The Gartner Sales Podcast cover image

The Gartner Sales Podcast

Portrait of the High-Performing Seller

Aug 2, 2024
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.
19:07

Episode guests

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • 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.

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