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The challenges Taskbase addresses for Sales Leaders and Enablement

Most sales teams don’t struggle with activity — they struggle with skill. Despite thousands of dollars spent per rep each year on external coaching, sales kickoffs, and enablement programs, behavior rarely changes in a lasting way. Coaching is episodic, playbooks are static, and enablement teams are stretched too thin to provide continuous development. This article explores why traditional sales coaching fails structurally, why expensive training often delivers low ROI, and how proactive, AI-driven coaching embedded directly into daily workflows can finally connect strategy, skill development, and execution at scale.

Patrick Trümpi

Feb 16

0 min read

Sales Enablement

Table of Contents

The challenges Taskbase addresses

Sales performance breaks down into two dimensions: quantity and quality.

Quantity is about activity and pipeline mechanics. Reps need to do enough of the right things — calls, emails, follow-ups — and turn those activities into discovery calls, demos, and progressing opportunities. Most sales organizations already track this well. Activity targets, conversion rates, and pipeline coverage are visible and measurable.

Quality is where things usually fall apart. This includes:

  • How well reps run discovery calls

  • Whether demos are relevant and structured

  • How confidently reps guide prospects through a sales process

  • Whether sales methodologies are applied consistently

Reps often miss targets not because they lack effort, but because they lack skills and knowledge, and those skills are not developed continuously. Learning without reinforcement fades quickly. Habits take over again, and performance regresses rather than improves.

Coaching exists, but it doesn’t change behavior — and it’s expensive

Most companies try to solve the quality problem with coaching, but the structure is flawed and costly.

Coaching today typically involves:

  • External coaches paid by the hour

  • Sales kickoffs (SKOs) and one-off training sessions

  • Occasional follow-up coaching throughout the year

In many organizations, this adds up to roughly $3,000–$6,000 per rep per year in coaching spend. Despite the cost, coaching is usually:

  • Infrequent and irregular

  • Generic rather than rep-specific

  • Detached from daily sales work

The result is a double failure:

  • Reps don’t change how they sell in the long run

  • Coaching investments have very low and quickly decaying ROI

Motivation may spike briefly after a session, but without continuous reinforcement, behavior remains largely unchanged.

Sales enablement is overloaded by design

Sales enablement is usually responsible for:

  • Coaching reps

  • Onboarding new hires

  • Maintaining playbooks

  • Rolling out methodologies

  • Driving behavior change across the org

In reality, enablement teams are heavily capacity-constrained. One enablement person is often responsible for a large group of reps, while also handling onboarding and operational work. Even under optimistic assumptions, the actual coaching time per rep per week is minimal — far too little to support continuous, personalized development.

As a result:

  • Continuous coaching is deprioritized first

  • Enablement is asked to “scale coaching” without leverage

  • Daily, situational coaching becomes impossible with humans alone

This is often why companies fall back on expensive external coaching — not because it’s effective, but because internal teams simply don’t have the capacity.

The sales playbook is not a real source of truth

Most organizations have a sales playbook, but it rarely works as intended.

Common problems:

  • It lives in static tools (Docs, Notion, PDFs, Confluence)

  • Updating it is time-consuming and manual

  • Reps don’t consume it proactively

  • Leaders stop maintaining it because usage is low

This creates a deeper issue. Company strategy — new priorities, messaging, or product focus — does not reliably reach the rep level. Updates are shared in meetings or announcements, quickly forgotten, and never fully translated into day-to-day sales behavior.


How Taskbase solves these problems

Proactive, embedded coaching instead of passive tools

Taskbase is not another platform reps have to remember to open. It lives directly in Slack or Teams and proactively reaches out to reps.

What that changes:

  • Coaching happens in daily workflows

  • Reps receive short, actionable guidance tied to real interactions

  • Nudges happen daily (and increasingly, multiple times per day)

  • Learning turns into habit formation over time

This reduces the dependency on irregular, expensive external coaching by providing continuous, in-context development at a fraction of the cost.

Continuous visibility into sales skills

Today, leaders can see quantitative metrics like activity and pipeline, but they lack visibility into qualitative performance.

Taskbase closes this gap by:

  • Analyzing calls, emails, and interactions

  • Inferring skill levels from real behavior

  • Maintaining a live skill profile per rep

This gives sales leaders and enablement teams:

  • Immediate insight into strengths and weaknesses

  • Early signals when performance is at risk

  • A qualitative explanation for missed targets

  • The ability to coach precisely, without manual assessments

A living, self-updating sales playbook

Taskbase replaces static sales playbooks with a system that evolves continuously.

Key differences:

  • The playbook lives inside Taskbase

  • New objections and patterns are captured automatically

  • Content gaps become visible to leaders

  • Updates can be made quickly using AI or voice

Most importantly, updates are not just documented — they are actively taught and reinforced through proactive coaching. This ensures that strategy changes don’t stop at announcements, but actually show up in how reps sell.

In essence:
Taskbase connects strategy, coaching, and execution in one system. It allows companies to scale continuous, high-quality sales development, reduce reliance on expensive external coaching, and finally turn learning into lasting behavior change.

If you want, next we can:

  • sharpen this into economic positioning (cost vs ROI)

  • tailor it per persona (CEO, enablement, sales leader)

  • or compress it into a crisp pitch or website narrative

Want to learn more?

Power your team with Taskbase's AI learning platform, crafted for personalized coaching, skill development, and measurable growth.

Book a call with the author

Want to learn more?

Power your team with Taskbase's AI learning platform, crafted for personalized coaching, skill development, and measurable growth.

Book a call with the author

Want to learn more?

Power your team with Taskbase's AI learning platform, crafted for personalized coaching, skill development, and measurable growth.

Book a call with the author

Patrick Trümpi

Taskbase

Patrick Trümpi is a co-founder and CRO at Taskbase. He's scaled multiple startups from $500k to $10M+ ARR and still makes cold calls daily.