The new talent playbook: How top sellers win in the AI era

Your customers have a shortlist before they talk to your sellers.

51% of B2B software buyers now start evaluations in an AI assistant instead of a search engine (G2, 2026). Buying committees compare twice as many vendors in half the time (Deloitte). The winner is on that shortlist 95% of the time (6sense).

At Gong Celebrate 2026 in Las Vegas, I moderated “Modernize Your Talent Playbook,” a panel that brought together Jason Magill Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting; Chad Mayfield, Senior Director of GTM Enablement Centre of Excellence, LinkedIn; Suzanna O’Donohue, VP of Sales, LexisNexis; and Callie Laden, VP of RevOps & Sales Enablement, Auris.

Jason opened with the question every revenue leader needs to answer:

“If the buyer doesn’t need your seller to explain the product anymore, what do you need the seller for?”

AI didn’t kill the need for great sellers. It changed what makes one great. Here’s what the panel said to hire and train for.

Most GTM orgs treat AI as an addition.

Buy the tools, bolt prompts onto existing stages, wait for ROI.

Deloitte’s research shows orgs that bolt technology onto legacy motions are 1.6 times more likely to miss expected ROI. The return comes from multiplication: humans × machines. Leaders who redesign the work and strip out admin friction, so sellers can apply judgment with buyers and with AI, are 2.5 times more likely to report superior financial performance.

1. Judgment and taste
Anyone can send AI-assisted emails in seconds. That’s noise. Jason and Callie called the differentiator taste: keeping automated slop out of your customer’s inbox. Top reps know when to trust AI, when to edit it, and when to override it.

Callie said top performers across Auris’s 400-person field org often had activity numbers that were “mediocre at best.” Their edge was interaction quality. They diagnosed sharply instead of summarizing, handled objections before they surfaced, and walked away from deals with no Compelling Event.

2. Adaptability and resilience
A static onboarding boot camp cannot protect a sales team against a market that's changing by the month. As Chad put it, “The role you hire for today will look different tomorrow.”

High performers treat their role’s evolution as continuous. Instead of waiting for enablement to distribute a refreshed deck, they test emerging plays immediately. At Auris, for example, sellers build their resilience by running self-directed AI role-play simulations, graduating from easy to hard modes in private so they can learn to handle hostile gatekeepers and tough competitor objections before ever dialing a customer.

3. Authentic curiosity
In an era when buyers show up having already researched their own solutions, surface-level discovery questions are dead on arrival. Sellers need genuine, investigative curiosity to uncover the real operational friction behind a buyer’s stated symptoms.

Suzanna shared how this curiosity operates internally at LexisNexis. Reps regularly run diagnostics across their own calendars and communications, asking questions like these:

• Where is our workflow breaking down?
• What manual tasks can we automate?
• What strategic questions are we not asking yet?

Curiosity drives the growth mindset that keeps their reps from sounding scripted.

4. Technical and commercial fluency

The objection dominating commercial pipelines today isn’t “Why your product versus a competitor’s?” Instead, it’s “Why shouldn’t we just build an internal agent?”

Winning reps don't need to be solution engineers, but they must master commercial fluency. As Callie pointed out, when prospective clients ask why they can't stitch an HCM workflow together using raw models, the top reps don't get defensive. Instead, they walk the buyer through the total cost of ownership, ongoing maintenance overhead, audit risks, and relentless regulatory shifts. They turn technical hesitations into clear business trade-offs.

None of this matters if leaders don't have a clear understanding of what AI fluency looks like in practice. You can’t coach to a standard you haven't defined.

At LinkedIn, Chad’s enablement team benchmarks AI fluency on four dimensions:

• Application: Can the rep embed AI directly into high-impact motions (e.g., strategic pre-call research, same-day executive summaries) rather than basic drafting?
• Adaptation: When plays change or new capabilities emerge, can the seller pivot their prompts and workflows without waiting for a formal enablement rollout?
• Judgment: Does the seller evaluate output critically, audit for tone and accuracy, and prevent robotic phrasing from reaching the buyer?
• Championing: Does the rep share effective plays across team channels, elevating the collective execution of their peers?

If a rep cannot operate at a fluent level across these four dimensions, they aren't just slower; they risk damaging brand credibility on live calls.

Even fluent, adaptable sellers will stall out if they are plugged into an outdated team structure built for a bygone era.

Today, you can’t count on one AE alone to source pipeline, run complex multi-stakeholder deals, handle technical validation, and manage expansion. Leading organizations are restructuring commercial roles around focused specializations.

Suzanna discussed how they’ve made this shift at LexisNexis. By deploying dedicated Growth Specialists alongside Account Managers and establishing customer innovation labs where technical specialists build rapid prototypes side-by-side with prospects, they remove technical hesitations and build-versus-buy friction in a single session:

• Net-new hunters → Dedicated outbound prospecting & pipeline creation
• Account managers → Health, adoption, and retention
• Growth specialists → Elite deal strategists paired with AMs for expansion
• Technical teams → Customer innovation labs running rapid-prototype validation

If you’re a revenue or enablement leader, I’m issuing a challenge that will move you in the right direction. Rewrite this one line in your team’s next job profile:

“Has a proven track record of quota attainment.”

Replace it with: “Can demonstrate how to diagnose complex business problems, identify hidden deal risks, and use AI to accelerate deal execution.”

A President’s Club photo tells you where someone landed in a different market. It doesn’t tell you how they think, how they diagnose, or how they adapt when the playbook changes.

Hire for judgment. Coach conversation quality over activity. Give reps room to operate.

Thanks to Jason, Chad, Suzanna, and Callie.

Want to dive deeper into the full framework, competencies, and enablement benchmarks?

Download: The modern talent playbook: Build a GTM team for the AI era