The One Sales Trend You Need to Master in 2024

Where do sales trends come from?

To answer this question, we can take a look at the fashion industry.

Each year, new trends emerge that either fizzle away quickly or become a mainstay. For example, in the 1980s both shoulder pads and leggings rose in popularity for women, but only one has remained an everyday staple—leggings.

Retail and fashion trend researcher Anja Bisgaard Gaede says,

״A trend is the beginning of a new direction, adding a turn, twirl, or twist to something that already exists. It starts something fresh and then, over time, will become the norm as new trends emerge.״

So, what new ‘turns, twirls, or twists’ are sales trends facing in 2024?

The biggest trend we see on the horizon is a buyer-first approach. Thought leadership, social selling, and account-based marketing are still top strategies, but will be applied according to this principle. In 2024, expect to see organizations let go of some previously tried-and-true ways of selling and communicating with customers, as they move in this direction!

Buyer-first selling has been at the forefront of conversations for at least a decade now, with most leaders dabbling in it, but not putting their customers first in every aspect. In today’s article, we’ll reveal our findings, showing how leaders will alter current sales trends to put buyers first. Plus, we have fresh insights from industry experts to help you bring your organization on board.

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Buyer-first—the fastest-growing sales trend today

Buyer-first (also known as customer-centric) is the fastest-growing sales trend for 2024. It’s not a strategy, but an approach that prioritizes your prospects’ and consumers’ decision making process above all else.

You may ask yourself, ‘Doesn’t every company put their buyers first?’ The answer is not so simple. Some sales teams believe they are putting customers first, but in actuality, they’re focused on their own priorities.

For example:

• Dialing cold calls at 9 AM when your sales rep is most productive, despite data showing prospects have more availability to be contacted around 2 PM.
• Wasting time and resources selling on channels or touchpoints that high-value customers rarely frequent because it’s easier for you.
• Selling to customers solely based on their behavior at touchpoints, instead of having a conversation with them to verify your findings.

This trend in selling isn’t new, nor is it going away anytime soon. Some leaders may say it’s impossible to always put customers first without hurting their own strategy and processes, but the truth is, if they don’t put their buyers first, it’s going to hurt them anyway!

Customers today demand this approach, so you can either train your team accordingly or get left behind, losing potential business.

3 sales trends that are getting a “buyer-first” makeover

1. Lengthy B2B sales cycles will be challenged

B2B sales cycles are painfully long (like being in line at the DMV long!) The wait to close a deal can be anywhere from 3 months to a year!

This usually depends on the product or service being sold, the industry, the customer base, the number of decision-makers needed for a buy-in, and the efficiency of the sales team.

Today, organizations are challenging the notion that decision-makers need or even want a long sales cycle to begin with.

New sales trends show that decision-makers are capable of making choices quicker if they have the right resources. In fact, 60% of them say yes to a meeting if sales reps contact them during the consideration stage, after they’ve researched and come up with a short list of options to buy from.

How will sales cycles be challenged?

Alejandro Cabral, Global Leader for Digital Sales at Kimberly-Clark Professional, says,

״Customers and sales cycles have changed way faster than salespeople, especially in the B2B space. That’s a powerful acknowledgment. It means that we need to run faster because customers are needing us less and less every single day.״

2024 sales trends show an emphasis on re-examining what prospects need, as well as how they prefer to learn, engage, and connect with sales teams. Sales cycles must be challenged in order to meet the new, shorter buying periods of customers.

Here are three ways organizations are shortening cycles while putting customers first:

1. Connecting with buyers later in the consideration stages, ensuring they have the best sales enablement content on hand (case studies, articles, and video content) to speed their prospect’s research and set up a meeting sooner.
2. Prioritizing and enforcing more follow-ups (at least 4-5) and being persistent. A sales tip for 2024 is to ask your prospect exactly when they want to be contacted, i.e, “Would you like a follow-up next Wednesday at noon?”
3. Review your sales prospecting tools. Oftentimes reps have software that don’t deliver enough accurate, or updated data points about their leads, prospects and customers. This can cause teams to create pitches or content that doesn’t speak to their problem or help them make a purchasing decision quicker. A lead enrichment tool, like Lusha’s email finder Chrome extension delivers personal and firmographic data about your leads as well as updated email addresses. It delivers correct data 97% of the time!

