The sales profession is undergoing one of the most significant transformations in its history. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how sellers work, buyers are demanding more evidence and less persuasion, and organisations are spending enormous amounts of money trying to improve commercial performance. Yet beneath the excitement surrounding technological progress lies a rather uncomfortable question: are we actually getting any better at selling?
There has probably never been a better time to be a salesperson, at least in theory.
We have access to more information about our customers than at any point in history. We can identify potential buyers, research their organisations, analyse financial reports, create personalised communications and produce business cases in a fraction of the time these activities once required.
Artificial intelligence can summarise conversations, recommend next steps, identify patterns in customer behaviour and, increasingly, execute entire workflows without human intervention.
We are living through an extraordinary period of technological progress, with software companies promising to eliminate administrative inefficiencies, improve forecasting accuracy and unlock previously unimaginable levels of productivity.
And yet, something doesn’t quite add up.
According to Salesforce’s seventh edition of its State of Sales report, based on 4,050 sales professionals across 22 countries, sellers spend just 40% of their working week on selling activities. The remaining 60% is consumed by everything else.
This would be a disappointing statistic in 2006. In 2026, given the amount of money invested in sales technology over the intervening two decades, it is rather extraordinary.
The numbers become even more interesting when we examine the latest research from Orum. Its 2026 State of Sales Development Report found that 42.3% of respondents reported their SDRs spending between six and ten hours per week on research and follow-up activities, while another 39.7% reported spending eleven hours or more.
These figures are not directly comparable, but they tell a remarkably consistent story. Despite the proliferation of technology designed to make salespeople more productive, a considerable amount of their time continues to be consumed by activities that technology was supposed to simplify.
We appear to have developed an extraordinary talent for creating technology to solve problems, only to discover that the technology itself creates an entirely new collection of problems.
Salesforce reports that 42% of sales representatives feel overwhelmed by the number of tools they use. Its research also found that 51% of sales leaders using AI say technology silos delay or limit their AI initiatives.
It would be tempting to conclude that the answer is better technology, greater integration and more sophisticated automation. There is certainly a case for all three.
However, we believe there is a more fundamental question that sales leaders should be asking.
If we successfully gave salespeople another ten hours of selling time every week, would they actually know how to use it effectively?
Because removing inefficiency from a sales process does not automatically improve the quality of the conversations taking place within it.
A salesperson who struggles to uncover a customer’s underlying business problems does not suddenly become better at discovery because an AI assistant has saved them an hour of administration. A salesperson who cannot build consensus across a buying committee does not develop that capability simply because their CRM has become easier to navigate.
Technology can create the conditions for better performance. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that better performance will follow.
And that distinction may be one of the most important facing the sales profession in 2026.
It is difficult to find a contemporary sales report that does not devote considerable attention to artificial intelligence. Given the extraordinary pace of development, this is understandable.
HubSpot’s 2026 State of Sales research, drawing on more than 1,000 sales and revenue professionals, reports that 94% of sales leaders say their teams use AI.
Salesforce finds that 54% of sales teams are already using AI agents, with another 34% expecting to introduce them within two years.
Meanwhile, research from the Institute of Performance & Growth found that the proportion of organisations using AI tools increased from 34% in its 2025 survey to 63% in 2026.
The samples and definitions differ, so these percentages shouldn’t be treated as competing measurements of the same thing. Nevertheless, the direction of travel is unmistakable.
AI is no longer an emerging consideration for sales leaders. It is becoming part of the infrastructure of modern selling.
But there is a difference between adopting technology and extracting meaningful commercial value from it.
The Institute of Performance & Growth asked organisations already using AI to assess its positive impact across nine commercial activities. The average score was just 5.0 out of 10.
Customer intelligence performed relatively well, receiving a score of 6.6. Personalisation of proposals and RFP responses achieved 6.0, while lead generation and analysis scored 5.8.
However, the results were considerably less encouraging for activities closer to actual commercial outcomes.
The perceived impact on opportunity velocity was just 4.0, while forecasting accuracy received 3.9. Replacing SDRs and BDRs for prospecting and calling scored only 2.7.
