Business best practices are always changing and it’s important for teams to keep their finger on the pulse of what’s new. This is especially true for sales, when your success depends on the market trends. How you discover and communicate with prospects now is wildly different from how sales representatives may have done things ten years ago.
Here are 4 sales trends to keep in mind in 2023.
Personalized pitches
Personalization is a big trend that continues to make its way across sales and marketing. From personalized ads to unique sales collateral, clients appreciate you doing your due diligence. Tailoring client-facing materials to reflect their pain-points and use cases can give you an edge over the competition, making your efforts more successful.
In sales, this can be thoughtful emails or personalized pitches. A personalized pitch might include the prospect or client’s branding, their situation, an answer to their pain points, relevant references, or examples based on their use case.
Beautiful.ai makes it easy to tailor each pitch deck to respective prospects. Our custom theming makes branding more seamless, allowing you to create and save a theme specific to each client, and apply it to their pitch. With one click, the theme— colors, fonts, logos— will automatically be applied to each slide within the deck. It’s also easy to repurpose existing sales content and copy presentation slides to make edits specific to new prospects. This helps expedite the sales presentation design process without having to start a pitch from scratch each time.
More account-based selling
Cold calls are out, account-based selling is in. Account-based selling (ABS) is a more targeted and personalized approach to traditional sales strategies. In this method, teams focus on their target audience and identify high-value accounts that they want to pitch. With this new method, lead-based selling is becoming less common. ABS can be more successful for sales teams looking to move into the enterprise space, or close deals with larger organizations.
On the same coin, maintaining the accounts is a higher priority for sales teams. In 2023 and beyond, you can expect to see nurturing existing customer relationships taking precedence over new customer acquisition. For sales teams, this might mean account manager roles which would tend to existing customers in the hopes of extending or upgrading their contracts.
Implement automation
There’s a lot of trends surfacing with the latest AI boom. For sales teams that means automation. Sales teams can implement AI to help automate repetitive tasks that are key to the customer journey like lead generation, or email and communications. Because automation is making communication more efficient, increasing touch-points for customers is becoming increasingly popular as well.
A touchpoint is considered any encounter where a prospect or consumer engages with a business or sales rep. This can vary from something as simple as exchanging information or addressing questions, to handling a transaction. It’s been said that it can take between 5 to 7 touchpoints to close a deal, so being able to automate some of that can help sales teams become more efficient and productive.
Collaboration between sales and marketing
In 2023, we’re seeing a lot more collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Sure, the two have historically worked together. Specifically, marketing has supported sales with sales collateral or making sure their pitch decks look professional and on brand. But now we’re seeing the two work together to get a better understanding of their audience and how to talk to them.
Marketing can support sales through social selling— a strategy that prioritizes fostering relationships with prospects on social media through paid and organic posts. The same social posts, or other marketing campaigns, can also help with lead generation for sales discovery. In return, sales teams can support marketing efforts by informing their target audience, what their use cases are, and how to talk to them in campaigns. By working together, the two can create a more accurate and customized strategy to win more business.
