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Harness Sales Expertise and AI Innovation in Tandem
Key Takeaways: Sales skills fade fast. Without ongoing reinforcement, reps drift back to old habits within weeks of any training event. Tandem by Action Selling turns one-off training into continuous coaching, pairing the 9 Acts methodology with AI so reps can practice on demand. Reps get private, judgment-free roleplay and real-time feedback, so they build confidence before real buyer conversations, not during them. Sales leaders get reporting on engagement, progress, and skill gaps, so coaching time goes where it actually moves the needle. AI does not replace the methodology or the manager. It scales the practice and reinforcement that used to be impossible to deliver rep by rep. None of us, no matter our success, is a finished product. Professional growth isn’t achieved; it’s developed. It is cumulative – bit by bit, little by little over time. It is an active, always-on process.
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The Skill 90% of Salespeople Get Wrong & How AI Sales Tools Can Help
What Is the Salesperson’s Weakest Skill? The weakest skill for most salespeople is handling objections. Brickwork’s research, drawing on assessments of more than 350,000 salespeople, finds that over 90% of reps are ineffective at uncovering and then resolving objections. Since objections arise in most selling situations, this is a big reason why so many salespeople consistently miss quota. I’d argue it’s the most consequential and neglected skill in B2B sales. The Numbers Are Hard to Ignore 64% of salespeople fail to ask for commitment. That alone is alarming. But consider the downstream effect – you’ll never hear a customer’s objection unless you ask for the business first. Which means the 90%+ failure rate on objection handling likely understates the full scope of the problem, because it only counts reps who got far enough to encounter one. Salespeople know it’s a problem, yet they still can’t execute. Why? Because they’ve been taught the wrong things. Why Traditional Sales Training Fails on Objections The Methods Haven’t Changed in Decades The techniques most sales training companies teach for handling objections haven’t meaningfully evolved. The Feel, Felt, Found method dates back generations: “I know how you feel. Other people felt that way until they found…”. Equally persistent is the myth that objections are buying signals. Major sales training companies continue to teach this. They’re not. An objection is a customer’s response to an unasked question. It’s a signal that something critical was missed earlier in the discovery process, not an invitation to celebrate. Training Offers Tips Instead of a Process Most objection-handling frameworks from well-known training vendors collapse into the same four vague steps: Listen: As if active listening isn’t something good reps are already doing throughout the entire conversation. Question: Sound advice, but with no direction on which questions to ask or how they connect to the buyer’s specific concerns. Respond: Frequently accompanied by psychological frameworks (cognitive dissonance, behavioral research) that offer no practical, repeatable guidance. Confirm: Verifying that the objection was addressed but failing to follow through with the actual next step of asking for a commitment. These steps function as a detour. Salespeople leave the sales process, wander around, and hope to find their way back. To handle objections well, they need to stay on the path toward gaining a sale without ever abandoning their methodology. Stalls and Objections Are Not the Same Thing One of the most damaging mistakes in conventional sales training is treating stalls and objections as interchangeable. They are not, and handling them the same way almost always fails. Examples of a stall include “Let me think it over,” “Send me a proposal,” and “Call me next week.” They don’t reflect a specific concern and instead mean: I’m not quite sold yet. Sell me some more. An objection, by contrast, always ties to one of the five buying decisions every customer makes: Salesperson, Company, Product/Service, Price, or Time-to-Buy. “Your price is too high” and “I prefer the competition’s solution” are examples of an objection. These require fundamentally different responses than a stall, yet nearly every training program lumps them together. What Actually Works: Objections as Unasked Questions The most effective reframe in objection handling is this: an objection is a customer’s response to an unasked question. When a customer pushes back after you ask for commitment, it’s almost always because a critical question went unasked during the discovery phase. The objection reveals a buying decision that wasn’t adequately addressed. The correct response is to return to that