These are subjective assessments rather than controlled measures of performance, but they raise an important question about the gap between what AI promises and what organisations currently experience.
It is entirely possible for a technology to improve the efficiency of an individual activity without materially improving the overall commercial outcome.
Generating a proposal twenty minutes faster is useful. Whether that proposal materially changes the buyer’s understanding of the business case is rather more consequential.
Researching an account in thirty seconds is impressive. Whether the salesperson can convert that information into a compelling conversation is what ultimately matters.
And writing fifty personalised emails is of questionable commercial value if the underlying message gives fifty people no compelling reason to respond.
Orum’s research provides another revealing perspective. When asked to identify the leading opportunities for AI, 47.7% of respondents selected prospecting, 35.3% selected targeting, while only 12% selected coaching.
Consider what that says about the industry’s priorities.
We are overwhelmingly interested in using technology to help salespeople do more things, while showing considerably less interest in using it to help them become better at doing those things.
At Flow State Sales, we believe this represents a significant missed opportunity.
The most exciting application of AI may not be its ability to automate the repetitive activities associated with selling, important as that is. It may be its potential to accelerate the development of commercial skills through feedback, deliberate practice and better coaching.
Imagine a world where salespeople receive meaningful feedback on their discovery conversations, can practise difficult stakeholder interactions before they happen, and have access to personalised development based on observable behaviours rather than generic training recommendations.
That represents a potentially profound change in how selling capability is developed.
Of course, there are limitations. AI-generated feedback is not automatically accurate, and coaching cannot be reduced to scoring a transcript against a checklist. Human judgement, context and the relationship between manager and salesperson remain essential.
Nevertheless, we suspect that organisations which use AI to develop their people, rather than simply increase their activity, may discover a far more sustainable competitive advantage.
The transformation taking place on the other side of the commercial relationship may be even more significant.
For decades, sales organisations operated within a relatively comfortable information imbalance. Sellers understood their products, their markets and their capabilities in considerably more detail than most prospective customers.
Buyers needed salespeople to help them access and interpret information, understand possible solutions and make informed purchasing decisions.
That imbalance has been steadily disappearing.
Digital research, independent reviews, professional networks, online communities and, increasingly, artificial intelligence have fundamentally altered how organisations investigate potential purchases.
Customers can now arrive at their first conversation having developed a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the market, the competitive alternatives and the questions they want answered.
The implications for salespeople are substantial.
Salesforce reports that 69% of sales professionals believe measurable ROI has become more important to customers over the preceding year, while 67% say personalised experiences have increased in importance. Another 67% report that customers require extensive education before purchasing.
Perhaps most tellingly, 57% say customers take longer to make decisions than they previously did.
HubSpot’s 2026 research identifies similar pressures, describing buyers who expect greater value, face tighter budgets and involve more decision-makers in their purchasing processes.
We believe there is a tendency within sales organisations to interpret these changes primarily as obstacles.
Customers are harder to reach. They are more demanding. Their expectations are unrealistic. Their procurement departments are slowing everything down. Their buying committees are becoming unnecessarily complicated.
There may be elements of truth in these complaints, but they rather conveniently overlook an alternative explanation.
Perhaps buyers have become more sophisticated, while too many sales organisations continue to operate as though the primary purpose of a salesperson is to explain what their product does.
If a customer already understands your capabilities, a demonstration that simply describes those capabilities adds remarkably little value.
If a customer has already researched your competitors, repeating the standard list of differentiators is unlikely to transform their perception.
And if a customer is struggling to build internal consensus around an investment, another persuasive presentation is unlikely to resolve the underlying problem.
The role of a salesperson must increasingly be to help customers understand their own situation more clearly.
That means diagnosing business problems, exploring their commercial consequences, challenging assumptions, introducing alternative perspectives and helping different stakeholders understand why change may be necessary.
It also means accepting that the customer does not always need to buy, and that a salesperson who can recognise this will often create more trust than one who is determined to manufacture urgency.
The irony is that as buyers become more digitally sophisticated, the distinctly human capabilities involved in effective selling may become more valuable rather than less.
But only if salespeople develop those capabilities.
One of the more interesting predictions in the research comes from Gartner’s November 2025 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.
