How many apps do you use to get things delivered to your doorstep? How many new apps did you start using in the past couple of years to get things done at work? The past two years have seen all of us ramp up our digital toolkits, and just like the buyers, the current sales trends too, are powered and driven by tools and technology.
Gartner predicts that the future of sales involves moving from analog sales processes to hyperautomated, digital-first engagement, powered by Artificial Intelligence.
The past two years, in particular, have accelerated the digital transformation of sales teams.
Let’s look at the current top technology trends.
1. The unified tech stack
The market for sales tech is getting crowded. To keep up with the competition, companies are now offering more bang for the buck, so to speak. We’re seeing solutions that now offer end-to-end, all-in-one solutions — A unified tech stack.
Think of a unified service that puts together streaming, gaming, and shopping. That’s the kind of sales technology we have in the market now.
For example, the Freshsales suite is an all-in-one CRM solution that brings together everything sales and marketing teams need.
What do these sales trends mean for salespeople?
It means that you can list out the tools and technology that you need to empower your sales and marketing organization and satisfy all your needs with just a single tool.
You don’t need five different tools to do five different things – now, just a single tool can do all five for you.
Dan Gottlieb, Director Analyst, Gartner, observed that this has been happening in the last 18 months and will continue to accelerate in the coming years.
“We’re now seeing a smaller list of vendors offering a wider set of capabilities,” he said. “Instead of these companies acquiring or adding capabilities that are within their swimlanes, they are adding adjacent capabilities.”
With vendors offering more capabilities, the tech stack becomes more unified, and buying from a single vendor will ensure that organizations see these benefits:
- Single window purchase from a single vendor for all the functionalities needed, possibly lower cost
- Easier training and onboarding for end-users
- Minimal problems with integration
Do this now:
- List your biggest problems that you feel can be solved by technology. For example:
- Fragmented view of customer
- Don’t know which lead to go after
- Sales forecasting is inaccurate
- Discuss the feasible tech solutions that can solve the problem. For example, an all-in-one CRM solution can solve all the three problems listed above. Shortlist vendors and compare features from review sites like G2
- Pick the best solution that has most of the capabilities that you need
2. Omnichannel sales
McKinsey studies on buyer behavior since August 2020 have shown a steady rise in omnichannel buying, with the most effective channel being e-commerce. About a third of decision-makers said e-commerce is the most effective channel, even higher than in-person sales.
The current sales trends show that customers use different sales channels at various stages of the buyer’s journey. These include face-to-face, video conferencing, online chat, or online marketplaces.
According to the McKinsey study, on average, customers are now engaging with buyers across ten or more channels, as opposed to five in 2016.
In the case of B2B, 94% of B2B decision-makers say the new omnichannel sales model is as effective or more effective compared to the sales model they used before the pandemic.
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Do this now:
- Activate as many channels as possible for your business, including live chat, social media, email, and e-commerce
- Ensure that all the data flows into a single source of truth like a CRM
- Diversify sales roles to embrace the omnichannel experience. Hybrid sellers need videoconferencing, online chats, and the support of e-commerce to close deals
3. Personalization
Personalization is usually associated with marketing but is fast becoming the norm among sales trends too.
According to McKinsey research, 71% of customers now expect personalized communication, and 3 out of 4 customers get frustrated if the communication is not personalized.
What’s more, the research also found that companies that grow faster drive 40% more of their revenue from personalization than their slower growth counterparts.
In sales, strategies like personalized email nurture campaigns and personalized video pitches are becoming more common.
One of the technologies that can help in sales personalization is digital sales rooms.
A digital sales room, according to G2, provides salespeople with a customer-facing microsite that can be used to share relevant content, chat with buyers, and create custom proposals.
According to Gartner’s Virtual Selling Framework 2021, digital sales rooms can also be used to assess the customers’ digital footprint and thereby derive more insights on the customer.
All the stuff you request over the course of a buying process, digital sales rooms store all that information in one place. So I have one link as a buyer, where I can go and see everything relevant to that buying experience
— Jonathan Carlson, Sr. Director of Marketing, Allego
Similar outcomes can be achieved with an all-in-one CRM. A CRM like Freshsales enables context-driven selling. You can nurture leads with personalized campaigns, personalize content and map out journeys. You can also run polls and get feedback. The best part is, all the communications and resources you share with your customer are stored in the unified customer record.