discovery phase, ask the best questions to surface what’s really driving the resistance, and then work back through to a commitment. This approach keeps salespeople inside their selling process. No detours. No psychological jargon. Just a disciplined, repeatable path. Distinguishing Stalls From Objections in Practice When you ask for commitment and receive a stall, don’t challenge it. Instead, use what Brickwork calls a universal stall breaker. This is an empathetic acknowledgment followed by a Trial Feature Benefit Reaction (TFBR) sequence that re-engages the customer without confrontation. If, after that, the customer surfaces a specific concern tied to one of the five buying decisions, now you have an objection and know how to address it. The sequence matters. Skipping it is how most objection-handling frameworks fall apart. The Knowledge Gap vs. the Application Gap There’s an important distinction buried in our assessment data: most salespeople actually know quite a bit about the five critical selling skills. The overall average knowledge score is 62 out of 100. But they only apply about 44% of that knowledge in real selling situations. This is an application problem that training content alone won’t fix. What fixes it is practice: deliberate, repetitive, corrective practice in realistic selling scenarios. The skills where the gap between knowledge and application is widest? Gaining commitment, sales call planning, and questioning – the exact skills at the heart of objection handling. How AI Is Closing the Objection-Handling Gap This is where the conversation shifts from diagnosis to solution and where AI is starting to make a difference. Traditional sales training happens roughly four times a year. A rep attends a session, receives a knowledge boost, and then returns to their territory. Within weeks, old habits return. The skills never become second nature because there simply wasn’t enough practice. Tandem by Action Selling addresses this directly with AI-driven coaching built on the proven 9 Acts sales methodology. Instead of waiting for the next quarterly training cycle, reps can practice objection handling as often as needed. And they do it in a private, judgment-free environment against AI buyer personas built from your actual ideal customer profile. The impact is measurable: Consistent practice between live training sessions ensures skills compound rather than fade. AI personas that mirror real prospects give reps exposure to the exact objections they’ll face in the field, not generic role-play scenarios. Immediate feedback on delivery, pacing, question quality, and objection resolution without waiting for a manager coaching session. Reporting that tracks progress against goals, giving sales leaders visibility into who is improving and where coaching is still needed. What gets measured gets learned. AI tools like Tandem make it practical to measure objection-handling skills continuously, not just at training checkpoints. The Path to Mastery Selling is a skill that can be taught, measured, and improved. But improvement requires the right foundation: a well-documented methodology, training grounded in valid learning principles, and manager reinforcement. Now, AI-powered practice closes the gap between what reps know and what they can execute under pressure. If your team is struggling to hit its quota and you’re not sure why, the data points to a place worth examining. 90% of salespeople can’t handle objections effectively. That’s a training problem — and in 2026, it’s a solvable one.
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AI in Sales: How to Separate the Helpful From the Hype
The AI Pressure Is Real. So Is the Risk of Getting It Wrong. Every sales leader I talk to these days is hearing the same thing: “What’s your AI strategy?” The pressure is real. If you haven’t figured out exactly how AI fits into your sales motion, it’s easy to feel like you’re already behind. But the noise around AI in sales is louder than the signal right now. New tools keep flooding the market, and most of them are making big promises. Before you make a decision – or worse, make the wrong decision – you need a clear framework for evaluating what’s actually worth your team’s time. What Should AI Sales Tools Actually Do for Your Team? AI sales tools fall into two broad categories: Productivity tools that save time and efficiency Skill-building tools that make your salespeople better at selling Both have genuine value, but they solve very different problems, and the right choice depends on what your team actually needs most. Most of the tools you'll encounter fall into the first bucket. They automate admin work, summarize calls, draft emails, and give reps back hours in their week that can be redirected toward selling. They also help with prospect research, surfacing what reps should know about a buyer before they ever get on a call, so they walk in prepared instead of winging it. These are valuable. But there’s a another category of tools designed to develop selling skills with the kind of deliberate practice that changes performance. That’s where the bigger long-term upside lives. 