B2B sales have always required a special approach, but growing customer demands coupled with rapid technological advances have made it imperative that sales teams have the right strategy, people, and tools to close deals quickly.
Customers expect interactions to be frictionless, fast, and personalized – and brands that can’t deliver will lose customers and leads to those that can. Still, in the race to win customers, it’s important for sellers to remain thoughtful and strategic.
AI and other tools bring exciting new insights and potential that could transform the B2B sales landscape, yet teams need to balance this cutting-edge technology with a human touch if they’re going to drive sales and grow revenue.
We dive into what sales teams need to succeed in 2024 and beyond in our guide, “B2B Sales Trends: 4 strategies to ignite growth and boost revenue.”
AI, data become drivers of sales success
If last year was the year everyone was talking about AI, 2024 is shaping up to be the year sales teams put it into action. As AI moves from hype to real-world applications, savvy sellers are using its analytics capabilities to give them more information about customers – so they can sell smarter, not harder.
One of AI’s greatest benefits is its ability to empower sales reps. Use conversational and generative AI to collect and comb through huge volumes of interaction data. AI can listen in on every prospecting and sales call, then examine all the resulting data to pull out trends and patterns.
With all that data, AI can identify opportunities and roadblocks, and sales teams can use those insights to help them tailor conversations and drive conversions. Rather than relying on their best guess of what sales approach will resonate with customers, sellers now have access to data-backed insights that give them more confidence and a higher chance of conversions during interactions.
When a logistics company wanted to grow the incremental revenue it generated from its embedded base of small and mid-sized businesses, for instance, AI-powered speech analytics let it analyze the behaviors of top and bottom performers in the sales team during calls. That generated insights that helped the company optimize call flow and spread best practices among the team. Monthly sales per seller jumped 65% and incremental revenue per seller rose 32%.
Yet for all its amazing potential, AI is only as strong as the data feeding it, so clean data is a must. Investing in data annotation, the human-led process of labeling and categorizing data before it’s fed to AI, is key to ensuring your AI models are accurate, comprehensive, efficient, and driving the results you need.
Make this your best B2B sales year yet
Harnessing the power of AI and data is just one of the trends we expect to transform the B2B sales landscape in 2024 and beyond. To thrive in the modern sales landscape, teams need to strike the right balance of humans and AI, but also have the right motions and strategies in place to bring deals across the finish line.
To see the other trends poised to reshape the sales landscape, check out our trends guide, “B2B Sales Trends: 4 strategies to ignite growth and boost revenue.”
