As businesses had to deal with the changes enforced upon them for more than 12 months, businesses that survived the global pandemic now see themselves as more focused and attentive to sales effectiveness compared to earlier days. In fact, a survey conducted in 2021 stated that about 75% of business leaders believe that the steps they have taken to adapt to the current changes will effectively serve them in the coming future.
However, buyers actually continue to work from home, online sales have seen an increase, and the pandemic has left a lot of companies on edge. Despite all these things, the company's goals & objectives for this year might be the same: to grow and increase revenue. In order to do that, you need to be more informed about the behavior of the buyer, the latest industry trends, and trends in sales management.
And the success of a business completely lies in its capability to anticipate any changes and be able to manage and strategize plans effectively. Consequently, we have made it easy for all the companies who are looking for the latest sales trends by stating the top sales trends in 2023.
In this article, we are going to present the top 8 sales trends that are transforming how businesses win their consumers and close more deals!
Here Are The Top 8 Sales Trends:
1. Powerful & Effective CRM Platforms
Building connections with customers nowadays is an important factor to pay attention to! It encompasses ongoing communications through social media, emails, phone calls, live chats, and web forms. In addition, the amount of consumer information and profile details impedes data analysis and decision-making, even for good employees.
Here CRM platforms come into the picture. These platforms have become a massive part of foin great business today. When it comes to small companies, they are also successfully implementing CRM solutions that help in boosting their sales, marketing, and service professionals streamline processes.
edge CRM provided many opportunities for multichannel communications, routine task automation, complete control of the consumer's journey, etc. There are various advantages that a CRM solution can offer to companies; some of these benefits specifically contribute to the sales growth of the company; they are:
Campaign Management
Activity Management
Data Centralization
Sales Analytics & Forecasting
Multiple Reporting Opportunities
Lead & Sales Pipeline Management.
360° Customer View
Besides, there are numerous communication options available in the CRM. For instance — it enables you to manage all the activities, integrate your CRM with a mobile system, augment customer data, access reports, etc.
Also Read, Top Sales Forecasting Methods
2. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR), these two continue to make huge jumps in providing consumers with direct & personal experience. AR & VR technologies are especially substantial for organizations that totally rely on the visual impact to boost sales growth. While considering the shift in customer preferences and online presence of most organizations, AR solutions instantly attain attraction with the augmented reality market to produce around $461 billion in revenue by the year 2030.
At the current moment, we keep on seeing so many changes around us. Today's customers prefer online shopping, which provides retailers with abundant opportunities and challenges to gratify their present requirements. AR and VR are powerful & influential instruments that genuinely help the e-commerce industry provide interactive shopping and virtual product experience for consumers. As a consequence, this enhances the bottom line.
3. The Internet of Things
The Internet of Things is apparently more than just a trend that has been able to attract our attention over the years. Sales and marketing these two are the ones that can benefit a lot from this technology. Rather than market analysis or intuition, companies can now use the power of IoT devices and applications to assemble and evaluate customer data in real time. Consequently, this helps streamline the realization of customer needs and anticipating further opportunities.
The perfect IoT solution enables organizations to monitor customer behavior, provide answers to their preferences more flexibly and guide them. The Internet of things will definitely remain one of the most influential technology trends when it comes to sales & marketing, playing a vital role in supporting better customer experience as well as sales productivity. Subsequently, the IoT helps in advancing:
Targeting Your Audience
Consumer Engagement
Data & Analytics
Process Automation
4. Speech Recognition And Call Analytics
You might have heard about speech recognition and AI-powered call analytics, right? Yes, they are the rapidly growing and world-changing technologies that help interpret, process, and understand valuable conversations.
All these solutions help us simplify our daily lives with voice-powered apps and ultimately improve sales team productivity. So many companies energetically accept speech analytics technology in their company's applications. It enables them to know the preferences, expectations, and requirements of their prospects & clients much better.
One of the best uses of these solutions is transcribing calls with your customers and seizing valuable information from these discussions. With the implementation of AI and ML solutions, you can examine this data to create apprised judgments and apply the outcomes in many empirical ways. These help in so many ways, such as:
Train your employees
Gauge the results of various activities
Leverage Your Knowledge Ground
Lets you understand the customer's requirements
Monitor script adherence
Score your reps
Determine high skills that result in conversion
5. Mobile Solutions
Several studies have found that around 76% of customers prefer shopping using mobile devices as it helps them to save a lot of time. Plus, 12% of consumers are satisfied & content with the mobile shopping experience. This means that there are abundant opportunities to capture and a good amount of space for improvement.
It doesn't matter if the mobile version of a website is developed with responsive, adaptive, or standalone design because it cannot always provide the best user experience. In most situations, mobile apps possess a user-friendly interface and allow a better user experience when compared to mobile websites.
Today, mobile devices have obviously become an integral part of everyone's life and for all generations. Therefore, a mobile application developed clearly for your business requirements is considered a powerful tool to support your sales growth. It offers organizations with so many advantages, such as:
Increasing Revenue
Boosting Sales
Creating A Powerful Brand
Improving loyalty and customer engagement
6. Chatbots
When we talk about chatbots, they have contributed a lot in transforming the way businesses communicate with their clients. A recent survey stated that chatbots would power up to 85% of customer service in the upcoming future. Most customers like interacting with chatbots because they provide a 24-hour service that delivers precise & accurate answers to all their queries. They are well-known for providing amazing customer service without any delay or confusion. This is why chatbots are becoming more famous in every industry. Chatbots will continue to be an essential sales trend that will make sure to provide a smooth customer experience.
7. Videos
Everyone likes watching videos, whether it is educational, informational, or entertaining. They're never going to go out of trend because videos are engaging, appealing, and fun to watch. Videos are becoming one of the most effective tools of communication everywhere, especially in the sales industry. Videos are an amazing way to present your products & services, as they fetch you a high engagement rate.
According to a report generated by HubSpot, 65% of adults prefer watching video content. Plus, the increase in click-through rate when it comes to videos is about 96%, and they are shared 1200% more times when compared to text, images, or links. Luckily, with the abundance of user-friendly online video editing tools available, creating high-quality videos is easier than ever. Videos are going to remain the most prominent sales trends, and therefore, you need to keep an eye on them.
8. User-Generated Content
User-generated content means any content that is specially designed & created for the users and posted on different platforms online. This has become the most popular sales trend, which is responsible for changing the way individuals are making a perspective about sales. This is because people tend to trust other individuals more than they have faith in companies.
According to a survey, 90% of the buyers stated that user-generated content influenced their judgments about buying more than any other medium of advertising. This is a fact because customers often check online reviews before dealing with a business. This sales trend depends on bringing your audience to promote your brand for you, and it must be given top priority as it helps strengthen your brand's image.
Summing It Up
As half of the employees have realized that they rejoice in the opportunity to work from home, and businesses take it as a cost efficiency of remote work, it must be fair to say that virtual selling will stay here. For the time being, the advent of AI seems to lessen sales interchanges in the physical world, with extra sales talks being more automated than before.
At the same time, businesses are also trying to explore many ways to fight against increased rates of post-purchase regret that move forward with detached, undifferentiated selling. This tells us that sales reps are really far from obsolete, at least for the moment. But, they will deal with software & tools and sales analytics in the next few years.