Mike Katz, a senior director of research at Gartner with over 15 years of experience, shares insights on evolving skills in B2B sales. He highlights the necessity for sellers to adapt to technology and changing buyer expectations. Key competencies like curiosity, innovation, and agility emerge as crucial for high performance. Katz discusses the role of AI in improving seller effectiveness and recommends targeted skill development. Listeners also get book suggestions like 'Giraffes Can't Dance' for fostering confidence and expressiveness.
High-performing sellers excel through mentalizing, tactical flexibility, and AI partnership, which are essential for navigating the evolving B2B sales landscape.
Sales leaders must actively support and assess the development of these core competencies to enhance seller performance and align with strategic goals.
Deep dives
The Importance of Seller Competencies
High-performing sellers distinguish themselves through three core competencies: mentalizing, tactical flexibility, and AI partnership. Mentalizing involves understanding unspoken beliefs and emotions to predict buyer behavior, with skills like active listening and cognitive decoding playing a crucial role. Tactical flexibility emphasizes the need for sellers to adapt their strategies and experiment with different approaches based on buyer feedback, highlighting the importance of learning agility. The AI partnership competency, a recent development, focuses on leveraging artificial intelligence tools, with skills such as prompt engineering and use case selection being essential for modern sellers.
The Role of Technology in Sales Skills
The relationship between technology and human skills in sales is increasingly intertwined, necessitating a comprehensive approach to competency development. Basic technology skills are now expected, with the differentiation coming from sellers who can effectively utilize AI to enhance their workflows. Research has shown that learning agility remains a tech-independent skill, while other skills benefit from technology, highlighting the necessity of assessing how tech impacts various competencies. This integration promotes a new competency model that emphasizes the interplay of technology and skills, steering clear of the traditional separation between the two.
Strategies for Sales Leaders
Sales leaders must prioritize, assess, and support the development of essential skills aligned with their sales strategies. By focusing on the three core competencies, leaders can create a clearer definition of success and evaluate how effectively their sellers utilize these skills in their daily roles. Regular assessment of skill application helps in identifying gaps, while providing the right resources and training is crucial for sustainable skill enhancement. Leveraging available tools, such as seller skills assessments and time spent analysis, empowers organizations to better integrate technology and improve seller performance.
As the B2B sales environment has changed, the skills that sellers need to succeed have changed as well. In this episode, hosts Billy Luckey and Betsy Gregory-Hosler speak with Mike Katz, senior director for research at Gartner for Sales Leaders, to explore the latest research on critical seller skills, what has shifted in the B2B seller competency model, and how sales leaders can support these skills moving forward.
Mike Katz is a senior director of research in the sales practice at Gartner with over 15 years of experience leading and managing research teams and directing mixed-methods research projects. He leads multiple research teams to generate actionable business ideas and data-driven insights for sales executives. His current focus is on sales talent, enablement and strategic planning.
He has presented his research to thousands of business and government executives in briefings, webinars, workshops and conferences. His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and multiple academic journals and publications.
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