There are two statistics about the future of B2B sales that, at first glance, do not appear to make much sense together.
In March 2026, Gartner reported that 67% of B2B buyers would prefer an overall sales rep-free buying experience. Nearly half of the buyers it surveyed had already used AI during a recent purchase, suggesting that the self-service buying journey is no longer limited to reading a few review sites and downloading a whitepaper. Buyers can now research markets, compare vendors, interrogate technical information, summarise customer reviews and construct their own business case without ever speaking to somebody carrying a quota.
Then, only a couple of months later, Gartner published another finding. Despite that apparent desire to avoid salespeople, 69% of B2B buyers said they turned to a salesperson to validate insights they had generated using AI. Buyers increasingly wanted to conduct the research themselves, but when the decision became important enough, they still wanted a human being involved.
Those statistics are not contradictory. They might actually tell us almost everything we need to know about the future of sales.
Buyers do not necessarily want more access to salespeople. They want access to salespeople who are useful.
That distinction matters because many of the things sellers have traditionally been paid to do are becoming extraordinarily cheap. Researching a company is cheap. Producing a personalised email is cheap. Summarising an annual report is cheap. Creating a presentation is cheap. Finding product information is cheap. Comparing competitors is becoming cheaper by the month.
Even expertise itself is being partially democratised. Research by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond studied more than 5,000 customer service agents using a generative AI assistant and found an average productivity improvement of around 14%. The gains were much larger among novice and lower-skilled workers, around 34%, while the impact on the most experienced workers was comparatively small. One interpretation is that AI can distribute behaviours and knowledge that were previously concentrated among the best performers.
Sales should pay attention to that.
For decades, part of the advantage enjoyed by an experienced salesperson was simply that they had seen more. They knew the industry better, recognised common objections, understood the competition and remembered what had worked in similar situations. AI can increasingly make parts of that accumulated knowledge available to everybody.
So perhaps the interesting question is no longer whether AI will replace salespeople. That question is too binary to be particularly useful.
The better question is: when information, content and basic expertise become abundant, what will a salesperson actually be for?
I think ten skills will become disproportionately important.
The most important skill of the future salesperson might also be one of the hardest to teach.
Judgement is the ability to look at imperfect information and decide what matters. It means distinguishing a genuine buying signal from enthusiasm, deciding whether an opportunity deserves another six weeks of attention, recognising when a Champion is not really a Champion, questioning an apparently impressive piece of AI-generated research and knowing when the technically correct answer is commercially irrelevant.
The importance of judgement actually appears to be increasing because of AI rather than diminishing because of it.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index asked AI users which human skills become more important as AI takes on more work. Quality control of AI output came first, selected by 50% of respondents, followed by critical thinking at 46%. Perhaps more importantly, 86% said they regarded AI output as a starting point rather than the finished answer.
That distinction will matter enormously in sales.
Imagine two sellers preparing for the same meeting. Both have access to the same CRM information, the same annual report and essentially the same AI tools. Within a few minutes, both can generate an account summary, possible business problems, likely strategic priorities, competitor information and suggested discovery questions.
One seller arrives with 16 pages of research. The other arrives with a hypothesis.
That difference is judgement.
As intelligence becomes easier to access, simply possessing information becomes less valuable. The advantage moves towards knowing which information deserves attention, which assumptions need testing and what should happen next.
The future salesperson therefore will not simply be somebody with good answers. They will increasingly be somebody capable of deciding which questions, answers and actions actually matter.
Sales has spent years talking about becoming a “trusted adviser”, which is one of those phrases everybody seems to agree with despite rarely defining what it means.
Commercial acumen is a more useful description.
It means understanding how an organisation makes money, where it loses money, what executives are measured against, why a particular initiative matters now, what happens if nothing changes and how investment decisions compete against every other possible use of capital.
This becomes more important because buyers no longer need salespeople merely to explain products.
Gartner’s recent buyer research suggests exactly that shift. Buyers increasingly prefer digital and self-service interactions, but still seek human support at moments requiring reassurance, context and decision support. Gartner has gone as far as suggesting that the role of sellers needs to shift from being primarily persuaders towards becoming “verifiers”.
That requires a fundamentally different type of seller.
