Sales Buyer Trends: A Guide to Selling into Sales

What are Buyer Trends?

There are few things more critical in B2B sales than understanding your customers’ buying priorities. Knowing their history, the challenges they face, the implications of their industry, and the needs of their employees. 

Skaled’s Buyer Trends are a nuanced way to tap into these priorities. We went directly to the executives who make these buying decisions and let them tell us what’s top of mind for them now and in the next year. In contrast, industry trends tend to take a survey approach and use random sample sets of strict questions to give you a general knowledge of what’s happening in the industry and not necessarily what’s important to the buyer.

What are Sales Buyer Trends?

Sales Buyer Trends are for sales teams who sell into sales. 

These trends and challenges are essential to the sales leaders of the companies we interviewed and trends we see daily as a sales consultancy.

Compared to other buyer trends, such as sellers who sell into Marketing, Human Resources, Real Estate, Finance, etc., Sales Buyer Trends can be a bit meta. That is, the critical trends to know for sellers selling into sales are also trends and challenges for sellers in general, selling into any industry. 

Therefore, in this article, we tried to limit our use of “seller or selling” when referring to the salespeople selling into sales and our use of “Sales” as the buyer. We wanted to make that clear before diving in. Nonetheless, if you sell a product or service to Sales teams, these trends will help you position and tailor your solution to what’s important to Sales buyers now.

What You Should Know Before Selling to Sales Teams

The primary trends shaping what Sales Leaders are buying include:

• • Engagement and Value-Driven Selling Tactics
  • Training for Selling via Zoom and other digital mediums
  • Buyer Empowerment: Frictionless and Faceless Selling
  • The Demand for Cross-Functional Tools
  • De-siloing Across Sales Team and Organization

From the interviews we conducted with Sales Executives, Sales teams are still looking for better ways to inject every customer experience with value, simplify the buyer journey, and align interdepartmental goals. These are common hurdles that Sales teams in any industry are honing in on. 

Sales is still trying to find new ways to connect with their buyers digitally while still providing a frictionless experience. Every Sales Executive and frontline Sales Rep has seen the shrinking interest buyers have in “traditional” sales approaches. Buyers want authenticity, free and relevant information, and they want an experience catered to their decision-making.

What Sales wants are new tools and playbooks to help them provide what their buyers want: value-driven, digital, and personalized experiences.

Related Content: Download the Top Six Priorities Shaping B2B Sales for more information.

How Sales Buyer Trends Help Sellers Sell to Sales Teams

These six buyer trends are directing what tools, platforms, and expertise Sales executives are buying to innovate and restructure their processes and methodologies in a world of customer-driven sales. 

Use them to frame how you can help Sales teams remove friction for their buyers and remove friction from internal process challenges.

For example, if you’re a sales engagement platform that allows reps to reach out and connect with 100s of buyers a day, how is that helping teams create a more value-driven sales process? Instead, you should highlight the features that allow Sales to personalize outreach and datasets that allow them to see what emails and content buyers are finding the most valuable and engaging with. Suppose you’re talking to a manager or admin. In that case, they probably care about how this tool integrates with other tools and what data they can collect on the organizational, team, and individual levels.

This is a simple example, but the point is that you are using what you now know is a priority for Sales teams to frame your message and your product. Keeping up with buyer trends in B2B Sales and customizing your strategy with their priorities in mind will give you an advantage in outreach, demos, and closing conversations. 

These Buyer Trends in Sales are meant to help you better engage with your Sales buyers as a sales technology or services provider.

Access Sales Buyer Trends

By leveraging the Sales Buyer Trends as a resource for directing your messaging and positions, you can better connect with the Sales teams you engage with and ensure your reps understand how they can affect change in their buyer’s organization. 

Explore the entire collection of interviews and download The Top Six Trends Shaping B2B Sales.