Are your sellers over-relying on AI? These new tools can make your team significantly more efficient. But they don’t eliminate the need for strong sales skills. In many ways, they make those skills even more important.

That’s because AI can give your sellers more information, but it can’t automatically turn that information into an effective customer conversation.

In complex B2B sales, the capabilities that differentiate your sellers remain fundamentally human: curiosity, active listening, emotional intelligence, judgment, adaptability, and the ability to build trust.

The challenge for sales leaders is to stay focused on developing consultative selling capabilities while teaching sellers how to use AI to become more effective.

Download your copy of 5 Strategies for Consultative Selling in the Age of AI to learn how to future proof your sales team.

AI Can Make Sellers More Efficient—But Not Necessarily More Effective

There’s no shortage of ways AI can help your sales team. Before a meeting, a seller can use AI to quickly synthesize information about a customer’s company, industry, competitors, and potential business challenges. Those are meaningful advantages. But efficiency isn’t the same as sales effectiveness.

Consider what happens once the seller is talking to the customer. The seller still needs to ask probing questions and they need to listen closely enough to recognize when an answer deserves another question. They need to notice when a buyer hesitates or when priorities shift during a conversation.

Those moments depend on human skills such as emotional intelligence, curiosity, active listening, adaptability, and judgment. AI can help a salesperson walk into a meeting better prepared. Your salesperson still has to know what to do once they’re there.

Use AI to Become a Better Sales Coach

AI can help sales leaders solve a persistent coaching challenge: finding enough time to provide specific, useful feedback to every seller.

AI shouldn’t replace the sales manager’s role as a coach. It can, however, help managers identify where coaching is needed and make coaching conversations more focused.

Here are several practical ways to use AI to improve sales coaching.

1. Analyze Sales Calls for Coaching Opportunities

If your organization uses conversation intelligence, use its insights to identify patterns rather than reviewing calls only when something goes wrong.

AI helps surface the moment. The manager helps the seller learn from it. Look for behaviors such as:

• How much the seller talks compared with the customer
• Whether the seller asks follow-up questions
• How quickly the seller introduces a solution
• Which stakeholders participate in conversations
• How sellers respond to objections
• Whether next steps are clearly established

Then use those observations as the starting point for coaching. Instead of telling a seller, “You need to improve your discovery,” you can focus the conversation on a specific behavior: “I noticed we moved from the customer’s problem to our solution very quickly. What else could you have asked before recommending an approach?”

2. Use AI to Prepare for Coaching Conversations

Before a one-on-one or deal review, use AI to organize the information you already have.

For example, you might ask AI to summarize call notes and identify recurring themes, unanswered questions, stakeholder gaps, or areas where the seller may be making assumptions.

Then review the output critically and decide which issue is most valuable to coach. This can help managers spend less time gathering information and more time having meaningful developmental conversations.

3. Create Practice Scenarios Based on Real Deals

AI can help turn coaching from discussion into practice. Suppose a salesperson is preparing for a meeting with a skeptical operations leader who is concerned about implementation risk. You can use AI to create a realistic scenario and have the seller practice responding to that stakeholder.

You can also make the exercise progressively harder:

• “Now assume the customer pushes back on price.”
• “Now the procurement leader joins the meeting.”
• “Now the customer says they’re satisfied with the incumbent.”

This allows sellers to practice adaptability rather than memorizing the “right” response.

4. Let Sellers Practice Before the Stakes Are Real

Not every practice session requires a manager. AI-enabled simulations can give sellers a safe environment to practice discovery, objection handling, positioning, and other conversations repeatedly. AI can also provide immediate feedback on areas such as content, structure, tone, delivery, pacing, and positioning.

That gives your sellers more repetitions while preserving manager coaching time for higher-value conversations.

You can then ask sellers to bring what they learned from those practice sessions into coaching: What felt difficult? What feedback did you receive? What would you do differently with a real customer?

5. Use AI to Generate Better Coaching Questions

Sales managers can easily fall into “telling” mode during deal reviews. AI can help you prepare questions that force the seller to think instead.

For example, rather than telling a salesperson what they should do next, use AI to develop questions around the situation:

• What do we still not know about the customer’s problem?
• Who else is affected by this decision?
• What assumptions are we making?
• What business outcome does this stakeholder care about?
• What evidence do we have that the opportunity will move forward?
• What would cause this deal to stall?

The manager still determines which questions matter. AI simply makes it easier to prepare for a more productive coaching conversation.

Learn more: The Brooks Group Named to Selling Power’s Top AI Sales Coaching Solutions 2026 List

Building Consultative Selling Skills in the AI Era

Use AI insights to identify meaningful patterns and create better coaching conversations—not to overwhelm sellers with dozens of metrics.

The objective isn’t to create sellers who perform for the algorithm. It’s to develop sellers who are more effective with customers. Encourage sellers to use AI for the work it does well, then train and coach the skills that allow sellers to turn that information into customer value.

The same principle applies to your role as a sales leader. Use AI to help you see more, prepare faster, and create more opportunities for practice. Then use your own coaching skills to turn those insights into behavior change.

Michelle Richardson is the vice president of Sales Performance Research at The Brooks Group, a leading sales training provider, where she spearheads industry research and ROI initiatives.