Not sure that I even have an answer to the question yet...need to mull it over more. But as someone with a background in marketing in the technology sector and now as a consultant it feels like the term sales enablement has come to be synonymous with marketing getting beat up for not handing the 'golden' leads over fast enough or often enough. The tools are powerful and what we as marketers can provide these days is vastly different than even five years ago but it seems the 'hunter' in sales is gone (especially in small companies) and has been replaced by either a telequal team that is really just taking responders and calling them to pass them one way (to sales) or the other (back to marketing) or by a team who wants to only call inbound leads and very highly vetted leads. Despite the espousal of industry leaders like Sirius lead scoring is used rarely, if at all and when it is it has been mutated to provide velocity of leads not quality of leads. Lead scoring has been permuted so far from its intent that it cannot possibly pass the highest quality leads without passing all leads that respond to anything. Somewhere lead quality has gotten lost and quantity has lead to a fire hose of leads passing forth, Sales then assumes marketing only can produce volume and not quality and the cycle resumes.
I think now is the time to redefine sales enablement. Provisioning tools for sales is just one component, mutual understanding and agreement around what feeds the process, from agreement on what a lead is, to the trigger points that pass it from one stage in the waterfall to the next, to SLAs and feedback on both sides around what is working and what isn't form the backbone of successful enablement. After the process and tools are in place a robust feedback loop needs to be built, something that allows both sides to share (in a systematic way) how things are working out in the field. Somewhere in the middle of that loop it goes beyond just sales and marketing and even involves the product teams to help them gain an understanding of how features and functionality of the products they design are really resonating with the customers. Providing that feedback beyond the sales and marketing teams then forms the basis for corporate enablement, truly allowing for success of the product and the company as a whole.