Are sales reps becoming sales consultants?
Challenges + Opportunities in the 2024 Sales Landscape
As we approach the end of the tunnel, sales teams continue to deal with the lingering effects of a very challenging macro-economic environment in 2023.
What are some of the challenges sales teams have faced in 2023?
The primary goal of sales professionals is to exceed their targets or quotas - but it has taken more effort this year. A majority of them, 54%, say that selling is harder this year because of inflation, stiff competition, a lack of high-quality leads, and the difficulty of reaching decision-makers.
In spite of headwinds, sales pros are still meeting or exceeding their goals - and there are plenty of exciting opportunities to look forward to in 2024.
The inflation rate is finally slowing down, so companies' iron grip on their budgets may finally loosen next year, making it easier for sales pros to close deals.
It has also been found that hybrid work, one of the most popular approaches, is the most effective setup for sales after three years of testing. According to HubSpot's recent research, hybrid teams are 28% more likely to outperform fully in-person or fully remote teams. Even though hybrid workers can work from home, coming into the office for team meetings and visiting prospects in person helps them feel connected and effective.
In the coming year, we'll continue to emphasize the importance of relationship building - referrals from existing customers are one of the top ways sales teams receive quality leads.
Even in challenging economic times, a trusted peer will be able to convince a colleague that a product is worth investing in more than a sales rep ever could.
Relationship-Building and Connection are More Important than Ever
Traditionally, sales reps were able to close deals by simply demonstrating the features and benefits of their product to prospects - but today, sales reps play a much different role.
Consumers are able to research tools they're considering - and 96% of them do so before speaking with any company representatives - which means they already know why your tool is valuable.
AI makes it so easy to compare tools, learn about their features, and even compare pricing options, so sales reps should behave more like consultants and partners. It's common for prospects to talk to reps because they've already moved beyond learning the basics of the tool - they want to know exactly how it will help them.
Users with similar needs want tailored use cases for their industries and circumstances, as well as expert-level consultation about the ROI of your tool.
Sales calls need to go deeper, be more personalized, and prioritize connecting person-to-person, expert-to-expert. In addition, reps are realizing that long-term revenue can be generated by establishing and maintaining relationships with customers before, during, and after they sign.
Key findings from the 2024 sales report:
- 54% of sales pros say selling has been harder this year than it was before.
- 96% of prospects do their own research before talking to a human sales rep - and 71% prefer to just do their own research instead of talking to a rep.
- Sales reps only spend 2 hours per day actually selling.
- Sales reps spend ~1 hour per day on administrative tasks.
- AI tools are saving sales pros 2 hours a day.
- 82% of sales pros say building relationships and connecting with people is both the
- most important part of selling — and the most enjoyable part of their job.
- 81% of sales pros AI can help them spend less time on manual tasks.
- 52% of sales pros say B2B customers use self-serve tools more than last year.
- 63% of sales leaders say AI makes it easier for them to compete with other businesses in their industry.
- 62% of sales pros say their org is taking fewer risks in 2023 than in 2022, and 70% say budgets are more scrutinized in 2023 than in 2022.
- 28% of sales pros say the sales process taking too long is the biggest reason prospects back out of deals.
- There’s an average of five decision-makers involved in every sales process today.
- 72% of company revenue comes from existing customers, with 28% coming from new customers.
- In 2023, the average sales win rate is 21%.
- 45% of sales pros are overwhelmed by the amount of tools in their tech stack.
Who is the informed buyer and what are the self-service sales?
Buyers don't go into sales calls without knowing plenty about the company and its products. Hence, reps are finding ways to go above and beyond, providing tailored, personalized service for prospects with a value-packed experience. A self-serve experience is another way companies facilitate more purchases, more quickly.
In addition to business-to-business (B2B) companies offering pricing packages that can be purchased independently, their business-to-consumer (B2C) counterparts are also doing this.
64%t of B2B sales professionals offer self-service tools to guide buyers' purchase decisions. According to 85% of them, it is an effective strategy. 52% of sales pros say B2B customers use self-serve tools more than last year.
Companies are trying to strike a balance between letting simple transactions go through completely independently, and leaving more complex contract-based sales to sales people.
Most Effective Self-Serve Tools
This year, sales pros who offer buyers self-service tools are 47% more likely to exceed their goals than those who don't. Sales pros can begin incorporating self-serve processes into their sales flow in a number of ways. Here are five of the most effective approaches:
- Product demos: Traditionally, demos were done in person or via video call. Today, pre-recorded demo videos can be uploaded for a variety of products and use cases. Prospects can watch the demo video at their own convenience after sales pros send it out.
- Free trials: In order to get a sense of a tool, it's always best to try it out, so free trials are becoming more common to let customers get to know a product before contacting a sales representative.
- Customer stories: By writing well-written, short articles that demonstrate the ROI and use cases of your products in action, you can move prospects down the sales funnel.
- User reviews: You can help prospects better understand the potential of your tools by sharing curated user reviews.
