How Notion upskilled its global sales team on AI technical fluency
“We needed to quickly increase the technical aptitude of our customer facing teams. By partnering with Maven, we shifted from talking about workflows to actually building them for CTOs & CPOs.”
The problem: how to build technical AI fluency for its sales team
Notion has spent over a decade building one of the most beloved productivity tools. Its newest launch, Notion Custom Agents, has transformed this company from a productivity tool into an AI orchestrator. This raised the bar for technical fluency for its sales team.
Notion sellers are expected to be able to carry a technical conversation with a CTO, design a system architecture, and build a working prototype. Only 1 in 3 reps felt ready to hold a technical conversation with a CTO, and 1 in 4 felt they could build a prototype with an AI coding agent.
“Notion was a predominantly product-led, bottoms-up growth motion. The gap that stands out for our sales team is how quickly can they get to a level of credibility and conviction to help a sale go over the line for a customer in technical role.”
So Sam Wener, who leads GTM enablement at Notion, worked with Maven to design a training for their global 300-person sales org to go beyond AI 101 and build their technical credibility and confidence.
Structure: focus on building, not lecture
Sam selected James Gray, a former data leader at Microsoft and CIO/CPO, to run a hands-on program. The virtual training ran over three days for each region.
Day 1: Technical foundations
- Build the shared vocabulary to talk to CIOs and CTOs
- Classify AI work with the Agentic AI Matrix
- Build a Notion custom agent for a real GTM task
- Build a multi-step GTM workflow with Notion + Claude
Day 2: Build
- Write a vision doc and PRD with Claude Code
- Turn the PRD into a working prototype
- Version-control it in GitHub
- Practice customer discovery and solution design
Day 3: Capstone and demo day
- Build a GTM workflow or prototype end to end
- Demo in breakout rooms with live feedback
- Standout builds spotlighted to the full cohort
- Close: your first 30 days of technical fluency
It was intentionally challenging and pushed them out of their comfort zone. The sales team joined breakout rooms to brainstorm and build, and received guidelines, not step-by-step instructions. Managers sat in their own team’s breakouts, so they could see where people got stuck and coach from there.
The results
We assessed participants before and after the training on 8 technical skills and 5 leadership skills.
81% of participants were able to apply their learnings to customer conversations
Within the first week, the sales team were sharing workflow and architecture diagrams on customer calls.
“The design workflow diagram was super helpful. I’ve already started using that in my day to day.”
Outcomes Architect86% became more confident across technical skills
Going in, 1 in 4 reps felt they could build a prototype with an AI coding agent. Coming out, 2 in 3 did, and more than half felt ready for a technical conversation with a CTO, up from 1 in 3.
90% of people managers gained confidence to lead their teams in AI
The share confident coaching a teammate on AI, and reviewing a teammate’s AI workflow, both rose from 20% to 90%.
73% were more confident integrating AI workflows into their daily work
“I learnt some important new concepts, and it strengthened my overall technical capabilities immensely.”
Sales Team MemberThe sales team loved the build-focused training
“It’s rare we have time to build and iterate without focusing on customer work. This helped me understand the story we’re trying to tell a lot better.”
Outcomes Architect“I really liked the actual building, specifically as a team. It made it less intimidating.”
Partnerships / Channel“Best training I’ve been a part of.”
Sales LeaderWant to train your go-to-market team to sell in the AI era?
Maven runs private, hands-on cohorts like this one.
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