Gartner’s strategic planning assumption is that by 2028, 75% of B2B organisations will complete their highest-revenue transactions through digital channels.
This is a forecast, not an observed outcome, and it relates specifically to digital commerce rather than every form of complex B2B selling. Nevertheless, it points towards an important structural change.
The mechanics of purchasing are becoming increasingly digital.
It would be a mistake to assume that this necessarily means the entire process of making a purchasing decision will become automated.
Completing a transaction is not the same as reaching organisational agreement to make that transaction.
A procurement system may facilitate a purchase, but it cannot necessarily resolve a disagreement between a CFO concerned about financial exposure, a technology leader worried about integration risk and an operational executive frustrated by the current situation.
An AI assistant may help buyers compare features, analyse pricing models and develop recommendations. Whether it can resolve the organisational tensions, competing priorities and political realities surrounding a significant investment is a much more complicated question.
For us, this distinction is fundamental.
The future value of a salesperson may increasingly depend on their ability to support decisions that customers struggle to make independently.
That includes establishing whether a problem is genuinely worth solving, quantifying its consequences, identifying the stakeholders who will influence the outcome and helping a potential champion build internal support.
It requires an understanding of the buying process that extends well beyond the next meeting in the calendar.
And crucially, it demands a change in what sales organisations consider evidence of progress.
A customer requesting a demonstration is not necessarily progressing towards a decision. A stakeholder expressing enthusiasm does not make them a champion. A proposal being reviewed does not mean the organisation has agreed that a purchase is justified.
Too often, sales pipelines are populated with evidence of seller activity rather than evidence of buyer commitment.
As the buying environment becomes more complex, that distinction becomes increasingly expensive to ignore.
Of all the findings contained in this year’s research, the data on coaching may be the most revealing.
Salesforce reports that 75% of sales representatives believe they are more likely to achieve their targets when they have access to a coach or mentor.
Meanwhile, 52% say traditional enablement materials do not provide the skills they need, 46% rarely receive feedback on their sales conversations, and 41% believe they lack sufficient opportunities to practise through roleplay before speaking with customers.
Another 40% identify their manager’s lack of time as an obstacle to enablement.
These findings should make uncomfortable reading for sales leaders.
We have an industry that spends substantial sums developing sales methodologies, purchasing learning platforms, delivering workshops and creating training content, while a significant proportion of its people report that they lack the feedback and practice necessary to improve.
The Institute of Performance & Growth found that almost 80% of sales leaders considered sales enablement either very or extremely important. Yet its research also suggests that sales leaders lean most heavily on enablement for access to sales tools and technology.
There is a tension here that deserves closer examination.
Sales organisations appear to recognise the importance of developing their people, but their operational priorities do not always reflect that recognition.
At Flow State Sales, we have long argued that the sales profession has confused training with development.
Training can introduce a concept, explain a methodology, demonstrate a technique and establish a common language. These are all valuable outcomes.
But knowing what good discovery looks like is not the same as being able to conduct a good discovery conversation.
Understanding the theoretical characteristics of a champion does not mean a salesperson can qualify one effectively.
And completing a module on objection handling does not guarantee that someone will respond skilfully when a senior stakeholder challenges their commercial assumptions.
These capabilities are developed through practice, observation, feedback, reflection and repetition.
They are also highly contextual.
A salesperson may be excellent at discovery with an operational stakeholder but struggle to hold a commercially credible conversation with a CFO. They may be comfortable exploring business problems but less capable of quantifying their financial consequences.
A generic training programme cannot reliably resolve every one of these issues because each represents a different developmental need.
This is why we believe the sales manager must become central to any serious attempt to improve commercial performance.
The manager is uniquely positioned to observe how knowledge translates into behaviour, identify the gap between current and desired performance, and support the salesperson in closing that gap.
Unfortunately, many organisations continue to treat coaching as something managers should fit around their operational responsibilities.
Pipeline reviews, forecasting calls, administrative tasks, recruitment and internal meetings consume the available time. Coaching becomes an aspiration rather than an established management discipline.
And when coaching does occur, it frequently resembles an inspection of opportunity status rather than an exploration of the salesperson’s thinking.
