How to align your talent to become an agentic sales organization

This past June, Gartner published a paper that should be on every revenue leader’s desk: The Great Sales Awakening: How to Lead Sales in the AI Era. Their findings validate what many of us are feeling in our bones: B2B sales is more challenging and competitive than ever, with “74% of leaders reporting increased difficulty in closing deals and sales cycles lengthening.”

Gartner found that traditional growth levers are losing impact; adding headcount or tweaking comp plans won’t cut it. But there’s a silver lining: AI is offering a boon that extends far beyond basic productivity gains and into an actual competitive advantage.

As the report explains, we’re in a unique time that’s full of possibilities. The next two to three years present a critical inflection point for revenue leaders to embrace agentic AI, embed it into their core strategies, and build a foundation for sustainable growth in uncertain times.

Gartner’s report makes three recommendations that perfectly summarize the opportunities ahead, but insights are only valuable when put into action. It's one thing to say the landscape is shifting; it's another to know how to act on it.

Let's walk through how you can take Gartner’s commentary and make real change throughout your org:

Gartner’s recommendation: CSOs must become AI-savvy, set the pace for the sales organization, design a transformation portfolio, and adapt their operating rhythm to drive AI results.

My take: Lead by example and use AI to become a better coach.

The new era of AI isn’t just about making reps more efficient; it’s about making managers and leaders more effective, too. AI can help individuals and managers unlock additional creativity, perform deep research in hours that would have previously taken days, and uncover insights that lead to better decisions, faster.

As leaders, I believe our role is to model this behavior. Instead of defaulting to “Here’s how I would do it,” or “Go research these three things,” the modern approach is to show, not tell. Show them how they can find the answer, integrate it directly into their own workflows, and model the behavior.

For example, a sales manager might tell their team, “For our top three deals, I’m going to stay on top of what's happening and save all of us time by using these specific prompts. But for the other 50 deals in the pipeline, I need you to run the same analysis and bring me the results.” Lead by doing.

This approach demonstrates a practical AI use case, sets a clear standard, and scales your expertise across the entire pipeline. It promotes efficiency and intelligent AI use in a way that feels like a partnership, not a shortcut. You're showing your team how to work smarter, not telling them they’re cheating by using new solutions.

Gartner’s recommendation: Operationalize ‘action-centric insight and design’ to deconstruct and rebuild sales workflows with AI.

My take: Be prescriptive and map the agents to the work.

This is where RevOps becomes the strategic linchpin for transformation. It’s not enough to tell your team to “go use agents to streamline deal reviews.” What does that even mean? Which agent? In which application? For what specific outcome? Not to mention there is no "how."

RevOps is uniquely positioned to initiate a broad, sweeping transformation by being prescriptive and answering those questions up front. Your RevOps and enablement teams must partner to create a clear, prescriptive map for individual contributors, showing them exactly where, how, and why to deploy AI agents within their existing workflows.

Let’s take the deal review example. Instead of a vague directive, RevOps should provide a detailed blueprint:

• Step 1: The routine. The manager leads the deal review to analyze the pipeline and assess alignment with company goals. The rep provides the deal details.
• Step 2: The solutions. Before the meeting, the rep will use Call Spotlight to summarize the last three customer conversations. The manager will use AI Deal Predictor to assess the health of the opportunity based on activity and engagement data.
• Step 3: The action. During the review, both parties will use these AI-generated insights to focus the conversation on strategic next steps, not just status updates.

This level of prescription — defining the who, what, where, when, and why — is what RevOps must provide. Don’t just say, “Get smarter on deals.” Build the blueprint for how it’s done.

Gartner’s recommendation: Realign talent strategy to prioritize ‘high-upside potential’ over traditional experience, and enable continuous learning on the job.

My take: Hire for new and emerging skillsets and aggressively upskill your current workforce.

Every new technology has a dawn, a period when the newness can feel overwhelming. When Windows was first introduced, we went from the world of the command prompt to using a mouse for everything. It’s hard to imagine now, but that was a seismic shift. Job interviewers would ask, “Do you know how to drag and drop a file?” That question seems absurd today — everybody knows how to do that! — but there was a moment in time when that wasn’t a given.

AI is having its “drag-and-drop” moment right now. Some new hires might view AI with suspicion, while others may not have meaningfully engaged with it at all.

Indeed, Gartner found that only 6% of job descriptions even mention AI-related skills, and less than 5% of current sellers possess these skills. “This traditional approach inadvertently screens out the very talent needed for future success,” the report concludes. Instead, you must “integrate future-fit traits into hiring and promotion assessments.”

Everyone, from executives to individual contributors, must reinvent how they operate. The ship has sailed on being the stick-in-the-mud who refuses to use AI in their day-to-day. As leaders, we must build teams that are eager to leverage this technology by prioritizing new competencies in the hiring process, such as tactical flexibility, a growth mindset, and a demonstrated curiosity for partnering with AI.

Gartner’s report is a powerful call to action, but we at Gong are focused on making it actually happen. Knowing that a change is coming is one thing; putting that knowledge into practice is where the real work begins.

The most exciting part is that the barrier to entry is low. Unlike specialized skills of the past, AI knowledge isn't being gatekept. Anyone can teach themselves. If you want to build a great sales organization, you have to show your people the how and the why. The solutions for self-service learning are everywhere.

The next few years will define the next decade of sales leadership. By translating insight into action, you can ensure your organization isn’t just surviving the AI era — it’s leading it.