Back in August, the Sales Enablement Collective published a piece on enablement metrics. It was thoughtful and grounded about why metrics matter: they're your roadmap, they prove efficacy, and they keep your team focused.
The core argument was straightforward: define what good looks like (time to quota, contribution consistency, onboarding effectiveness), measure it consistently, then use that data to prove enablement impact and guide where to focus coaching.
Six months later, that foundation holds. But we're starting to see a subtle frustration in the field, not named in the piece.
If you followed that article, you might have:
And then... nothing changed.
But everything in that article is based on real experience of what is happening in the field. The logic is sound. So where does the gap show up?
It's not because the metrics were wrong or because the enablement strategy was flawed, but because the distance between "we know what to measure" and "we can actually measure it continuously" is much larger than it appears.
Here's what that gap looks like in practice:
Coaching misses the moment. A rep stumbles on an objection in a call Monday morning. You don't review that call until Friday. They've already fumbled the same objection twice more since then, and now it's a pattern.
Improvement is slow and invisible. You run discovery training in month one and measure impact in month four. By then, you have no idea which reps improved, which ignored it, or whether the training was even the reason.
Messaging alignment is invisible. You launch new positioning. You have no real way to track which reps are using it, which messaging is winning deals, and which is creating friction with buyers. By the time you find out, adoption patterns are already set.
This isn't a critique of the SEC article, it's an acknowledgment of a hard truth: frameworks alone don't win you deals. The problem is that measuring enablement at the scale it needs to happen (continuously, across real conversations and behaviors, tied to actual outcomes) requires more than spreadsheets and discipline.
The core metrics haven't changed. Time to quota, quota attainment, contribution consistency - they still matter.
What's changed is how they're measured.
Coaching decoupled from training. It used to be fine, coaching happened quarterly because that was the only realistic cadence. Managers had limited time, call volume was manageable. Now you have 50+ calls per rep per month, and each call generates more data than ever. Weekly coaching is table stakes. But feedback still arrives weeks after calls happen. The shift: coaching inside real deals, in real time.
Faster product-enablement collision. With advancing AI and technology, product ships every sprint now, not quarterly. Competitive landscapes shift faster and buyer priorities evolve mid-quarter, causing your messaging to change weekly. You need real-time visibility into what's landing and what's not, or you'll be coaching on outdated positioning while the market has moved on.
Automatic over manual. The quantity of data being generated is larger than ever, and it is becoming less and less sustainable. Manual scorecards, spreadsheet tracking, and call audits just don't scale anymore. The teams staying competitive aren't measuring better, they're measuring automatically.
So if everything is changing, what can be expect to stay the same?
The SEC article's core thinking: metrics prove what works, focus keeps you disciplined, evidence beats opinion, baselines matter. All still true. What's changed isn't the strategy, it's the tactics required to execute it. You can't measure continuously with spreadsheets. But the principle of measuring is unchanged.
When you measure enablement only through quarterly reviews, measurement happens after execution. You run a program, wait three months, see if it worked.
But what if measurement was continuous? What if every rep got feedback after every call, showing whether they're improving on the specific behaviors you're coaching? What if metrics updated in real time?
Suddenly, enablement becomes running experiments with continuous feedback loops, adjusting in real time, and scaling what's actually moving the needle.
The metrics SEC outlined still matter. But they can now be tracked continuously, at the rep level, tied directly to specific behaviors and coaching initiatives.
If you've built your charter around SEC's metrics, you're on solid ground. The next step is automating them. Technology makes this more feasible than ever before. Teams are already starting to automate and they are outpacing teams that stay manual.
Here is where you can start:
Make coaching about behavior change, not activity. Measure whether actual rep behavior is shifting on the specific skills you're coaching. Track rep by rep, call by call, and adjust in real time.
Let execution data inform your playbook. What reps actually do in calls (language that lands, objections that arise, questions that move deals) should continuously feed back into playbooks and talk tracks. Your framework evolves based on field reality, not quarterly assumptions.
Stop being the data janitor. Automatic activity capture and continuous feedback loops mean you spend time on diagnosis and strategy, not spreadsheets.
The Sales Enablement Collective got it right in August.
What's changed is the tooling available to execute against those frameworks. Six months ago, living those principles required heroic manual effort.
The enablement leaders building the most impact right now aren't the ones with better metrics frameworks. They're the ones who've automated measurement so thoroughly that it's no longer a limiting them, but helping them scale.
Your job shifts from measuring enablement to using measurement to improve execution, continuously, without the manual overhead.
That's the evolution.
If you want to see how continuous measurement changes your ability to execute against that framework, explore how platforms like Hive Perform automate the metrics that matter and reveal where execution is breaking down in real time.