If a buyer can type “compare these four cybersecurity platforms” into an AI tool and receive a plausible answer in seconds, reading out your feature list becomes almost completely redundant. The useful salesperson needs to explain why one capability matters given the customer’s operating model, regulatory exposure, strategic objectives, existing architecture and appetite for change.
This also has implications for discovery.
The seller who understands only their own product will continue asking product-shaped questions. The commercially astute seller can explore the business itself. They can move from symptoms to consequences, from operational friction to financial impact, and from an interesting problem to a problem the organisation is actually prepared to fund.
The ability to connect what you sell to how a company operates will become considerably more valuable than memorising another 40 slides of product information.
There is an obvious temptation to put “AI skills” at number one on any future-of-sales list. LinkedIn’s 2026 analysis of the fastest-growing skills in sales certainly provides evidence for including it, identifying foundational AI literacy alongside client relationship management, lead generation, cross-functional collaboration and data-driven decision-making.
But I suspect the phrase “AI literacy” will eventually sound rather like saying somebody has “internet skills”.
The meaningful capability will be knowing how to delegate work to machines.
That means understanding which tasks should be automated, which should be augmented and which should remain stubbornly human. Research, meeting preparation, call analysis, CRM administration, account mapping, first drafts, market analysis and data interrogation are obvious candidates for significant AI involvement.
Salesforce’s own 2026 State of Sales research found that top-performing sellers were 1.7 times more likely than underperformers to use prospecting AI agents. Sellers using these systems also expected them to reduce research and content-creation time considerably.
The opportunity is not simply to perform the existing sales job slightly faster.
The more interesting opportunity is to redesign the job.
A seller who previously spent an hour collecting information before a meeting might spend ten minutes reviewing research produced by an agent and the remaining 50 minutes thinking about what the research means. A manager who spent an afternoon trying to identify risks across 30 CRM records could use AI to surface patterns before deciding where coaching attention is actually required.
This is why delegation is the important word.
Strong sellers will need to understand what to ask AI to do, how to provide context, how to interrogate the output and, crucially, when not to use it.
The worst future sellers may not be those who ignore AI completely. They could be the people who trust it completely.
AI can generate an almost unlimited number of discovery questions, but that does not make it curious. There is a difference between asking questions and wanting to understand something.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found analytical thinking remained the most widely valued core skill among employers, cited by 69%. Curiosity and lifelong learning were considered core skills by half of employers and are expected to continue increasing in importance through 2030.
In sales, curiosity manifests itself through the ability to pursue information rather than merely collect it.
A buyer says staff turnover is too high. The scripted seller moves to their next discovery question. The curious seller wants to understand why people are leaving.
A buyer says improving efficiency is a priority. The average seller writes “efficiency” in their notes and carries on. The curious seller asks what inefficiency currently looks like, where it appears, what causes it, who is affected, what it costs and why the organisation has not already fixed it.
That difference becomes particularly important as sales organisations increasingly automate their processes.
There is a danger that AI makes mediocre discovery even more mediocre by making everybody incredibly well prepared to ask the same supposedly intelligent questions. Sellers could arrive armed with perfectly constructed account research, six hypotheses and a neat list of prompts, only to ignore the unexpected sentence the buyer says halfway through the meeting because it was not included in their preparation.
Great discovery has never depended on asking clever questions in isolation. It depends on hearing an answer, processing it and becoming sufficiently interested to abandon the script.
The salesperson of the future needs to diagnose, not interrogate.
There was a time when providing information created value because information itself was difficult to obtain. That world has largely disappeared.
What buyers increasingly need is help making sense of the volume of information available to them.
LinkedIn’s 2026 UK Skills on the Rise research includes data storytelling among the capabilities increasing most rapidly in demand, while its sales-specific research highlights data-driven decision-making.
Those skills matter because the job is moving from providing information towards interpreting it.
Consider the modern business case. A seller might have access to utilisation data, customer benchmarks, employee costs, projected efficiency improvements, implementation costs, competitor comparisons and AI-generated modelling. Dumping all of that into a 30-slide presentation does not automatically make the case persuasive.
Sensemaking means being able to say: “There are 14 numbers here, but these three determine whether you should make this investment.”
