← The AI-Native Sales Team

Everyone Says They Use AI.

A few weeks ago one of our recruiters asked a candidate the first question we ask every seller about AI.

"When it comes to AI and sales, tell me about a prompt you reuse."

He gave an excited answer about his experience with AI. Confident, specific, detailed. A real deployment at a real customer, predictive analytics, the whole build.

Then he said it himself.

"I sold AI. I don't use AI."

He was not hiding anything. He answered about the AI he sells instead of AI he uses. Then we added the word "personally" in that question because of him.

Ask a room of salespeople if they use AI and every hand goes up. It is the new "I'm a self-starter." If you are looking for AI-Native sellers who use AI to hit their goals, it's not that easy to spot in the interview.

And it matters more this year than last. Companies are spending real money on AI. Tools, tokens, licenses, something newer every quarter. The spend is real, and when it comes to upskilling the sales team - very few know how to measure that.

And the people are behind. 55% of workers use AI daily or weekly, but only a third got any AI training from their employer in the last six months. That is the Conference Board, in July. The Census Bureau found the sharper version: among US workers who say they use AI at work, 30% did not open it once in the past week. Having used it is not using it.

There is not much info about sellers specifically. Ages ago (early 2024!) Gartner reported: sellers who effectively partner with AI were 3.7 times more likely to meet quota than sellers who did not. Nobody has published a newer one, which tells you something on its own.

Read that line again, because the word doing the work is "effectively." Not sellers who use AI. Sellers who are good at it.

The training that does exist is the basics. AI literacy, how to write a prompt. Almost none of it goes near what a sales manager cares about, which is whether the rep hits their number with it.

More and more of our clients ask us for an AI-native sellers. No one quite agrees yet how to measure it. So we started measuring it ourselves. With data. Every sales phone screen my team runs is scored for AI fluency. We see a huge gap between what employers are asking for and what candidates currently skilled at with AI.

Check out these 2 candidates for example:

They said yes to the same question. The first had once used AI to summarize a long document. Not a sales task, months ago, and he could not name the tool. And it wasn't a prompt he reused since. The second runs one prompt before prospecting that researches the account and hands him discovery questions, and another after calls that reads his own transcript back for the objections he did not really handle.

Same yes. One used AI once. The other runs it every week.

On our phone screens, not one person has scored in the top half of that AI fluency scale. Not one.

That is not a knock on sellers. Look at what we are asking of them. The tools change every week, nobody tells you where to start, and you still have to hit your number while you figure it out. And while you are at it, please upskill yourself somehow.

Then the training they do get is general. Not their deals, not their accounts, not their quota. Generic prompting, in a room of people from twelve different jobs.

So most sellers land in the same place. They know how to write a prompt. They do not know how to turn prompts into a system, one that makes more effective at what they do well and helps them find and close more deals.

That is the gap. Not effort, and not attitude.

So, if hiring AI-native sellers is important to you, here is what to do in your next interview. Three of some of the questions we ask, in this order.

1. When it comes to AI and sales, tell me about a prompt you personally reuse.

Keep it open. Do not say "have you built a custom GPT" or "do you use Claude." Name the tool and everyone who has heard of it says yes, and you are testing vocabulary instead of practice. Leave "personally" in.

2. How did you land on that version, and where does it live now?

This separates a habit from a system. "I retype it each time" is a habit. "It's in a doc" is saved. "It's a saved project, a custom GPT, a skill" is a system.

3. How do you know it's better?

If they stall, ask what changed that they could point at. Reply rate, meetings booked, hours back. Most have no answer. What you don't measure, can't improve. AKA no system.

Three questions, about four minutes, and you will know more about how someone works than their resume will ever tell you.

And if your own sellers sit at the bottom of that AI scale fluency, that is not a hiring problem. They don't know yet what the top looks like, or how to hit their quota with AI system in place.

Let's find them,
Olga Pechnenko

Originally published on LinkedIn in Get Me Someone Who Can Sell.