How Human-Centric Skills Shape the Future of Selling

I hope you're doing well.  This weekend, I read 1929 by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who pointed out a fascinating fact: consumer debt, as we know it, didn’t exist in the U.S. before 1919. It was General Motors that first designed the concept of borrowing to sell cars, and they had to hire people with strong advisory skills to help customers understand and embrace the idea of financing.

Almost a hundred years later, that same consultative and advisory skill remains at the heart of effective selling. This was the inspiration behind our latest paper, "Sales Skills for the Future."

As industries converge and AI becomes deeply embedded in customer engagement, organizations can no longer depend on static, product-centric playbooks. The strongest salesforces — and by extension, workforces — are being built around three layers of capability:

• Root Skills: enduring human capabilities such as empathy, active listening, curiosity, resilience, and consultative thinking — the ability to deeply understand needs before offering solutions.
• Core Skills: application-oriented abilities like ROI storytelling, stakeholder management, and digital prospecting that adapt based on selling motion and customer complexity.
• Emerging Skills: future-facing fluencies such as AI prompt design, predictive engagement, and automation mastery that enhance human performance.

The framework segments selling environments (B2B, B2C, and B2B2C) by customer complexity, showing how skill intensity rises from transactional selling to ecosystem-led, partnership-driven models.

Importantly, the paper shifts focus from one-time training to a continuous cycle of Diagnose → Design → Deploy → Evolve.

For SaaS sales, this means evolving from transactional product demos to continuous advisory engagement — helping customers realize value, renew, and expand through data-driven insights and consultative depth.

For HR leaders, this means moving from static enablement programs to living skill architectures — where people, process, and AI work together to sense change and reskill rapidly.

The same principle applies to every function: the future-ready workforce will be defined not by fixed roles but by fluid, evolving capabilities anchored in consultative, human-centered skills.