The Future of B2B Sales

20 May

Business-to-business sales have undergone some major shifts in the past 5 decades, supported by technologies ranging from CRM systems to auto-dialers.

Books like “Strategic Selling,” “SPIN selling” and “The Challenger Sale” have also influenced how sales teams approach their job.

The question is – “What’s next?”

Given the rise of AI, the changing demographics of decision makers and a continuing proliferation of sales tools, what does the future hold?

Here are some ‘educated guesses,’ based on insights from major research firms and industry consultants:

GENERATIVE AI AND SALES

The launch of Chat GPT at the end of 2022 launched a new phase in the application of AI to sales.

But according to a survey in November 2023 by US sales consultants the Rain Group, “Even respondents seeing the greatest impact from AI on sales performance are overwhelmed by the AI options and use cases (45% vs 35% for others)”.

And adoption of AI tools is still at an early stage – only 5% of respondents said they relied heavily on AI tools and used them daily, with 15% saying they used them frequently but not every day. 60% of respondents said they occasionally, rarely or never used AI tools.

Despite this, there will be a continuing focus on how to apply GPT and other AI tools to improve the B2B sales process over the next 5 years.

So far applications are tactical, offering incremental improvements e.g., helping to build and validate buyer personas, or generating and improving sales messaging.

But AI tools are beginning to be used to analyze past sales performance and then to recommend “Next best actions” for sales people e.g., “Call Geoff Smith today and highlight this specific new product feature and the corresponding case study”.

MOVE TO DATA DRIVEN DECISIONS IN B2B SALES

The 2020 Gartner report “The Future of Sales” projected that by 2025, 60% of B2B Sales organizations will move away from decisions based on the sales team’s own experience and intuition to fully data-driven selling.

So, for example, rather than rating the potential of a sales prospect purely on personal judgement, the sales person will also have to use data from previous sales interactions that were successful and unsuccessful to judge which deals should get the most attention.

That decision will be based on data gathered during the sales process for other similar deals, and sales people will need to justify how they apply their time based on data.

MOVE TO OUTSOURCE PARTS OF THE SALES PROCESS

According to Maria Valdivieso de Uster of McKinsey Consulting in an article for Salesforce in 2021, “One of the sales trends that we began to see while doing the research for Sales Growth is the outsourcing of parts of (and sometimes lots of) the sales value chain. What’s new today is that the automation we mentioned has enabled third-party vendors to run a company’s entire end-to-end sales process.”^[i]

TOO MUCH INFORMATION AND 'SENSE MAKING'

According to the Gartner article “5 Ways Future of B2B Buying Will Rewrite Rules of Effective Selling”, B2B buyers increasingly want to do their own research online during the buying process, but they find the amount of information overwhelming and, often, contradictory.

Vendors are pumping out huge amounts of content and buyers simply can’t consume or analyze it effectively.

Gartner recommends that sellers position themselves as “Sense makers” – someone who can guide the buyer to the key information and provide insights.

SALES TALENT IN THE US IS SCARCE, EXPENSIVE AND HARD TO RETAIN

According to the 2023 Gartner report “Chief Sales Officer Leadership Vision”

Sales talent in the US costs more – salaries for B2B sales have increased in all the top US metropolitan areas.

Hiring is taking longer, from an average of 36 days in 2019 to 60 days in 2022 (up 67%).

Retaining talent is harder -annual attrition has increased to 9.7% from 6.9%.

SALES PRODUCTIVITY IS AN ONGOING PRIORITY

According to surveys by Gartner, Salesforce and others, more than 40% of sellers’ time is still taken up with non-sales activity such as form filling.

There is still an urgent need for solutions that reduce these interruptions and let sellers focus on their prospective customers.

BUYERS STILL WANT TO HEAR FROM SELLERS

According to a Rain Group survey, 82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers who proactively reach out to them.

And from the same survey, 71% of buyers want to hear from sellers at the earliest part of their buying process when they are forming ideas.

SO WHAT CONCLUSIONS CAN WE DRAW?

First, B2B sales managers need to focus on maximizing their team’s selling time. This means identifying, reducing or eliminating any non-essential and non-sales activities.

Second, you need to stop using intuition and guess work to guide salespeople’s prioritization of prospects, accounts and their next actions. Their decision should be supported by evidence – that is data you have collected on previous successful and unsuccessful sales. Later this will include using AI tools to help you with the analysis.

Third, the adoption of AI tools in B2B sales is still at an early stage. The recommendation is to experiment with different tools now and see how you can apply them at each stage of your sales process. This can include using them to help you figure out buyer’s needs, researching your sales prospects, improving your messaging and analyzing your sales process effectiveness.

Fourth, consider outsourcing parts of the sales process you can’t or don’t want to become experts at. For example, you can outsource sales prospecting to a company like Motarme.

Fifth, regardless of the new tools and insights, buyers still want to talk to sellers. So human-to-human interaction is still part of the process, and that means skills like active listening, consultative selling and other old-school techniques are still an essential part of your sales toolset.

^[i] Salesforce and McKinsey Consulting, “The 7 Biggest Trends Upending Sales Today”, https://www.salesforce.com/resources/articles/biggest-sales-trends/