This article comes from Dr. Courtney McCashland’s insightful talk, ‘The talent formula for future success’, at our New York 2023 Chief Revenue Officer Summit.

What if I told you that the key to accelerating your sales growth lies not just in the natural talents of your salespeople, but increasingly in the competencies you can help them develop?

I'm Dr. Courtney McCashland, Co-Founder and Chief Officer of Science and Strategy at AuctusIQ, and over the past few years, my team and I have made some game-changing discoveries about what really differentiates top sales performers.

Through our work with leading sales organizations and over 300 empirical studies, we've uncovered a powerful formula for "future-proofing" your sales force. 

It's a formula that takes into account the dramatic shifts we've seen in the buyer journey and the surprising new findings about the relative impact of talent versus competency on sales performance.

So today, I'm going to walk you through these insights and show you how to apply them to lift the performance of your sales team with certainty, let's dive in and explore the talent formula for future sales success!


The changing buyer journey

To really understand what it takes to succeed in sales today, we need to start by looking at the buyer journey. 

Traditionally, we've thought of the buyer journey as a nice, linear, chronological funnel with well-defined stage gates, but that's just not how people buy anymore. 

About three and a half years ago, Gartner did a very rigorous study where they dug deep into what's going on in the buyer journey, and what they found was a crazy, complex map that they call their "spaghetti model."

If you're working in complex sales, you know exactly what this feels like. You've got elusive buyers, numerous influencers, and decision-making that's all over the place. 

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