- Chatbots: Whether they’re purely AI-powered and pull from your knowledge base, or they’re partially run by AI and pass things off to a human if a question is too complex, chatbots can be a helpful self-serve sales tool.
Buyers are Better-Informed than Ever - and They’re Using AI to Research
A rep can't just read off value props - buyers can find that information easily doing a few minutes of research by themselves. Buyers can compare all three options with a chatbot instead of having discovery calls with representatives from three different companies.
By empowering buyers with independent research, Al will increase their confidence and decision-making ability, resulting in shorter and more productive sales cycles. AI will enhance buyers' ability to do research so much that they'll be able to make informed decisions without working with salespeople by 2024, according to 67% of sales pros.
It is important for sales reps to provide real value during their conversations with prospects - even today, prospects prefer to conduct their own research instead of talking to someone.
In addition to providing basic research, sales pros should be able to:
- Contextualize their products expertly for each customer
- Ensure that each customer's needs are met by providing value and usefulness
- Relationship building and maintenance
- Make products, pricing packages, and services more personalized
- Boost buyer confidence
How do sales teams use AI and automation?
Today, AI tools make information more accessible to more than just buyers. There are many creative, effective ways sales pros are integrating AI tools into their processes, and the results have already been impressive.
There are many reasons to start implementing AI into sales processes, from reducing manual tasks, to better understanding their customers, to providing increased personalization, to generally being more efficient.
Top Sales Use Cases for AI Tools
- Personalization: Reps can use AI tools designed for sales to quickly research each customer's company and their needs to better tailor product recommendations.
- Drafting and Sending Outreach: Using generative AI tools, sales reps can draft emails with different tones, products, and sales tactics. ChatSpot allows reps to input one email template, and have the system create more or less formal or friendly versions - rather than rewriting the template several times. AI-powered outreach tools can also schedule emails and texts automatically. In addition, sales reps and marketers can set up nurturing flows that are triggered by prospect and customer behavior, sending them messages relevant to their actions on your website.
- Understanding Emotions and Identifying Buyer Stage: Some prospects and customers aren't great at communicating - so sales reps are often left guessing what stage they're in. Because of this, 41% of sales pros use AI to recognize and respond to buyer emotions - and 83% say it's effective. Additionally, sales professionals who use AI this way are 52% more likely to exceed their goals this year.
- Competitive Analysis: Sales teams can take advantage of sites like G2 to help prospects compare your product to the competition - but these sites, as well as AI tools that parse all the information available across multiple review and product sites, can also be leveraged by prospects. AI research can help sales pros prepare responses to common questions about their competitors. As a result, sales pros can demonstrate product fit more effectively than their competitors.
- Predicting Objections: With AI research tools and AI-powered CRMs, sales professionals can quickly parse all the history and activities of a prospect and come up with replies to their most likely objections.
The Impact of Tighter Budgets
2023 was, from beginning to end, an economically tumultuous year. As a result, budgets have constricted and companies are generally treading more cautiously before jumping to invest in a new product or tool.
During economic challenges, it’s harder to convince prospects to buy. When the macroeconomic climate is challenging, more company stakeholders — and more senior leaders — become involved in buying processes, making them take longer.
Sales teams are prioritizing leads from highest quality sources
Sales is so much about prioritizing: how do reps decide which leads to pursue at any given time? CRM data can help. The right CRM can surface individual opportunities with alerts when a prospect's behavior changes.
However, a CRM can also reveal macro trends, such as which lead sources consistently bring in deals. According to our survey participants, the following sources provided high quality leads this year:
- Social media
- Referrals from existing customers
- Email marketing
- Telemarketing
- Website/blog/SEO
- Tradeshows and events
The Importance of Maintaining Relationships
As sales teams know, building relationships is important, but maintaining existing relationships is becoming more and more important - because existing clients bring a majority of revenue and refer the best prospects.
How to Maintain Sales Relationships
- Check in regularly - not just near the end of the billing cycle.
- Use the right channels for each prospect - Use AI tools to create a range of correspondence types (email, text, social media DM, phone script) based on your contact’s preferences.
- Tailor your scripts - Use AI tools to adjust the tone of all your scripts - some customers are formal, some prefer a friendlier approach.
- Come prepared for each interaction with tailored scripts - Check your CRM and use AI tools to research your customer before you send that message or email, or make that call — and choose which talk track makes the most sense at this time.
- Take a consultative approach - Get in touch regularly, not just near the end of the billing cycle, to address any issues the customer may have. That way, when you get in touch when a new product or integration has launched, you don’t come off opportunistic. By building real trust with regular check-ins and effective problem solving, suggestions for new add-ons are more likely to be well-received.
- Celebrate customer wins - Keep in touch and send congratulations when customers are able to grow their business — no CTA included.
Sales Performance Benchmarks
Knowing where industry benchmarks stand is always helpful when planning for a new year, quarter, or month. But as the tech industry has evolved over the past few years, especially with global economic challenges, it's helpful to redefine success.
