Blog
B2B sales continue to evolve, offering new opportunities to companies that know how to adapt. Attracting and retaining sales reps customers, adapting to an increasingly complex sales environment, moving towards ultra-personalization and embracing artificial intelligence are just some of the challenges you need to take up to boost your business.
1 - Attracting and retaining sales reps: a strategic challenge for your company
Attracting and retaining sales reps is a growing challenge for companies. With the shortage of qualified sales talent, it's increasingly difficult to find and retain high-performing sales reps . There are over 200,000 vacancies for sales reps in France, a figure that illustrates the scale of the challenge. The attractiveness and loyalty of the sales force is a strategic challenge for 2023. To meet this challenge, sales and human resources managers must first of all make the company more attractive to candidates. Modernizing the company's image and making it easier for candidates to see themselves in the context of their future activity will be an asset in your strategy.
Faced with a shortage of profiles, 97% of B2B sales managers consider skills enhancement to be their top priority... and more than half of them believe that their sales reps do not have the skills needed to succeed in the years ahead (McKinsey). Focus your efforts on accelerating the skills development of your sales reps , ensuring that they are fully conversant with your offerings, and providing them with ongoing training will enable you to be among the winners in 2023! The key factors in the success of your strategy must revolve around the following points: accelerating the skills development of new entrants, developing sales reps' autonomy & confidence, enabling them to self-evaluate and continuously reinforce their knowledge of offers/services, reducing sales reps' turnover, identifying and duplicating the success model of the best.
Another point of attention is the recent Gartner study highlighting that 89% of sales reps feel exhausted by their work. An alarming and unsurprising figure, given that sales reps spend 70% of their time on non-sales related activities, and the ever-increasing weight of administrative tasks. These include researching content, creating and personalizing presentations, and writing up visit reports... We need to make life easier for sales reps, so that they have the best possible conditions to achieve their objectives and develop their potential.
2 - B2B sales will be more complex in 2024: how can we adapt to stay competitive?
B2B sales have become increasingly complex in recent years, and this trend is set to continue into 2023. B2B buyers are increasingly demanding and well-informed before they enter into a sales relationship. According to Forrester, the buyer completes 57% of the buying journey before initiating contact with the intended supplier. This situation is set to continue and become even more pronounced with the accelerated digitization of the purchasing process. In this context, you need to ensure that the sales person is able to create complementary value in terms of content, as well as a sales experience that makes a difference. Training and facilitating the self-assessment of salespeople's knowledge must be a priority for 2023.
The desire for immediacy and a highly personalized relationship will make B2B sales in 2023 an increasingly demanding process for sales reps. The McKinsey study has outlined the expectations of decision-makers, 72% of whom want a consistent buying experience across all channels. With the spread of teleworking, interactions between buyers and sellers will inevitably take place in a hybrid environment. This is underlined by the Sales Trends 2023 report (Hubspot & Aircall): 50% of sales reps will move towards a hybrid model, 33% face-to-face and 17% entirely remote. To adapt to a hybrid environment, sales reps need an easy-to-use sales tool that is just as effective face-to-face as it is remotely, works 100% offline and captivates the buyer during the sales presentation.
With the crises we've just experienced, the decision-making process, and therefore the sales cycle, has tended to lengthen in companies. The B2B buyer multiplies his online documentation and consults other players in the decision-making sphere. On average, 7 people are now involved in the purchasing process of a company with 100 to 500 employees. The number of purchasing interactions has also evolved, from 17 in 2019 to 27 in 2021. This trend is set to continue and even intensify in 2023! To remain competitive in your market,sales and marketing must bealigned! The marketing team must provide sales with relevant, easily accessible content that is in tune with the reality on the ground. All this in a context of hyper-personalization and contextualization of the sales approach.
The arrival of Generation Z in the company will radically change B2B sales. Forget the overly commercial sales pitch with Generation Z! Adopt a more conversational approach, favor more visual video content, and deliver your messages at the right time.Salespeople will also need to be more creative in their approach and structure their message to better hook this profile.
3 - Ultra-personalization: the next stage in B2B sales in 2024
More informed and more demanding, the buyer expects added value and a real level of expertise from the salesperson. They want the sales person to be aware of their issues, to be able to adopt a personalized approach to their needs and to provide them with a real value proposition. This requires the sales person to better prepare for meetings, to have a better understanding of the customer's business and challenges, and to be able to listen and adapt more effectively.
Personalization is no longer an option, and seems to be relatively well integrated by sales reps. In 2023, ultra-personalization will gradually take over. According to LinkedIn, 73% of sales reps customers say they do more research on their prospects before contacting them. Salespeople will need to mobilize all the data they need to personalize and contextualize their approach. It will no longer be possible to ignore data! Companies without a framework for operationalizing data analysis by 2024 will be at least 2 years behind in all their tactical initiatives (Gartner). Marketing & sales managers are aware of the stakes, even if there is still a great deal of work to be done on the quality of the data collected. 40% of marketers believe that poor data quality is a major obstacle to the buying experience and the personalization effort demanded by the B2B buyer (Experian).
4 - AI to improve your sales efficiency
AI is an increasingly important tool for sales reps, and this trend is set to continue in 2023 too. AI helps to understand buyer behavior, identify sales opportunities and improve sales reps' efficiency. This technology will undoubtedly become a "must-have" in salespeople's day-to-day support. The use cases for AI are almost infinite, and are already going from strength to strength. success with varying degrees of success from CRM data cleansing to conversational analysis and appointment optimization. For example, AI can suggest marketing content to sales reps during appointment preparation. This suggestion is possible because it is based on previous experiences analyzed by the AI and the knowledge it possesses about the buyer (buyer typology, structure of the company in which he or she works, degree of maturity on the subject, the company's sector of activity...). It can also prove formidable when it comes toup-selling or cross-selling by identifying the right moment to present content on a specific product.
Despite all these advantages, AI is not intended to replace B2B sales reps , but to accompany them. Selling remains above all a relational activity, and sales reps will always be needed to establish relationships of trust with buyers. However, by using AI strategically, sales reps will not only be able to improve their efficiency, but also offer an even more personalized sales experience tailored to the buyer's needs.
In summary, the outlook for B2B sales in 2023 will be heavily influenced by the shortage of skilled talent, the increasing complexity of B2B sales, the personalization of the sales relationship, and the increasing adoption of AI. To succeed, sales and marketing departments will need to equip the sales force with a Sales Enablement application to boost the performance of their sales organization.
