AI is about to widen the gap between average and elite B2B salespeople.

If the gap already exists, why is it about to get bigger?

For as long as there have been sales teams, there has been a gap between average and elite performers. It shows up in overall performance, average deal size, win rates and has always been explained the same way: discipline, thinking and behaviour. The best salespeople prepare with more intent, engage more stakeholders, ask more insightful questions and create more value in every conversation.

Recent research suggests that gap is not just persisting; it is accelerating. Revenue intelligence firm Ebsta's 2025 GTM Benchmarks Report found that top performers are closing deals 11 times faster than their lower-performing counterparts, an almost 25% increase from 2024.

Until now, the constraint on closing that gap has been capacity. There are only so many hours in a day, and even a disciplined average performer can't out-prepare, out-research or out-think an elite one at scale. AI is starting to remove that constraint, but is that enough?

Phase one: automation is the baseline, not the differentiator

Ask most sales leaders how their teams use AI and the answers sound similar: drafting emails, automating admin, summarising meetings, etc. This is genuine, valuable progress. Salesforce's State of Sales research found that reps spend 70 per cent of their time on non-selling tasks like admin, CRM updates and internal meetings. This leaves less than a third of the week for actual selling. Automating even a portion of that work hands sellers back real hours.

This is phase one of AI adoption, and increasingly becoming the bare minimum for organisations that don't wish to fall behind the curve. When automation is available to anyone with a subscription, it stops being a source of advantage the moment your competitors adopt it too. It becomes the price of staying in the game, not the way to win it.

Why phase one alone won't close the gap

Whilst automation solves a capacity problem, giving your top-performers more time to work their magic; it doesn't change behaviour. The evidence is clear that the gap between average and elite performers was never really about time, it was about behaviour. How many stakeholders a seller engages, how well they qualify a deal and how strategically they prepare before a conversation.

Give an average performer back five hours a week and, without a change in how they think, they will likely spend those hours doing more of what they already do. Give an elite performer the same five hours, and they invest it in deeper preparation, sharper qualification and more deliberate stakeholder engagement. Automation alone will never close the gap between those two outcomes.

Automation gives salespeople back time. It does nothing, on its own, to change what they do with it.

Phase two: using AI to build thinking and capability

This is where the real opportunity sits, and it's a different application of AI altogether. Rather than automating activity, phase two puts AI agents to work improving the thinking and behaviours that separate average performers from elite ones; embedding strategic activities such as account planning, deal qualification, stakeholder mapping and executive engagement inside the sales process itself.

Account planning, deal qualification and stakeholder mapping have always been available to every seller. In practice, most average performers skip them, because done properly they take time, and without a clear payoff in the moment they feel like effort for effort's sake. That changes when these activities are built into an AI agent a seller is already using to save time elsewhere. The strategic work stops being a separate task someone has to choose to do and becomes part of how the tool works. Over time, without really deciding to, they end up working the way elite performers always have.

In practice, this difference looks like:

• Preparation becomes more rigorous by default, because the agent is built on proven sales methodology and grounded in the seller's own account and CRM context

• Ways of working are embedded and reinforced every time the agent is used, rather than relying on training that fades within weeks

• Salespeople are challenged to think more strategically in the moment, not just given a faster way to complete the same task

This isn't a replacement for phase one. It's what phase one should be building toward. The time automation frees up is only valuable if it's reinvested into better thinking, and phase two is what makes sure it is, by making that reinvestment the path of least resistance rather than something a seller has to consciously choose.

Why this lifts the whole team, not just the leaderboard

Phase two won't fully close the gap between average and elite performers. Top performers will keep finding ways to be top performers, that's part of what makes them elite in the first place, and no tool changes that. But closing the gap entirely was never really the point.

What phase two does is lift the floor. When strategic ways of working are embedded into a tool sellers are already using, and arrives through the path of least resistance rather than a deliberate choice, average performers start working the way elite performers always have. Not because they were told to, and not because they suddenly became more disciplined, but because it's simply how the tool works. Do that across an entire sales team, and the whole team's baseline moves up, even if the gap to the very best never quite disappears.

Your sales team has more time than they used to. Is anyone making sure they spend it differently?

That is the real question in front of most sales organisations right now, and it's a strategic one rather than a technology one. Every organisation should have phase one in place to even be in the race. But organisations that treat automation as the finish line will get efficiency and nothing more. Those embedding better ways of working directly into how sellers already operate will get something more durable: a sales team that thinks and behaves more strategically as a whole, not just a handful of standout performers.

The gap between average and elite B2B salespeople is about to get much bigger. Automation is the entry fee. Embedding strategic thinking across the whole team is the advantage. The real question isn't whether your best people can keep up, it's whether the rest of your team can be lifted toward them.