How AI Is Evolving Adaptive Selling for Modern Sales Teams

Apr 10, 2025 | AI, Articles, Sales Training

Key takeaways:

  • AI is revolutionizing adaptive selling by providing deeper and more instantaneous personalized sales interactions.
  • Training sales teams on AI skills and ethical usage is crucial for leveraging AI tools effectively and maintaining customer trust.
  • Modern adaptive selling combines traditional soft skills with AI-driven data analysis for personalized customer care.
  • Litmos offers comprehensive training programs to equip sales teams with both practical AI knowledge and essential soft skills.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is creating a paradox in sales.

On the one hand, personalized sales is now at a peak, with 73% of consumers feeling as though they’re being treated as unique individuals by brands. On the other hand, most customers don’t necessarily trust the AI that makes it possible to personalize sales at scale. A recent study showed that most customers would still rather talk to a human when making decisions.

This means the pressure is still on for salespeople, who are expected to provide tailored service to customers while maintaining a human touch.

Personalization at scale isn’t easy, however, particularly not for overworked sales teams, who often face burnout in the best of times. There is no single definitive source on sales job turnover, but it’s usually said that about a third of sales professionals leave their jobs every year. For the modern sales professional, the mounting pressure to provide personalized attention to every single customer can be daunting. However, there is a strategy that can help: adaptive selling.

While AI is revolutionizing the way teams approach adaptive selling, it isn’t a panacea for all of the challenges that come with crafting personalized sales strategies. To fully capitalize on the unprecedented access to real-time customer data and buying behaviors that AI provides, sales professionals need to be trained to in a combination of traditional soft skills like empathy and communication, as well as AI skills and AI ethics. This will ensure that sales reps maintain customer trust while still making the most of emerging AI tools.”

How is AI changing adaptive selling?

There have always been some customers who expect to be treated like VIPs, but this mindset is now the norm — particularly as AI tools have become more sophisticated, allowing for deeper and more instantaneous personalized sales interactions.

In fact the percentage of customers who feel they’re receiving tailored care from brands has only increased over the years. In 2023 only 39% of customers felt they were being treated as individuals, while in 2024 that percentage jumped to 73% of customers. This is likely due to the increasing sophistication of AI, which can help agents personalize sales more quickly and accurately.

AI tools can help salespeople in a variety of ways:

  • By offering insights about each customer: AI can analyze massive amounts of data about a customer—past behavior, buying history, social media activity, and even tone in emails or calls—to help salespeople personalize their approach before and during interactions.
  • By improving lead scoring: Much is made of gut instinct in sales, but instincts can be wrong. AI uses hard data to rank leads. That means reps can spend more time on the customers who are most likely to convert.
  • By flipping the script: AI tools can help agents adjust their conversations with customers in real time, offering suggestions and steering the conversation while a rep is talking to a customer.
  • By personalizing outreach: Most of us already use automatic suggestions when we send emails or texts. AI can take sales outreach to the next level, generating personalized messages based customer data.

AI tools have incredible potential for adaptive sales — but of course, reps have to learn these tools and develop a comfort level with them.

Why it’s important to incorporate AI into your adaptive sales strategy

Gartner predicts that 65% of B2B sales businesses will shift from traditional, intuition-based decision-making to data-driven decision-making in 2026. Incorporating AI into sales workflows reportedly saves an estimated 2 hours and 15 minutes in the average salesperson’s day, making it an indispensable tool for operationalizing adaptive sales at scale.

Integrating AI into adaptive sales processes is no longer just an advantage, but a necessity for keeping up with the ever-increasing complexity and volume of customer data that comes with the modern sales landscape.

With the right training and strategic implementation, your salespeople can leverage AI tools to stay ahead of the competition – with 81% of sales teams either experimenting with or fully implementing AI in 2024, they are likely already using AI to their advantage! AI can be used to more deeply analyze prospects and customers, improve lead scoring, and automate administrative tasks. Increasing productivity is a welcome benefit of AI, too, as it allows sales teams to spend the time and mental energy previously given to prospecting, lead scoring, and administration, on high-level strategy and optimization of individual outreach to high-potential leads.