Based on 2023 performance, here are the sales benchmarks to consider for 2024:
Top 3 Sales Strategies for B2B and B2C Businesses in 2023
B2B companies sell differently than B2C companies. For each business type, here are the top sales strategies:
The only overlap between these two approaches is establishing rapport with customers during the sales process. It doesn't matter if you're selling a yearly contract for a complex business software, or a desk for a home office, you must connect with the customer. Despite the fact that many B2C companies don't involve sales reps in most simple transactions, you can still build relationships with your community in other ways.
How to Better Enable Sales Teams
In order to help their sales pros succeed, sales leaders can do a variety of things. In 2024, we'll discuss some of the most impactful opportunities.
Create More Enablement Content
In addition to helping sales pros sell, enablement content can also bring in higher-quality leads. In both B2B and B2C go-to-market (GTM) teams, the following content types have the highest ROI:
Social media content
Together with your marketing team, create assets sales pros can share on social media and in DMs.
Product demos
Having full-length demos is great, but when did you last make sure that the video that goes out all the time is fully updated? Demonstrations need to reflect new features and software changes. You can start by creating bite-sized walkthroughs of product capabilities that are well-edited and concise.
Videos
Videos are extremely engaging, so sales teams can use them to share with prospects and customers. Try different video types to see what works, whether it's a short tutorial, a roundup of top use cases, or a front-facing announcement of a sale or a promotion.
Creating content that helps close deals will make sales pros eager to use it if you work with the marketing team. Test different types of enablement content, provide feedback to the sales team, and invest more in what works.
Top 5 Most Effective Sales Enablement Content for Helping Reps win Deals
Reduce Your Tech Stack significantly
Over the past decade (or longer! ), companies have been implementing new technologies all the time. As everything went online only during the early pandemic, companies developed even more apps and software.
But we’ve reached a bit of a breaking point: companies use, on average, over 200 apps and tools. Moreover, because so many tools don't integrate well, sales teams spend too much time entering data twice, cleaning up incorrect data, and syncing systems that don't automatically sync.
Finding information about prospects and customers is time-consuming, and teams could be spending that time connecting with them instead. Therefore, sales leaders are considering trimming their tech stack in order to boost efficiency.
Consider a tech stack audit. If a tool doesn’t play well with others, or if its ROI isn’t up to par, give it the boot.
Improve Marketing + Sales Alignment
The sales pros at companies with aligned sales and marketing teams are 103% more likely to exceed their goals this year than those at companies without alignment.
When sales and marketing are aligned, sales enablement content is better, leads are higher quality, and deals are won more often. Because of this, 61% of sales professionals say alignment between these teams is more important now than it was last year - in challenging economic times, sales and marketing alignment is more important. Consistent GTM alignment is, however, out of reach for many companies.
The top request from sales to marketing has to do with leads: 43% of sales professionals say they need higher-quality leads from their marketing team - only 59% say they get high-quality leads today.
39% say aligning goals and strategies is necessary. If you want to ensure that things are still going well, consider a short monthly standup between sales and marketing leaders.
Implement AI Tools
As mentioned in the AI chapter, sales pros see AI significantly boosting their ability to upsell, cross-sell, and down-sell.
With ChatSpot, sales teams can create and customize talk tracks, emails, and social posts with the help of generative AI tools. AI-powered CRM tools also save sales teams time spent digging for information about which prospects to pursue next.
AI tools can help shorten sales cycles because buyers are better educated about products thanks to AI research, and sales pros can save time when researching customer needs.
Sales Team Culture + Hybrid Work
In May of 2022, 45% of U.S. sales reps were hybrids, up to 71% in May of 2022. There are 20% of in-person meetings and 10% of remote meetings.
“Sales leaders have to adapt in order to maximize the success of their teams in a remote or hybrid world, where driving results and providing support need to be balanced,” shared Chris Gell, Dialpad's Sales Enablement Program Manager.
According to 56% of sales pros who work remotely or in a hybrid setup, selling remotely is easier. Meeting in person remains the most effective sales channel, even for hybrid sales professionals.
The most effective sales channels according to sales pros:
Sales professionals who are hybrid are 28% more likely to exceed their sales goals this year than those who are in-person and fully remote.
Many teams have fallen into hybrid life as the default after overcoming the many curveballs of the past three years - and it's working well. In spite of this, it's still important to monitor the sales team culture, and make active efforts to grow and evolve it.
Stay on top of your hybrid sales culture by following these tips:
Building Better Relationships is as Easy As AI-B-C
The sales teams have learned flexibility and adaptability after a challenging few years, each one adding a layer of complexity. As many teams struggle to do more with less, sales teams are embracing AI tools to build stronger relationships, have more productive conversations, and shorten sales cycles.
Learn more about how HubSpot AI tools can help sales teams get back to the fun, connected side of selling: building lasting relationships with prospects and customers.