With an ever changing sales landscape, we have once again sought out the expertise of a few sales experts to share their sales insights into 2024 and what the world of sales will look like in the year ahead.
This year, we asked our experts “what sales tactics or strategies will sales teams put more effort in 2024?” here is what they had to say.
Steve Gruber -VA Partners
This year I think old is new. For account based sales, the cadence of emails followed by cold calls will be key. We are finding email engagement rates low, it is hard to work through spam detection and hence calling is another method of trying to reach the contact.
I think the second piece of this is adding a little more tailoring into the messaging if possible. You need to make your emails and calls stand out.
Karen Kelly – K2 Sales Academy
With the increase of new players in many industries, optimizing our outbound motions should be a priority for sales reps in 2024.
Standing out in a crowded space requires intentional personalization and a unique attention to detail.
Many sales reps are relying on technology to do the work for them. They are looking to scale and hit a massive audience. The challenge with this approach is they aren’t sure what is working or not on a smaller scale. This will produce more of the same with no awareness of how to further improve or what changes to make.
While technology is important, we can’t lose sight of our human touch. Our audience expects a bot, how can we highlight our message was written by a human?
Firstly, ensure we have a clear and compelling reason for our outreach. ie) funding, product launch, change in leadership etc. With these type of trigger events most messages will sound the same.
How can we take this trigger and tie into a priority? metric? to what others in the industry are doing? What is the impact? How will this influence the direction of the company? Go a layer deeper, think outside of the traditional box. Be different.
Get creative, allow our authentic self to come though, we are the differentiator.
Tim Davison- Togetherall
First, a bit of context. Togetherall is the leading provider of clinically moderated online peer support. Users access anonymously, allowing them to express themselves in a safe and supportive environment, and to connect with others with similar lived experience. Our model is B2B, with organizations purchasing from Togetherall so that their citizens, employees, members, or students can access it at no charge to the user.
We have a relatively small but mighty sales and marketing team. Our team works virtually and are geographically distributed across North America and the UK, our primary markets. Our most effective strategies for lead generation are events, both in-person and virtual. We typically host several virtual webinars each year, in addition to attending or sponsoring events or conferences that align closely to the industries and stakeholders that are a good fit for our offering. We tend to pair this without outsourced lead generation or SDR support. These events provide our partner with a regular flow of fresh contacts and topics to facilitate a conversation about Togetherall. This year we also plan to increase our emphasis on content marketing.
Tactically, we have increased our emphasis in recent months on cross-functional communication and collaboration across our account management, marketing, and sales teams. The goal is to ensure a clear and ongoing understanding of the following:
· what each team is working on
· what we are hearing from our customers, prospects, and other stakeholders
· key challenges
· sharing and celebrating of our successes
The more our teams are in sync on these items, the better equipped they are to support each other and stay aligned on our key priorities.
Marlene Keay- Virtual Causeway
Millennials will make up three-quarters of B2B buying teams in 2024. Forrester predicts that 40% will rate in-person meetings with product experts as their most valuable interaction in the buying process. There will be a focus on refining the buyer’s experience during the presentation phase of the buying cycle.
- More decision-makers involved in the buying process with most requiring executive approval. Our teams are looking at ways to engage all members of the buying team and get the executive approvers engaged earlier in the process.
- Continue to streamline processes, enhance customer experiences, and improve overall efficiency.
In 2024, we’ll continue to invest into our sales enablement programming. Figma’s successes as a product-led growth (PLG) business are well documented. Our all-in-one design platform has changed the way that the world’s leading design and product organizations work, and we’re lucky to have a phenomenally passionate community of advocates. Over the last few years, we’ve invested heavily into layering on an Enterprise sales motion so that we can deliver a customer experience that’s more appropriate for our largest and most strategic customers. The goal of our sales-led motion is to ensure that customers clearly see how a strategic relationship with us will impact their ability to collaboratively build great digital products, bring those products to market more efficiently, and attract and retain top talent. We’re most successful when we ensure that our sellers have the tools and resources they need to do value-based discovery, when they feel empowered to connect the dots between business pains and our value drivers, when they’re able to partner with their cross-functional peers as part of a process of value-based solutioning, and when they can craft and deliver value-based business cases with our champions and executive sponsors.
Our experts still have a lot to say about sales tactics and trends for 2024. Follow us on LinkedIn to learn more.
