Where Do Sales Enablement Professionals Come From?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been involved in many conversations regarding the professional background of people who are now in a sales enablement role. Many people have opinions, but few have data. “They are mostly from sales training,” “They come from L&D,” “Aren’t they just low performing sales managers?” “As far as I can see, many are sales ops people who never carried a bag.”
Really? I work with a lot of enablement leaders. And the majority of them have had sales roles, sales management roles, and sales excellence roles. And if I look at my background, I had roles in sales, consulting, and business development. I led an industry-specific team that was focused on business development in the utility industry before I got into sales enablement, before I became an analyst.
However, experiences are not data. So, we decided to look into the matter and analyze what’s actually happening