4 Baseline Questions to Ask About Any AI Sales Tools Before you get into the specifics of what a tool does, start with these questions: 1. Will my data stay secure? When your salespeople use an AI tool, your proprietary information (client data, playbooks, IP, etc.) shouldn’t be used to train someone else’s large language model. Make sure you understand how the tool handles data. 2. How difficult is implementation? People often underestimate the time and cost to get an AI sales tool up and running. Ask specifically: How long before the tool is usable? And will you need to pay a third party to configure it, or can your team stand it up independently? Slow, expensive implementations drain your return on investment (ROI) before you’ve seen a single benefit. 3. Will my reps actually use it? Adoption is everything. If your salespeople are already overwhelmed, adding a tool that requires extensive training before is a recipe for shelfware. The steeper the learning curve, the lower the adoption. Ask yourself honestly: if a rep opened this tool cold, would it be obvious what to do? 4. Can I see whether it’s working? As a sales leader, you need visibility. Can you tell whether your team is using the tool? Can you see what results they’re getting? If the tool is a black box from a management standpoint, you’ll have no way to evaluate your ROI or make changes when adoption stalls. Going Deeper: Evaluating AI Sales Tools for Skill Development If you’re specifically looking at AI sales tools designed to help your team get better at selling, not just work faster, three additional questions matter. These tools are built around practice: giving reps a low-stakes environment to rehearse their conversations, work out their talk tracks, and sharpen their skills without doing it in front of a live prospect. Think of it like a batting cage. Your reps take swing after swing without a prospect on the line. The problem every sales leader knows is that most salespeople don’t practice nearly enough. And when they do, it’s usually during an actual sales conversation. AI changes that equation, but only if you pick the right tool. 5. Does it reinforce your sales methodology? The AI tool should align with the specific sales process and methodology you’ve already invested in. If your team has been trained on a particular framework and the AI roleplay tool is giving feedback that pulls them in a different direction, you’re undermining the training investment you’ve already made. When evaluating these tools, ask: Can the feedback be configured or calibrated to match our sales methodology? The answer to that question will tell you whether the tool multiplies your existing investment or dilutes it. 6. Does the practice feel real? The value of AI roleplay is directly tied to how realistic the interaction feels. Does the AI sound like your ideal customer profile? Does it surface the kinds of objections your prospects actually raise? Does it use the industry language your buyers use? A practice interaction that sounds nothing like a real prospect conversation isn’t building the right muscle memory. Before you commit to a tool, ask for a demo that mirrors your specific buyer, and evaluate whether it would truly prepare your team for a real conversation. 7. Can it analyze real sales conversations too? The most powerful AI skill-building tools close the loop. This means a rep uses the AI to rehearse before a meeting, then uploads a recording of the actual Zoom or Teams call afterward to get feedback on how they really performed. This creates a continuous improvement cycle: practice before, analyze after, get better for next time. If an AI tool can only do one half of that loop, you're leaving a significant part of its potential value on the table. Cutting Through the AI Noise You don’t have to feel overwhelmed by the volume of AI tools hitting the market. The landscape is crowded, but the framework is simple: Start with your goal. Are you trying to make your team more efficient, or are you trying to make them better sellers? The answer shapes everything else. Ask the baseline four questions for any tool you evaluate: data security, implementation cost, ease of use, and leadership visibility. If you’re evaluating a skill-building tool, add the three additional criteria: methodology alignment, realism, and the ability to analyze real calls. The sales leaders who will get the most from AI aren’t the ones who move fastest. They’re the ones who move clearly by knowing what problem they’re solving and holding every tool to a consistent standard.