AI can also improve the confidence and adaptability of your salespeople, by providing real-time recommendations that improve sales conversations in the moment, and AI can also improve the personalized outreach that your salespeople generate, by instantly tailoring a sales email to each customer’s preferences and requirements.

Effectively training employees to use AI responsibly in sales strategies

Training sales employees on responsible AI usage involves a balanced approach. Sales teams should be educated on how to leverage AI tools to gain valuable insights and improve lead scoring, while also maintaining the human touch that builds trust and rapport with customers.

Modern sales training programs should include modules on ethical AI use, ensuring reps understand the importance of transparency and compliance with data privacy regulations. Review and vetting by humans should also be a required step in any AI-driven process. By ensuring ethical and responsible use of AI, sales teams can enhance their adaptive selling techniques, delivering personalized, trustworthy experiences to customers.

How to incorporate AI into adaptive selling strategy

Adaptive sales requires more than just active listening or the right AI tools. It’s a complex and evolving set of skills that need to be consistently strengthened through training and practical application – and which can be enhanced by a number of AI tools on the market. Litmos has published a separate article with tips on how to get started with adaptive selling, but to specifically explore how AI can help you launch your team’s adaptive selling strategy, read on:

Train sales teams on AI skills

Training in AI is especially important, given its rising ubiquity and the complexities that AI presents in for customer-facing salespeople. Since AI is still a relatively new technology, many sales reps may not be comfortable with it or know how to effectively leverage AI tools for sales. When integrating AI into your adaptive selling processes, make AI skills training a priority for everyone on your team. From understanding the basic business considerations of AI, to mastering the ins-and-outs of building and using conversational agents, any salesperson using generative AI should have a grasp of how it works, what its limitations are, and your company’s best practice standards and usage policies.

Prioritize ethical AI usage in adaptive selling

It’s no secret that AI isn’t universally trusted by customers. In fact, only 42% of customers said that they trusted businesses to use AI ethically, according to that Salesforce report. With consumer trust being critical to sales, training reps how to use AI in compliance with emerging regulations is paramount. Empowering your sales team with the knowledge to use AI responsibly will also help them answer questions from customers who may be concerned about AI and how customer data is used.

Whether your sales team is already using technology to personalize sales, or needs some soft skills refreshers to help them meet the demands of your customer base, check out the Litmos eLearning course on Adaptive Selling to explore the power of personalization in sales and give your sales reps the people skills they need to be better listeners — and better sellers.

Incorporating AI into your selling strategies is the new normal

In many ways, adaptive selling is just old-school sales. A salesperson pays attention to a client and tries to address their pain points, using problem solving and product knowledge. However, technology is adding a new sheen to this old skill set.

As AI transforms what’s possible in terms of personalization and insight, it’s also raising the bar for sales professionals, who must now combine data-driven tools with genuine empathy and responsiveness. By investing in training, developing core soft skills, and building trust through responsible AI use, sales teams can meet the increasing expectations of today’s customers while staying one step ahead in an increasingly competitive market.

How Litmos equips sales teams to leverage AI in sales

In today’s competitive sales landscape, high-quality training is essential for equipping your sales team with both soft skills and practical AI knowledge. Litmos’ AI-powered, all-in-one Learning Management System (LMS) offers award-winning eLearning courses that cover critical soft skills such as communication, active listening, and problem-solving alongside a variety of courses on compliance and AI topics.

Taking a holistic approach to sales training ensures that your reps are not only adept at building strong customer relationships but also skilled in leveraging AI tools for more efficient adaptive selling. Seamless integrations with Salesforce and other popular CRM and HRIS platforms, along with single-sign-on (SSO) access from any device, make Litmos the easiest LMS to use for both administrators and learners.

Take the first step towards transforming your sales strategy with Litmos. Sign up for a free trial todayto see how Litmos can enhance your team’s training and performance. Discover the power of AI-driven learning management tools and personalized learning paths that will elevate your sales effectiveness. Don’t wait—start your journey to a more adaptive and successful sales team now.