There's a question that keeps coming up in sales enablement right now. What should the humans do? What should the AI do? And how do you actually tell the difference?

It's the right question to be asking. And I want to walk you through how we've been thinking about it at Corporate Visions, grounded in research and real buyer data, because I think there's a path forward that's more concrete than most people realize.

The human vs. AI pendulum

Let's start with a number from Gartner. Just a couple of months ago, they published a finding that 75% of B2B buyers now prefer human interaction at critical decision points in complex, high-stakes transactions.

Good news for salespeople. Good news for enablement.

But here's what made me pause. A little under three years ago, Gartner published a different finding with the same number. That one said 75% of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free experience. So in roughly three years, the pendulum swung almost completely the other way.

What that tells me isn't that one finding was wrong. It's that the industry is genuinely wrestling with this question, and the answer keeps shifting as the technology and buyer expectations evolve together.

The real insight in that more recent Gartner stat is buried in the context: buyers want human interaction at critical decision points.

So, the more useful question becomes: what are those critical decision points? What human behaviors actually drive better outcomes? And once you know that, how do you figure out who's good at them, and how do you scale it?

That's the framework I want to work through with you.

Starting with what actually drives wins

The most common way organizations try to figure out what's driving wins and losses is through CRM dropdown fields. You ask the seller why they won, why they lost, and you build your strategy around those answers.

The flaw in that approach is pretty obvious once you say it out loud. Sellers and buyers rarely agree on why a deal went the way it did.

When you ask a seller why they won, the answer is usually some version of: me. Everything I did.

When you ask a seller why they lost, it's almost always one of what we call the three P's: Product (we didn't have what they needed), Price (we couldn't get there), or Politics (beyond my control, nothing I could do).

The seller is rarely the reason they lost, at least in their own telling.

Buyers see it differently.

At Corporate Visions, we acquired a win-loss analysis company a couple of years back.

We thought we were acquiring a business, which we were. What we didn't fully anticipate was the dataset that came with it: 150,000 data points from B2B buyers across more than 50 industries and 500 companies, all explaining why they chose or didn't choose a specific vendor.

One finding from that dataset stands out above everything else. Over half the time, a losing vendor could have won. And the reason they didn't win had nothing to do with those three P's. It had everything to do with things entirely within the seller's control.

That's a significant finding. Because if you're building your enablement strategy around the assumption that losses are mostly driven by product gaps, pricing constraints, or politics, you're probably focusing on the wrong things.

The behaviors that actually predict wins

So, we did the work on that dataset to identify which specific seller behaviors correlate with better win rates. A few things made this analysis worth paying attention to.

First, every behavior on the list is observable, teachable, and coachable. These aren't personality traits or innate talents. They're skills that can be developed.

Second, they're entirely within the seller's control. No blaming the product team or the pricing committee.

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Third, and most importantly, they're predictive. We used a statistical measure called area under the curve to assess correlation.

The way to think about it: if you do that behavior significantly better than your competitors, you're more likely to win. If you do it significantly worse, you're more likely to lose. The higher the number, the stronger the relationship.

One behavior worth highlighting is what we call "align solution to needs," which is essentially your discovery motion.

Everyone knows good discovery leads to better outcomes. But the specific unlock here is something called problem statement alignment. When a seller plays back their understanding of the customer's problem and explicitly checks for agreement or gaps, asking "what did I get right, what did I miss," something meaningful happens.

We did follow-on research with a professor at Florida State, and when we went back after a discovery call and asked the seller and the buyer separately to describe the problem being solved, they often weren't in agreement. And when that alignment isn't there, outcomes suffer. It happens more than it should.