Do this now:
- Explore digital sales rooms or an all-in-one CRM to offer a variety of content formats relevant to the prospect, including personalized video messages from sellers
- Pull data on which resources prospects are engaging with most frequently, and use this data to create more impactful content and enhance customer experience
- Engage asynchronously over the channels the customer prefers
4. AI-assisted selling
According to Gartner, by 2025, 3 out of 4 B2B sales organizations will augment traditional sales playbooks with AI-guided selling solutions.
Here are some of the applications of AI in sales, that are growing bigger among the current sales trends:
- Prioritize leads to go after. AI can learn from historical data like contact properties and engagement levels and assign scores
- Get data-backed suggestions of the next-best-action to drive the conversation with leads further
- Get deal insights from historical sales data, activities, and engagement
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The applications of AI are among the top sales trends right now. These will only expand in scope as a larger number of buyers perform more activities in the digital space.
Sellers can no longer exclusively rely on intuition-based selling to push a deal over the finish line. Tomorrow’s sellers must learn to use data today to effectively manage their sales cycles as the use of the information will become more critical to their success over time
— Steve Rietberg, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner Sales
Do this now:
Gartner recommends these four actions before embarking on AI-guided selling:
- Educate all sales partners on the basics of AI-guided selling, including micro-level actions of engagement
- Identify sales process steps and business outcomes that are unique to the organization’s processes to find the best-fit solution
- Select the AI-based guided selling technology that is most relevant to your sales organization’s lead, opportunity, sales enablement, and quote management use cases
- Prioritize where AI-based guided selling functions would be most relevant. Do this by identifying which parts of the sales cycle reps mostly use “gut-feel”.
5. Keep your sales team happy
In October 2021, a McKinsey survey released a shocking number based on a survey of employees.
About 40% of employees across 5000 global firms were at least somewhat likely to leave their current jobs within the next 3-6 months.
A Gartner pulse survey of CSOs showed that seller attrition rates were 57% higher than their targeted rate.
The writing is on the wall: the great resignation is the most disruptive among the current sales trends. Why? Your star performers may be moving to different companies, and your new recruits need to hit the ground running, thereby possibly making a dent in organizational sales targets.
With the explosion of startups, unicorns, and IPOs, the demand for good talent is through the roof, and there’s a tussle for the best talent.
How can you retain your talent? Ensure that your reps are happy. Happy reps are less likely to jump ship. Recently, Freshworks partnered with Harvard Business Review to find out the impact of sales happiness on traditional sales metrics. The results speak for themselves:
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The 2021 Gartner Workforce Resilience Survey also found that making work easier is more important than getting rewards and recognition for hard work.
For instance, 24% of respondents wanted more easily adaptable processes, while 12% actively sought employee feedback on bottlenecks.
These measures will ensure that you can retain talent, build a lasting relationship with your colleagues.
Typically, in years gone by, most of us viewed sellers as being ‘coin operated’ – their biggest driver was their pay packet. Now, sellers are also considering non-monetary factors such as manager and leadership quality, employee experience and culture, and professional development
— Robert Lesser, Director (Advisory), Gartner
Do this now:
- How can you make work easier for your team? Automate everything that can be automated. Set up sales sequences to simplify manual work. This will also free up more selling time for reps
- Move from a purely numbers-driven culture to one that has sales team happiness also factored in — happier sales teams perform better on all metrics
- Equip reps with the right tools and technology for virtual sales. Coach them walk them through the new way of doing things
Takeaways
Data-driven digital selling is here and isn’t going anywhere soon.
In its Future of Sales report, Gartner envisions that by 2025, 8 out of 10 B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers will occur in digital channels.
It also predicts that by 2025, 60% of B2B sales organizations will transition from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling.
This being the case, the sales trends are going to include not just selling, but also a dash of data analysis and interpretation.
Do this now:
- Keep the number of tools minimal. Go for an all-in-one, unified tech stack
- Expand your offerings across channels to ensure you reach the most number of customers
- Explore digital sales rooms to personalize content and have context-driven conversations
- Experiment with AI-driven selling for tasks like lead prioritization and next-best action
- Ensure sales happiness is high and leverage technology to improve job quality (for instance, automating mundane and repetitive tasks)
The traditional field sales role has already shifted into hybrid mode, and sellers need to learn new tactics and keep swimming with the tide of technology to stay on top.