There is a world of difference between asking someone when an opportunity will close and helping them examine why the customer has not yet established a compelling reason to act.
One produces an update for the forecast. The other has the potential to improve the salesperson’s judgement and their ability to influence the customer.
The distinction matters because a forecast can be corrected this week, while an improvement in selling capability can influence hundreds of future conversations.
We believe organisations that want to build more predictable revenue must begin treating coaching as an essential management responsibility, not an optional enhancement to the training programme.
And, perhaps more controversially, they should start developing their managers before expecting those managers to develop their salespeople.
Few subjects generate quite as much noise in the sales profession as prospecting.
For years, technology vendors, consultants and sales influencers have debated the relative merits of cold calling, email, social selling, video messages and various other methods of getting a prospective customer’s attention.
The arrival of generative AI has intensified that debate by dramatically reducing the effort required to produce outbound communications.
Unfortunately, it has also made it considerably easier to produce large quantities of communications that nobody particularly wants to receive.
Orum’s 2026 research illustrates the continuing importance of human conversation, although its findings should be viewed in the context of a company whose products focus on calling.
Among its 300 surveyed sales leaders, 64.3% considered calling an effective driver of pipeline. Furthermore, 44.6% reported that more than half of their organisations’ pipeline originated from calls.
These findings challenge the suggestion that telephone prospecting has become irrelevant.
However, they do not justify the equally simplistic conclusion that organisations should simply make more calls.
The effectiveness of any prospecting channel depends on the quality of the interaction taking place through it.
A poorly researched cold call built around a generic opening and an irrelevant proposition remains a poor interaction, regardless of whether it was delivered by a human or supported by AI.
Equally, an email that offers a credible perspective on a pressing commercial issue can create interest without requiring the recipient to answer an unexpected telephone call.
We suspect that much of the debate around prospecting channels has distracted organisations from the more consequential issue of message quality.
Why should a particular individual care about what you have to say?
What do you understand about their organisation, market or responsibilities that makes your approach relevant?
And can you demonstrate that understanding without subjecting them to a three-minute explanation of your company?
AI can make research and preparation significantly easier, but it cannot compensate for a failure to understand what the customer considers important.
There is also a commercial danger in confusing activity with effectiveness.
When technology makes it easier to increase outreach volume, organisations may be tempted to celebrate improvements in activity metrics without examining whether the additional activity creates meaningful opportunities.
More emails do not necessarily mean more conversations. More conversations do not necessarily mean better-qualified opportunities. And a larger pipeline does not necessarily mean more revenue.
The important question is not simply how much activity a salesperson produces, but how effectively that activity creates commercially meaningful progress.
Forecasting is another area where the promise of technology is particularly attractive.
In theory, better CRM data, improved pipeline visibility, historical conversion analysis and AI-assisted predictions should make revenue increasingly predictable.
There is little doubt that these developments offer substantial potential.
However, forecasting remains vulnerable to the quality of the information and judgement entering the system.
The Institute of Performance & Growth found that respondents rated the positive impact of AI on forecast accuracy at just 3.9 out of 10.
That result should not be interpreted as evidence that AI cannot improve forecasting. Rather, it suggests that many organisations have yet to experience the level of improvement they may have anticipated.
We believe the deeper problem is that a substantial proportion of sales forecasting still depends on subjective interpretations of customer behaviour.
A salesperson believes the customer is interested. A manager believes the opportunity is progressing. A senior leader believes the quarter is achievable.
These beliefs may be sincerely held, but sincerity is not a particularly reliable forecasting methodology.
The quality of a forecast depends partly on how effectively the organisation can distinguish between what it hopes will happen and what the available evidence suggests is likely to happen.
Has the customer quantified the business problem? Is there agreement about the financial and operational consequences of doing nothing? Do the decision criteria favour a particular approach? Has the economic buyer demonstrated meaningful engagement? Is there a credible plan for navigating procurement, legal and financial approval?
These are fundamentally questions about customer behaviour and buying progress.
Technology can help organisations collect, organise and analyse the evidence. It can highlight inconsistencies, identify historical patterns and challenge assumptions.
