How do I prepare my sales team for AI?

Not with tool training, but with a new understanding of the role. The team must first understand that their customers now enter conversations AI-informed — and what that means for discovery, argumentation and their own value. Only after that does tool training make sense, because a tool without changed behaviour produces certificates, not results.

In order, in three stages.

Stage one: making the shift tangible. Most salespeople underestimate how far along their customers already are. According to Forrester, 94 per cent of B2B buyers use AI in the buying process; Gong Labs measures that AI discussions in sales conversations have nearly doubled within two years. When a team places these figures alongside their own conversation experiences for the first time, resistance usually gives way on its own. That's the moment when 'do we have to?' becomes 'how do we do this?'

Stage two: training the new core competency — validation. The customer arrives with an AI-generated picture: comparisons, objections, sometimes a ready-made business case. The salesperson's most valuable skill now is checking that picture: where is it right? Where incomplete? Where wrong? According to Gartner, 69 per cent of buyers use salespeople exactly for this — to verify AI insights at decision points. This can be trained with real cases from your own market: running through AI research on your own offering, finding the gaps, practising the correction.

Stage three: bringing tools into daily work. Only now do your own AI tools come in — research, preparation, follow-up, CRM support. And led deliberately: the manager uses the tools themselves, makes them part of pipeline reviews and call preparation, and follows up. A strategy doesn't yet change daily work, and a licence even less so. Behavioural change comes from modelling it and sticking with it.

What's deliberately missing here: the big rollout with twenty tools and mandatory training for everyone. Breadth without depth creates exhaustion. A few use cases, properly embedded in daily work, beat any training programme.