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The RevOps Approach to Defining Your ICP
Do You Know Your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)? Most go-to-market (GTM) teams think they know their ideal customers. Ask them to write it down – with specificity, consistency, and data to back it up – and the conversation changes quickly. What seemed like a shared understanding turns out to be a collection of individual opinions loosely orbiting the same concept. And that gap misaligns sales and marketing efforts. Yes, marketing plays a role in defining your ideal customer profile (ICP), but it’s also a revenue operations (RevOps) function that touches every layer of your go-to-market strategy. Why Does Having the Right ICP Definition Matter? Your ICP defines the specific subset of your total addressable market (TAM) where your business wins fastest, your margins are strongest, and retention compounds over time. Where you win is the key phrase, not where you could theoretically sell. Not every company that fits a broad industry category - your ICP is the bullseye. It’s the accounts that close quickly, show value quickly, and expand reliably. Without a disciplined ICP definition, organizations start chasing anything with a budget. The consequences cascade across the entire revenue motion: Customer acquisition costs climb as sales and marketing resources spread across low-fit accounts Win rates drop because reps are qualifying on budget rather than fit Churn increases because customers who weren’t a great fit to begin with rarely become long-term success stories Forecasting breaks down because the pipeline is full of noise And AI doesn’t fix this problem, it only amplifies it. If your ICP is badly defined or constructed, AI-driven lead scoring, intent prediction, and outreach personalization will just help you find more of the wrong customers faster. The RevOps Framework for Your ICP ICP discipline lives inside the Readiness pillar of the RAISE framework – the operational model we use here at Brickwork. Readiness establishes clarity (before you try to optimize) and ensures your go-to-market model is grounded in data and not just instinct. ICP definition is one of the foundational RevOps levers inside Readiness, and it requires moving through four distinct steps. Step 1: Quantify Your Market Before you can define your ICP, you need to understand the market landscape you’re operating in. TAM (Total Addressable Market): The full universe of potential buyers; a directional planning metric (not a daily focus) SAM (Serviceable Available Market): The buyers you can realistically reach with your current GTM model. ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): The accounts within SAM where you win most efficiently and retain most effectively. Think of it as a target - TAM is the outer ring, your entire potential market. The middle rings are broader segments and adjacent use cases. The bullseye is your ICP, and the goal of ICP definition is to get precise about that center. This framing matters for RevOps because it ties directly to territory design, pipeline coverage modeling, and resource allocation. If your territories don’t balance TAM, SAM, and ICP against rep capacity, you’ll either overcrowd accounts with multiple reps or leave high-value ICP whitespace uncovered. Step 2: Formalize ICP Attributes Across 4 Dimensions Vague ICP definitions fail in practice because they can’t be operationalized. “Mid-market SaaS companies that need to improve sales efficiency” isn’t going to cut it. Effective ICP definition requires four specific types of attributes: Firmographics: The structural characteristics of target accounts, including industry, company size, revenue range, employee count, geography, and business model. These are your table-stakes filters. Technographics: The technology stack, existing integrations, and level of digital maturity. A company running a modern CRM and marketing automation platform will onboard and adopt your solution very differently than one managing pipeline in spreadsheets. Behavioral and intent signals: Buying signals, content consumption patterns, website engagement, event attendance, and search intent data. These factors are important for prioritization, separating companies that fit your ICP in theory from ones that are actively buying Value-based traits: The specific pain points your solution solves, the use case fit, expected profitability, and likelihood to retain. This is often the hardest dimension to nail down, but it’s where the real signal lives. What problems do your best customers have in common? What outcomes do they achieve that your average customers don't? The goal is to combine all four dimensions into a scoring model that can be built directly into your CRM and marketing automation systems. If your ICP only lives in a deck or a one-pager, it isn’t operationalized, it’s just documented. Step 3: Build ICP Into Your Systems and Processes ICP definition becomes ICP discipline only when it’s embedded in how your revenue team operates day-to-day. In practice, this means: CRM scoring and qualification criteria. Your ICP attributes should be reflected