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.
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Three Core Seller Competencies
- High performing sellers excel in three core competencies: mentalizing, tactical flexibility, and AI partnership.
- Each competency greatly increases quota attainment, highlighting their importance for sales success.
Defining Mentalizing & Flexibility
- Mentalizing involves understanding buyers' unspoken feelings, using active listening, cognitive decoding, and perspective taking.
- Tactical flexibility is about adapting sales approaches with learning agility and situational versatility.
Emerging AI Partnership Skills
- AI partnership is a newly critical competency, emphasizing skills like prompt engineering and use case selection.
- These skills enable sellers to effectively use generative AI tools in their sales process.