper cost is brand dilution as the marginal cost of software approaches zero.
Episode 5 - How to manage capacity and hold the line with stakeholders in enablement (with Stephanie White).
The episode covers capacity management, team inheritance, stakeholder expectation-setting, and the question every interview process should include.
Episode 4 - Why your next great enabler might already be sitting on your sales floor. With Varun Desai
In this episode of the Enablement Optimization Podcast, Varun Desai joins Chris Walker and Leann Leone to discuss what it takes to build enablement that sellers actually trust and how to prove it is working.
Episode 3 - Your sellers are wasting 4 hours a month. Here's the fix. With Andrew Zinger
Andrew Zinger has spent his career in rooms that did not want to listen and figuring out how to make them.
From running Salesforce boot camps for 200 new hires a week to building enablement functions inside some of the world's most complex sales organizations, he has developed a clear and often contrarian view of what enablement actually is and what it is not.
In this episode of the Enablement Optimization Podcast, Andrew joins Chris Walker and Leann Leone to share the two philosophies that have shaped how he builds enablement programs: distraction-free selling and golden...
Episode 2 - Why every sales training program you've built has failed (and what finally works) with Greg Smith
In this episode, hosts Chris Walker and Leann Leone sit down with Greg Smith from Janek Performance Group to unpack why enablement has struggled to deliver on its own promises, what's changed, and how a convergence of AI, culture, and smarter implementation strategy is finally making real skill development possible at scale.
If you've ever implemented a tool nobody used, watched an LMS gather digital dust, or wondered whether tech is improving your reps or just making them busier, this one is for you.
Key talking points:
How a decade of broken promises is...Episode 1 - Enablement is broken. Let's fix it.
On this episode, hosts Chris Walker and Leanne Leone kick off the brand new Enablement Optimization Podcast to explore what sales enablement actually is, why it keeps getting mistaken for admin, and how leaders can stop being order takers.