in lead scoring models, account scoring, and stage qualification requirements. If a prospect doesn’t meet ICP thresholds, that should be visible in the opportunity record, not discovered after a rep has spent three months on the deal. Territory and segmentation design. Territory planning should be built around ICP density and not just geography. Use CRM and enrichment data tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo, or Clay to identify ICP-fit accounts within each territory. Then ensure your coverage model reflects the actual distribution of your ideal buyers. Marketing and demand generation targeting. Your ICP should define which audiences your campaigns target, which content assets you build, and how you prioritize leads. Campaigns pointed at non-ICP audiences generate volume without velocity. Hiring and enablement alignment. Sales reps and customer success managers need to understand the specific value drivers, pain points, and buying behaviors of those accounts. AI-powered role-play training that simulates buyer personas is one of the best ways to close the gap between a documented ICP and consistent rep execution. Step 4: Validate and Refine ICP Against Closed-Won Data Your ICP should be a living model, continuously validated against real data. The richest source of ICP signal is your closed-won customer base. Analyze your best customers and look for the patterns that cut across your four attribute dimensions. Which industries? Which company sizes? Which technology stacks? Which pain points? Equally important: run the same analysis on your churned customers and lost deals. What are the attributes of accounts that seemed like a fit but weren’t? ICP definition is as much about identifying disqualifiers as qualifiers. Run this analysis quarterly. Your market shifts. Your product evolves. Your win patterns change. An ICP that was accurate 18 months ago may be drifting away from your actual best-fit buyers without anyone noticing until the churn data tells the story. Where AI Fits Into Your ICP Definition AI accelerates ICP precision, but only if your foundation is solid. Once your ICP attributes are established and your CRM data is structured, AI tools can: Continuously refine ICP scoring by analyzing closed-won patterns across your customer base Surface intent and fit signals to automatically prioritize ICP-aligned accounts showing active buying behavior Flag ICP drift when new deals begin falling outside established parameters, an early warning system for GTM misalignment Enable ICP-based training by creating AI buyer personas that think and respond like your ideal customers, so reps practice the real conversations they’ll have in the field AI can help you find more of your best customers, but only if you’ve defined what best means first. Because when your ICP is precise and embedded in your systems, the downstream effects compound across every part of your revenue engine. Pipeline quality improves. Win rates climb. Customer acquisition costs drop. Retention strengthens. Forecasts become more reliable. And AI tools, which are increasingly central to how high-performing GTM teams operate, become genuinely predictive rather than just automated.
Drive Higher Win Rates Through AI-Powered Roleplay
Every sales team wants higher win rates, but the real differentiator isn’t always a sharper deck or a new script – it’s how well reps practice before they perform. Just as athletes rely on repetition to build confidence under pressure, great salespeople rely on roleplay to prepare for the unpredictable moments that decide deals.
AI + Human Selling: How To Find the Right Balance
Artificial intelligence is changing how sales teams operate. It touches nearly every part of the sales process, from analyzing leads and refining forecasts to enhancing coaching and improving call reviews. Yet with all that speed and precision, one question continues to surface – how do you integrate technology without losing the human connection that makes selling work?
Setting the Foundation for AI Readiness
Before artificial intelligence (AI) can transform your revenue engine, it needs a strong foundation. That base has less to do with algorithms and automation and more to do with people, process, and structure.
Why AI-First Marketing Teams Are the Next Competitive Edge
The future of marketing is no longer about whether to use AI. The real question is how to structure teams around it. An AI-first marketing team begins with artificial intelligence at the center of its strategy, workflows, and decision-making. That doesn’t mean businesses should replace their people with software – what changes is how they work. By weaving AI into the foundation of a team, organizations create a model where technology handles the repetitive and data-heavy tasks while people focus on creativity, storytelling, and strategy.
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How AI Helps Reps Master the 5 Critical Sales Skills
Sales performance isn’t based on personality or style. It’s driven by skills that can be taught, practiced, and measured. While many abilities factor into selling, five core skills have the greatest impact on success.