In many sales organizations, performance conversations cover familiar ground: pipeline reviews, forecast inspection, deal-by-deal scrutiny, and the recurring question from leadership: what needs to change for more opportunities to close?
The answer isn’t always more pipeline. Nor is it always more activity, another tool, or more forecast pressure. Sometimes those are the right moves. Often, they treat the symptom while the root cause lies in weak qualification, unclear value, stalled buyer consensus, limited manager coaching, or poor visibility into deal risk.
These problems are connected, but they’re not the same. When leaders treat them as the same, they risk investing in fixes that don’t move the number.
In RAIN Group’s 2026 sales challenges and priorities research, we surveyed 252 sales management, leadership, and enablement professionals. This is the third wave of the study, following research fielded in 2019 and 2023. The findings, as detailed in our B2B Sales Challenges Report, reveal what sales organizations find most challenging, what leaders are prioritizing, and where enablement and leadership teams can have the greatest impact.
The findings point to a practical problem many sales teams share: turning buyer interest into decisions, renewals, expansion, and revenue.
Picture a sales leader in a Monday forecast meeting.
Sales manager 1: “Hiring has slowed the team’s capacity.”
Sales manager 2: “Several late-stage deals have pushed.”
Sales manager 3: “Procurement is asking for more justification.”
Sales manager 4: “A competitor is discounting aggressively.”
The CRO: “Is the problem is pipeline, deal quality, sales skill, manager coaching, or market conditions?”
The honest answer? Yes.
Sales organizations aren’t dealing with one isolated challenge. They’re facing pressure across the commercial system.
Most Reported Challenges
% Very / Somewhat Challenging
The top 10 sales enablement and leadership challenges identified in the research are:
What stands out is not only the severity of any single issue, but also how tightly these issues compound.
Economic uncertainty affects budgets. Budget pressure slows decisions. Larger buying committees make consensus harder. Longer cycles increase no-decision risk. Talent and manager challenges make it harder to respond consistently. Pipeline quality and seller capability determine whether opportunities advance or stall.
From the outside, these symptoms can look like one problem: missed number, soft forecast, or slower growth. But a pipeline creation problem, a no-decision problem, and a manager coaching problem require different responses.
When respondents were asked to select their top three priorities, four rose to the top:
Top Ranked Sales Priorities
% Selected
These priorities have something important in common: they all affect whether opportunities and accounts move forward. Leaders aren’t only worried about filling the front end of the funnel. They’re focused on what happens when buyers evaluate, hesitate, compare, delay, renew, and expand.
This is easy to underestimate because “communicating value” is such familiar language in sales. Many organizations already talk about it and train on it. Fewer inspect whether sellers are actually connecting their solutions to business impact, financial outcomes, risk reduction, and the buyer’s strategic priorities in live opportunities.
For sales enablement, the implication is clear: don’t treat every performance problem as a general skill gap. Identify what actually needs to improve as each pattern points to a different response.
Not every challenge can be addressed the same way.
If recruiting and hiring strong sales talent is a top challenge, leaders can respond with stronger hiring profiles, better onboarding, and improved retention strategies.
If developing sales managers is a challenge, manager effectiveness can become a priority.
If no-decision losses are increasing, leaders can invest directly in qualification, value creation, stakeholder alignment, and deal coaching.
Economic uncertainty, buyer budget constraints, and larger buying committees can’t be solved by enablement alone. Sellers can’t make the buyer’s budget environment easier. Managers can’t coach procurement scrutiny out of existence. Enablement teams can’t reduce the number of stakeholders on a buying committee because everyone agrees the process would be simpler.
But organizations can improve how sellers sell through these pressures:
Generic responses are unlikely to help. Leaders need to look at each pressure point and ask: what seller or manager behavior would help us handle this better?
Every seller knows what it feels like when the buyer seems engaged, meetings have gone well, and the proposal has been sent. Then the opportunity slows down. The champion needs more time. The decision date is moved. A senior stakeholder wants to revisit priorities.
The deal stays in the forecast, but the momentum has drained out of it.
That’s often how no-decision appears: it looks like something that happened late in the opportunity.
Percent of Proposed / Quoted Opportunities Lost to No Decision
% Respondents 2023 vs. 2026
The research reveals why no-decision deserves more attention than it often gets:
No-decision may surface late, but it usually develops earlier. It can begin when discovery doesn’t uncover the full business impact of the problem, or when the buyer doesn’t see the cost of staying the same. It can worsen when stakeholders are misaligned, risk isn’t addressed, the champion lacks the internal case to build consensus, or the seller moves forward without enough evidence that the buyer is committed to change.
This is why reducing no-decision requires more than seller persistence.
Managers play an important role here. No-decision could stem from lack of follow up, objection handling, qualification and pursuit intensity, value case, or buyer alignment. In a deal review, managers can move the conversation away from, “What activity is happening?” and toward, “What evidence do we have that the buyer is committed to change?”
A coaching conversation might focus on a few questions:
These aren’t just inspection questions. They help managers test whether the opportunity has enough urgency, alignment, and commitment to keep moving.
They don’t guarantee a win. But they do help sellers and managers identify no-decision risk before the deal has already gone quiet.
A seller can:
These gaps are easy to underestimate because they often involve skills leaders assume sellers already have.
Some seller capabilities may not rank among the most prevalent challenges overall, but outcome comparisons suggest they still matter to performance.
Several findings stand out:
Just because fewer organizations identify these capabilities as highly challenging doesn’t mean they matter less.
In complex sales, relationship development, discovery, value communication, and buyer-process understanding aren’t peripheral skills. They help sellers create trust, identify the full scope of need, connect the problem to business impact, build urgency, understand how decisions are made, and help buying groups move forward.