It also means recognising uncertainty. Perhaps the projected saving depends heavily on adoption. Perhaps one assumption in the ROI model has been supplied by the vendor rather than validated by the customer. Perhaps the most impressive financial benefit is actually less strategically important than reducing operational risk.
This is another reason Gartner’s finding that 69% of B2B buyers use salespeople to validate AI-generated insights is so interesting. The machine may increasingly provide the analysis, but buyers still appear to want humans to help determine whether the analysis is believable and relevant.
The future seller therefore becomes partly an interpreter, not somebody who adds more information to the buying process, but somebody who reduces complexity and helps the buyer distinguish signal from noise.
The popular image of sales remains strangely individualistic.
Seller meets buyer. Seller persuades buyer. Buyer signs contract.
Complex B2B decisions rarely work like that.
The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report found that more than 40% of B2B opportunities stall because of internal misalignment within buying groups. Their research focuses particularly on “hidden buyers”, stakeholders who may not be the obvious target for the salesperson but who can significantly influence whether a purchase proceeds.
That makes organisational navigation an increasingly important sales skill.
A seller needs to understand not only who is involved but how those people relate to one another. Who owns the problem? Who controls the money? Who benefits from change? Who absorbs the disruption? Who has been burnt by a similar project before? Who can quietly prevent the whole initiative from progressing without ever attending a meeting with the supplier?
Then comes the harder part: helping those people reach agreement.
This is why simply “building relationships” is not enough. You can have an excellent relationship with one enthusiastic stakeholder and still lose because finance, procurement, security and the executive team never aligned behind the decision.
Great sellers increasingly need to operate like organisational diplomats. They must identify competing agendas, understand political dynamics, equip Champions, create shared language and help buyers navigate their own organisation.
Sometimes the most valuable thing a salesperson can do is not convince the customer that their solution is right, but help the customer convince themselves.
There is something slightly ironic about the current obsession with sales technology. We are building increasingly sophisticated systems to analyse conversations because human beings are often quite bad at paying attention during them.
The World Economic Forum found empathy and active listening were considered core skills by 50% of employers in its Future of Jobs research.
For salespeople, however, listening needs to mean more than politely waiting for somebody to finish speaking.
The future salesperson needs to interpret what is happening underneath the conversation.
They need to notice when somebody answers a different question from the one that was asked, recognise when enthusiasm disappears after pricing is mentioned, hear uncertainty in a Champion who previously sounded confident and notice that the most senior person in the meeting has barely contributed while everybody else enthusiastically discusses next steps.
Technology may become very good at telling you afterwards that the CFO spoke for only four minutes. A skilful salesperson notices while the meeting is happening that the CFO has not said anything for twenty.
This is where sales retains one of its genuinely human advantages.
Real conversations are messy. People contradict themselves. They soften objections. They protect colleagues. They hide political concerns behind technical questions. They occasionally say yes when they mean maybe, and maybe when they mean absolutely not.
Listening allows sellers to respond to the conversation they are actually having rather than the conversation they prepared for.
Storytelling has been discussed in sales for so long that it risks becoming another piece of generic advice.
But its importance may actually increase as products and business decisions become more complicated.
Companies increasingly sell propositions involving AI, cybersecurity, transformation, automation, platforms, data infrastructure and organisational change. These are rarely easy things to explain, particularly to buying groups containing people with very different levels of technical expertise.
LinkedIn’s broader 2026 UK research shows growing demand for skills combining technology with communication, including data storytelling, relationship management and cross-functional collaboration.
The salesperson’s job is therefore not simply to know the detail. It is to create a narrative that makes the detail understandable.
A good commercial story establishes where the customer is today, what is changing around them, why the status quo is becoming problematic, what a different future could look like and what must happen to get there.
That narrative needs to be memorable enough that somebody else can repeat it.
This is especially important in complex sales because most of the selling happens when the seller is not in the room. Your Champion attends an internal meeting. Finance asks why the investment is necessary. Procurement challenges the urgency. An executive asks why this project should take priority over three others.
The seller does not get to answer those questions directly. The story does.
If the message cannot survive being retold by somebody who did not create it, it probably was not clear enough in the first place.
There is a strange contradiction in modern sales.
Companies repeatedly tell sellers to become trusted advisers, then train them to agree with almost everything the customer says.
Future sellers will need stronger points of view.
