Sales is one of the oldest known professions. The fundamental expectations of a seller’s role—building trust-based relationships, finding opportunities to create value for customers, and creating experiences that minimize friction—have remained constant over time. What’s new are the tools available to help sellers become more productive, especially with the rapid emergence of generative AI (gen AI) in recent years.
Because of gen AI’s great promise, companies at all stages of technological development have been exploring its implications for their businesses. Those in B2B sales are reporting strong business outcomes and real impact from their initial gen AI builds, and they have told us that they’re eager to do more. At this point, it appears that the widescale adoption of gen AI isn’t just probable but inevitable.
Experimentation and development with gen AI is still playing out. In this article, we look at how technological changes are currently impacting B2B sellers. Then we explore three pathways for how B2B sales could evolve over the next decade: fundamental reimagination of sales efficiency, meaningful sales growth, and reframing of the sales operating model. On each pathway, gen AI’s role progressively deepens. Finally, we describe how companies can take steps now to prepare for a gen-AI-enabled future of sales—one with a journey powered by gen AI so ubiquitous that it’s nearly undetectable.
How new technology is rewriting the rules of sales
In the past decade, automation, data analytics, and machine learning solutions have helped B2B sellers become more effective. Companies that have empowered their sales teams through technology, including automation, now report consistent efficiency upticks of 10 to 15 percent.1 They also report an increase in the amount of time that sellers spend in front of customers and a decrease in the time spent performing back-office activities, such as pipeline management and invoicing (see sidebar “In the field: A customer experience success story”).
Gen AI offers the promise of even greater productivity and growth. In previous research, McKinsey estimated that gen AI could open up an incremental $0.8 trillion to $1.2 trillion in productivity across sales and marketing, on top of the productivity increases already realized from traditional analytics and AI applications.2 It’s not surprising that the function that saw the greatest jump in adoption of gen AI applications from 2023 to 2024 is sales and marketing.3
According to the most recent McKinsey B2B Pulse Survey, B2B sellers are in the early stages of using gen AI.4 Just 21 percent of surveyed commercial leaders (defined as top management, sales leaders, and marketing leaders) report that their companies have fully enabled enterprise-wide adoption of gen AI in B2B buying and selling, and 22 percent have only piloted specific use cases (Exhibit 1).
The optimism is palpable, however. More than 85 percent of surveyed commercial leaders who have deployed gen AI in their organizations report that they’re “very excited” about the technology.5 They point to improved efficiency, top-line growth, and customer experience as among the most important benefits that gen AI could have for B2B selling (Exhibit 2).
As seen with the adoption curve of other innovative technologies, such as the internet and smartphones, the impact from a disruptive technology is multidimensional and far reaching. We believe that the question of widespread adoption of gen AI isn’t a matter of “if” but rather “when” and “how.”
SOURCE: McKinsey
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