Two weeks ago I was on a call with a CRO at a B2B SaaS company. She runs about 180 reps. She'd recently completed an enablement RFP. Shortlist of three vendors. Decision coming in a month.
Halfway through the call she paused and said something I keep thinking about.
“I'm about to spend three quarters of a million dollars on a platform that does what my last platform did. I think I'm picking the wrong category, not the wrong vendor.”
She was right.
Sales enablement as a category was built for a different world. It made sense when the work it was solving for was real: reps couldn't find the right content, managers couldn't see what was happening in the field, marketing couldn't tell which assets actually moved deals. The category emerged in the late 2000s to solve those problems, and for most of the 2010s it solved them reasonably well.
I want to be clear about something before I go further. Legacy enablement is not a failed category. It produced real platforms that helped real teams. The people who built it the founders, the early customers, the practitioners who shaped the discipline did meaningful work. The vendors that emerged from that era served their customers genuinely.
That category is now being eclipsed.
Not because the vendors got worse. Because the world changed.
Three structural shifts happened in the last 24 months that legacy enablement was not built to handle.
The first is agentic AI. Two years ago, AI in sales meant a Chrome extension that drafted emails. Today, AI is autonomous enough to research an account, attend a discovery call, take notes, identify objections, surface the right competitive intel, draft the follow-up, and update the CRM in flow, without being asked. The work AI can do has expanded so fast that the question is no longer “can AI help?” The question is “what should the human still be doing?”
The answer is the conversation. The relationship. The judgment. The trust. AI owns the work around the conversation. Humans own the conversation.
Legacy enablement architecture cannot deliver that. It was built to store content in folders and deliver training as events. It cannot put the right thing in front of the right rep at the right moment in the right deal in flow. It can search. It can serve. It cannot activate.
The second shift is consolidation. The Highspot/Seismic merger in February 2026 is the highest-profile example, but it's part of a pattern. The legacy enablement category is consolidating because it is maturing into commodity. When categories commoditize, customers leave for the next category. They don't wait for the consolidation to finish.
The third shift is what buyers are now asking for. I've been in close to a hundred CRO conversations in the last year. Almost none of them want a better content library. Almost all of them are asking some version of the same question: “How do I get my whole revenue team not just the reps, the whole team operating like the best version of themselves at the same time?”
That is a different problem. It needs a different category.
That category has a name. We've been calling it Revenue Activation.
Revenue Activation is the discipline of activating the entire revenue team rep, manager, marketing, customer success, revenue operations in flow, continuously, across the deal. Not as separate workflows that meet in a dashboard. As a coordinated operating layer that knows what's happening across the team and surfaces the right thing to the right surface in the right moment.
The architecture is structurally different from legacy enablement. It sits on top of a knowledge graph that lives in the customer's environment. It uses an open MCP layer to connect to existing systems. Above MCP, it operates as a multi-player engine wide enough to coordinate across every surface of the revenue team, not narrow enough to be a single-player assistant for one rep.
The measurement is different too. Legacy enablement measured sessions delivered, content views, training completion. Revenue Activation measures Revenue Capacity per Rep, behavior changed, activation in flow. The first set of metrics describes what happened to the platform. The second set describes what happened to the team.
And the function is different. Legacy enablement was a support function. Revenue Activation is a revenue function. Geeta Gupta, who runs sales for the Credit Funds Externally Placed group at Apollo Global Management, said this better than I have in fewer words: “Sales Enablement isn't a support function. It is a revenue function. Revenue doesn't just happen. It's built deliberately, with the right foundations.”
That sentence is the category in one breath.
Here's what I want every CRO and every VP of Enablement reading this to know.
The migration from legacy enablement to Revenue Activation is happening whether anyone names it or not. Every buying decision you make in 2026 is implicitly a vote for one category or the other. Renewing your existing platform without questioning its category fit is a vote to stay in legacy enablement. Buying a new platform that still measures sessions delivered is a vote to stay in legacy enablement. Even doing nothing is a vote to stay in legacy enablement, because the agentic era keeps moving.
Most CROs are making this choice without realizing they're making it. The campaign we're starting today exists to surface the choice.
Once you name the choice, the conversation changes. You stop asking “which enablement platform should I buy?” and start asking “what era of sales am I building for?” If you're building for the era that ended in 2024, the answer is straightforward and the legacy enablement category serves you fine. If you're building for the agentic era if you've already had the conversation with your team about what AI changes for your motion you need different architecture, different metrics, different vocabulary, different category.
That category exists. It is being practiced today by women like Geeta Gupta at Apollo, by leaders like Theresa McCluskey at Vectra AI, by builders like Regan Barker at Coach Pilot, by hundreds of others who haven't yet been named publicly. Most of them haven't called what they do Revenue Activation. They've just been doing it.
We are naming it. That is what this campaign is for.
Three things happen now.
First, we are publishing the doctrine. The architecture diagrams, the Five Levers framework, the migration paths from each legacy vendor, the case studies of teams who have already made the shift.
Second, we are releasing a diagnostic. Five minutes, fifteen questions, four maturity bands. At the end you'll know whether your current motion is operating in legacy enablement, transitioning out of it, actively practicing Revenue Activation, or already activated. If you score in the top band, we'd like to interview you for the next wave of case studies. If you score lower, we'll route you to the next steps that fit where you are.
Third, we are starting a conversation. Not a sales conversation. A category conversation. If you want to push back on the doctrine, my DMs are open. If you want to add a voice to the discipline, we'd like to hear from you. If you've already been practicing Revenue Activation under a different name, tell us we'd like to honor the work.
Naming a category isn't claiming it. The discipline already exists. It exists in the work being done by hundreds of practitioners who haven't yet had a shared vocabulary. We're offering the vocabulary.
The era is shifting. The migration is happening.
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