The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn research found that hidden buyers do not simply consume thought leadership for reassurance. They value ideas that inform or challenge their existing perspective.
That same principle should apply to sales conversations.
If the buyer says their biggest problem is increasing lead volume, perhaps the salesperson has enough evidence to suggest the real issue is conversion.
If the buyer believes their sales team needs more negotiation training, perhaps the evidence indicates that opportunities are being negotiated badly because they were poorly qualified six weeks earlier.
If the customer wants to implement AI purely to save employees time, perhaps the seller should challenge whether time saved actually constitutes a meaningful business outcome.
This is not about being deliberately provocative. Nobody needs an army of LinkedIn contrarians wandering into customer meetings looking for arguments.
Constructive challenge requires expertise, evidence and judgement. The salesperson needs enough confidence to introduce an alternative interpretation without turning the conversation into a contest.
This becomes even more valuable in an AI-rich world because generic opinions are becoming almost free. Ask an AI system for five trends affecting your industry and it will happily produce them. Ask it for ten insights for a CFO and you will have them before your kettle boils.
The salesperson who merely repeats widely available thinking contributes very little. The one who can introduce a different perspective, explain why it matters and defend it with evidence still has something genuinely valuable to offer.
The final skill is the one that protects all the others.
LinkedIn’s Work Change Report estimates that by 2030 around 70% of the skills used in most jobs will have changed, with AI acting as a significant catalyst. The World Economic Forum similarly expects 39% of workers’ existing skillsets to be transformed or become outdated between 2025 and 2030.
Nobody can therefore produce a definitive list of skills for the salesperson of 2035.
Some of the technology they will use has not been invented yet. Buying behaviour will change. Markets will change. Regulation will change. New channels will appear. Existing sales activities will disappear.
The competitive advantage becomes learning velocity.
That means the willingness and ability to acquire a skill, practise it, receive feedback, discard what no longer works and become competent again.
It also means becoming unusually coachable.
There is a version of experienced selling that relies too heavily on experience itself. “I’ve been doing this for 20 years” can either mean somebody has accumulated two decades of valuable pattern recognition or that they have repeated the same year 20 times.
The distinction will become increasingly important as the profession changes faster.
The best future salesperson may therefore not be the individual with the most impressive skillset today. It may be the person whose skillset changes fastest when the environment demands it.
There are several traditional sales skills that deliberately have not made the ten.
Closing is not there. Neither is objection handling, presentation skills or product knowledge. Negotiation could easily justify an article of its own, and LinkedIn’s skills data suggests relationship and commercial capabilities remain important, but I am not convinced any of these represent the fundamental shift taking place.
That does not mean they disappear. It means they increasingly become the price of entry rather than the source of advantage.
A professional salesperson will still need to understand their product. They will still encounter objections. They will still need to negotiate. They will still need to ask for commitments and advance opportunities.
But the bigger change is happening somewhere else.
We appear to be moving through three eras of selling. The first was an information era, where the salesperson often knew things the buyer could not easily discover independently and access itself created value. The internet changed that by giving buyers extraordinary access to information, which meant the salesperson increasingly became a guide through that information. AI represents another shift because both buyer and seller now have access not only to information but increasingly to analysis, synthesis, recommendations and content generation.
The logical consequence is that the salesperson’s value moves again, away from simply providing information and towards the harder work of applying judgement, adding context, interpreting complexity, remaining curious and helping groups of people reach agreement. In other words, the future salesperson becomes more valuable not because they know more than the buyer, but because they are better able to help the buyer make sense of what they know and turn that understanding into a decision.
Perhaps this explains the apparent contradiction in Gartner’s research. Buyers simultaneously want a sales rep-free experience and still turn to salespeople to validate what AI tells them. They are not saying they no longer value salespeople. They are becoming considerably more selective about when a salesperson adds value.
That is a much more uncomfortable prospect for the profession than simply asking whether AI will replace us.
AI does not need to replace every salesperson. Buyers can simply stop involving the ones who are not useful.
The future salesperson will therefore not win because they can provide more information than the buyer can find themselves. They will not win because they can send more emails, produce prettier presentations or memorise more product functionality.
They will win because, at important moments, they make the buyer better at buying.
And that might turn out to be the most valuable sales skill of all.
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