This is where familiarity can work against sales organizations. Most have provided training on discovery, have discussed value, and expect sellers to understand the buyer’s decision process. Because these skills feel familiar, leaders assume they’re already handled.
They may not be.
For leaders, this is a practical caution: don’t assume foundational skills are solved because they’re basic. In difficult selling environments, the basics often determine whether opportunities advance or stall.
After a sales training program ends, sellers return to live opportunities, active accounts, forecast calls, pricing pressure, buyer delays, and competing priorities. Some apply the new skills. Some intend to but revert to old habits. Some use the language without changing their behavior.
And some wait to see whether their manager reinforces it.
That matters.
The research reinforces the importance of effective sales managers:
This aligns with other RAIN Group research: sellers receiving a combination of effective management, regular sales coaching, and effective sales training are 63% more likely to be top performers.
Managers determine whether methodology becomes part of the weekly operating rhythm or stays in the training materials.
Managers help sellers:
This is the routine work that makes capability change stick.
It’s especially important when the priority is conversion. If sellers need to reduce no-decision, managers need to know how to coach no-decision risk. If sellers need to improve value communication, managers need to know what strong value messaging sounds like in an actual deal conversation. If sellers need stronger opportunity planning, managers need to know how to inspect deal strategy and stakeholder coverage.
Manager development shouldn’t be treated as a separate initiative from sales performance improvement. It should be built into the performance agenda from the beginning.
If the organization wants sellers to change behavior, managers need the capability, tools, and expectations to reinforce that change.
Many sales teams are already using AI, but mostly for discrete tasks rather than as part of a consistent sales workflow.
Only 15.4% of respondents said AI is used extensively in the sales process. Another 70.1% said AI is used in a limited way.
The most extensive use cases are concentrated in task-level activities: call notes, summaries, follow-up emails, account research, meeting preparation, prospecting, outreach, proposals, business cases, and CRM or administrative work.
These use cases can save time and reduce administrative burden, and can help sellers prepare faster and communicate more efficiently.
But productivity gains don’t automatically translate into better sales performance.
For AI to affect outcomes, it needs to support the behaviors that drive performance, but the barriers identified in the research make this difficult: difficulty integrating AI into workflow and systems, limited training or best practices, and lack of clear AI policy or governance.
Sales organizations need to define where AI fits in the sales process, how sellers should use it, how managers should coach around it, what good outputs look like, what risks must be managed, and how AI use connects to sales methodology.
Without that direction, AI may improve efficiency without improving the sales behaviors that affect outcomes.
A common response to a difficult sales environment is to add initiatives: launch a prospecting push, update the playbook, run negotiation training, add AI guidance, increase forecast inspection, schedule more coaching, or revisit account planning.
Any one of those responses might be right. The risk is choosing one before understanding the issue. The research points to four places to focus first.
Before choosing the response, leaders need to get specific about the problem they’re solving.
A pipeline creation issue may require better targeting, prospecting, messaging, account planning, and sales / marketing alignment. A conversion issue may require stronger qualification, discovery, value communication, stakeholder engagement, and deal coaching. A retention issue may require account management, value realization, renewal planning, and Sales / Customer Success coordination.
Four useful questions are:
The intervention should match the pattern in the business.
The priority data point strongly toward conversion-critical capabilities.
Winning against competitors, reducing no-decision, improving retention, and communicating value all require sellers to do more than present solutions. They need to help buyers understand why change matters, why now, why this approach, and why the value outweighs the risk.
These skills work together in live opportunities. Strong value communication depends on strong discovery. Reducing no-decision requires sellers to understand urgency, stakeholders, risk, and the buyer’s decision process. Winning against competitors requires sellers to connect differentiation to the buyer’s strategic and financial priorities.
For enablement teams, this means building capability systems, not disconnected events.
If managers aren’t involved, seller behavior change is unlikely to last.
Managers need to know what sellers are learning, what behaviors are expected, how those behaviors show up in real opportunities, and how to coach them. They also need practical tools for coaching, opportunity inspection, call review, account planning, and skill reinforcement.
The support should be tied to the sales priorities that matter most.
If the priority is:
Manager reinforcement should be designed into enablement from the beginning, not added after training ends.
AI, sales process, and enablement should not operate as separate projects.
AI can help sellers prepare for discovery, analyze account context, draft value hypotheses, identify stakeholder gaps, summarize buyer concerns, and prepare for manager coaching sessions.
Sales process can define standards for qualification, opportunity advancement, value creation, and buyer commitment.
Enablement can provide the methodology, tools, practice, and reinforcement to make those standards real.
The goal is to make sure these efforts reinforce the same seller and manager behaviors.
Before adding another tool or program, leaders should ask:
That keeps AI, process, and enablement from becoming separate workstreams with separate goals.
Sales and enablement leaders are not short on challenges. The 2026 research shows pressure across talent, economic uncertainty, sales cycles, no-decision, competition, manager development, buyer complexity, sales skills, pipeline quality, and budget constraints.
But the priority data show that urgency is concentrating in competitive wins, no-decision, retention and renewals, and value communication.
That combination calls for sharper diagnosis and more focused execution. Leaders need to know where performance is breaking down, which capabilities matter most, how managers will reinforce them, and how process and AI can support the behaviors that improve outcomes.
Progress starts with getting clear on the constraint before choosing the fix.
From there, the work becomes more focused: build the capabilities that address the constraint, reinforce them through managers, connect process, tools, and AI to the same behaviors, and measure whether the targeted outcomes improve.
Sales challenges are broad. The response doesn’t have to be scattered.