But where sellers have failed to establish the underlying facts, technology may simply produce a more sophisticated analysis of incomplete information.
The implication for sales leaders is that improving forecasting accuracy requires more than better reporting infrastructure.
It requires better qualification, greater intellectual honesty and managers who can coach salespeople to distinguish between assumptions and evidence.
An opportunity review should not simply be an exercise in defending an anticipated close date.
It should be an opportunity to investigate what is actually happening within the customer’s organisation, identify what remains unknown and establish what needs to happen next.
Until organisations improve the quality of these conversations, forecasting technology will continue to operate with significant limitations.
It would be easy to interpret the challenges facing the sales profession as evidence that organisations need another fundamental reinvention.
We are less convinced.
The research does not suggest that the established principles of effective selling have suddenly become irrelevant. If anything, it suggests that many of those principles have become more important as the environment in which they operate becomes more complicated.
Understanding customer business problems, quantifying commercial impact, building relationships, navigating buying committees and helping customers make confident decisions are hardly revolutionary concepts.
What has changed is the level of competence required to execute them consistently.
When customers had limited access to information, a moderately capable salesperson could create value simply by explaining a product and answering questions.
When purchasing decisions involved fewer stakeholders, a strong relationship with one influential contact could sometimes be enough to secure an agreement.
And when competitive alternatives were more difficult to compare, sellers could exert greater control over how customers understood the market.
Those conditions can no longer be taken for granted.
Organisations therefore face a choice about where they direct their next wave of investment.
They can continue prioritising technology that increases activity, automates administration and creates additional data. These investments may be valuable and, in many cases, necessary.
Or they can place equal emphasis on developing the human capabilities required to turn those advantages into meaningful commercial outcomes.
We believe the most successful organisations will do both, but they will understand the relationship between them.
They will use technology to give salespeople greater capacity, better information and more useful feedback. They will use managers to develop judgement, improve behaviours and create accountability for applying what has been learned.
They will examine opportunities through the evidence of customer progress rather than the volume of salesperson activity.
And they will stop treating sales training as an isolated event, recognising instead that commercial capability develops through sustained practice and coaching.
There is an additional challenge here for sales leaders.
If organisations want their salespeople to become more consultative, commercially credible and effective at navigating complexity, they must also reconsider how those people are managed.
A culture dominated by activity targets, superficial opportunity inspections and short-term forecasting pressure is unlikely to produce the thoughtful, customer-centred behaviours that leaders claim to value.
You cannot spend Monday demanding that salespeople improve their discovery skills, Tuesday pressuring them to create more opportunities regardless of quality, and Wednesday questioning why the forecast is unreliable without acknowledging that management behaviour is part of the problem.
For sales performance to improve sustainably, the entire organisation must develop greater consistency between what it says is important and what it actually rewards.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the sales profession in 2026 is how much of the conversation is dominated by technological capabilities that are becoming increasingly accessible.
The ability to generate personalised emails, summarise customer meetings or research organisations using AI was extraordinary a relatively short time ago.
Today, these capabilities are rapidly becoming commonplace.
As they become more widely available, their ability to provide lasting differentiation will diminish.
The same is not necessarily true of commercial judgement, the ability to ask genuinely insightful questions, the confidence to challenge a customer’s assumptions or the skill required to navigate a politically complex buying process.
These capabilities take time to develop. They require exposure to different situations, an understanding of business, repeated practice and meaningful feedback.
They are also difficult to replicate simply by purchasing another software subscription.
This is not an argument against AI. Quite the opposite.
We believe technology has the potential to remove many of the constraints that have historically prevented organisations from developing exceptional salespeople at scale.
But realising that potential requires a change in perspective.
The objective should not simply be to create a sales organisation that can do more with fewer people.
It should be to create an organisation in which people are capable of doing substantially better work, supported by technology that removes unnecessary friction and accelerates their development.
The research suggests that the profession is making considerable progress with the technology.
Whether it makes equivalent progress with the people remains an open question.
And if there is one argument we would make about the state of sales in 2026, it is this:
The next great improvement in sales performance will not come from teaching technology to behave more like salespeople. It will come from using technology, management and coaching to help salespeople become better at what makes them valuable in the first place.
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