The State of Sales, from Salesforce

Let’s also talk about some sales.

Sixty-nine percent of sales professionals say selling is more challenging now than before the pandemic, according to the State of Sales 2022 report from Salesforce Research. 

Quoting ZDNet with four key findings:

1. The new sales mantra: maximizing impact. Companies are moving away from high-risk strategies as they battle inflation, supply chain bottlenecks, regulatory uncertainty, and political disruption. And yet, sales reps are under pressure to hit targets. It’s a huge challenge. 
2. Sales operations boost efficiency. Operational efficiency is taking on growing importance. Sales ops are expanding into a more strategic role, tasked with enabling reps to spend more time in customer conversations. Sales reps spend only 28% of their week actually selling. 
3. Reps strive to meet rising buyer expectations. Buyers are looking for sales reps to meet them wherever they are, regardless of channel: eCommerce platforms, social media networks, and personal assistants. Buyers then expect sales reps to act as sophisticated, trusted advisors. Organizations connect with buyers on an average of 10 channels. 
4. The seller experience gets a second look. Companies are reviewing training programs and benefits while optimizing territories and sales enablement tools to set employees up for success. New headcount is limited, and a 25% turnover is expected in sales organizations over the next 12 months.

I’m also going to highlight some specific trends from the ten listed.

1. Buyers expect well-informed sales teams with sophisticated insights. The report found that 81% of sales reps say buyers increasingly conduct research before they reach out. This was an eye-opening finding: 87%of business buyers expect sales reps to act as trusted advisors.
2. The marriage experience has to be better than the courtship experience. The report found that 80% of sales reps say maintaining customer relationships after the close is increasingly important.
3. Sales teams are drowning in tools and overwhelmed with data. The report found that 94% of sales organizations plan to consolidate their tech stack in the next 12 months.

Why do we care?

That last one – that’s another example of “less is more.”   Customers don’t need more systems; they need to use the ones they have better.       That’s playing out in sales teams.

There are obvious insights here to implement so that I won’t belabor those.  I will highlight that hiding any of your information… including pricing… doesn’t play well with those rising buyer expectations.