2. Sales reps will have to cut the small

Another major trend in selling is account-based marketing. This is when you group high-value customers (those who generate the most revenue) by similar characteristics (industry, company size, etc.) or business needs. These groups are referred to as an ‘account.’ Once customers are segmented, reps will use hyper-personalized messaging, pitches and content to win them over.

With the rise of account-based marketing, there’s been a push in sales trends toward better data insights. Insights are what you have after you collect, analyze, and interpret relationships between customer data. After gathering deep, nuanced, and contextual insights around high-value customers, you can give them an experience like no other!

In sales trends for 2021, we saw a huge rise in the ROI of ABM programs. The 2020 State of ABM Report shows 94.2% of respondents now have an active ABM program (up from 77% in 2019). Mature ABM programs now account for 79% of all sales opportunities. Imagine what it will be in 2024!

With that kind of ROI, there’s a huge incentive for marketing and sales teams to create content that resonates with high-value customers. A survey by CEB found that individual stakeholders were 40% more willing to buy from suppliers whose content was tailored to their specific needs.

Besides collecting data, it’s crucial for sales reps to also ask for context to develop accurate insights.

Sales expert Morgan Ingram explains,

״What I tell people is, don’t come into a discovery call and ask them how’s the weather. That’s not going to build trust, because now you’re like everyone else. I noticed such a huge shift in the way that people started trusting me when I began to hop on the call and I say, “Hey, you know, real quick before we dive into this, I just want to give you just a quick summary of what I found when I was doing research.” And then I’m like, “Hey, I saw on your website that you’re targeting security professionals.

I noticed that you have these case studies on your website. I noticed that you’re hiring a couple SDRs and AEs, which is pretty cool. That means that you’re probably growing here in the next couple months. And I also saw on your profile, you used to work at Salesforce. Is that all accurate or am I missing anything?” And it’s fascinating because when you do that, they open up to you for, like, 10 minutes, and then you have all this information—because you took the time to do that research.״

By using a buyer-first approach with the account-based marketing sales trend, you’ll no longer have insights without context. You will be able to verify exactly why your customer made a decision without guessing or misinterpreting data. Then, you can focus on creating sales enablement content which speaks directly to their problems.

3. An end to gatekeeping information and content

Another sales trend we see is marketing and sales teams opening up the gates of content and resources they previously held behind paywalls and lead forms.

In the past, companies kept content gated in order to generate leads or build email lists, but that approach is becoming problematic. When decision-makers are in their research and consideration phase, they don’t want to subscribe to every single company’s email list, especially for generic information. With email spam and Inbox Zero on the rise, decision-makers are becoming more selective about who they give contact information to.

A sales industry trend in 2024 is leaders speaking out against gated content.

Rick Bradberry, Principal Analyst at Forrester, says,

״Buyers are in control. With better purchase processes, strong peer networks, and more product information, prospects are defining the rules of marketing and selling. They never wanted gated content, email spam, cold calls, or discovery questions, but many sellers still do them. Buyers now have higher expectations.״

So what do buyers expect?

Decision-makers now want content, information, and resources available for free, without having to trade their contact information. If you don’t offer ungated content, they may decide to spend the beginning stages of their buyer’s journey researching with competitors.

Listen up—to apply this sales trend with a customer-centric mentality, you’ll have to make some sacrifices in the way your organization sells. This means designing your sales strategy around how your buyer wants to learn and engage with your team, even if it’s not your ideal way.

This also means giving up current rigid sales processes that don’t align with buyer preferences. If you’ve been paying close attention to the B2B vs. B2C in sales debate, B2B customers now prefer the B2C self-serve model, where they can research on their own without having to speak to a sales rep.

Some B2B sales leaders may think the self-serve model is costing them opportunities to build relationships with prospects by nurturing them, so they keep reaching out during stages when they are not ready to be contacted. With this model, you’ll use other ways to build a relationship with prospects.

Here are some tips on delivering ungated content:

1. Ungated content that’s generic or information that’s easily found online. Make it quick for decision-makers to get their research done, do comparisons and create a shortlist.
2. Turn your content into ongoing conversations on social media, peer groups, online communities, and forums. This will keep them focused on and discussing your company’s ideas, points, and opinions and you’ll also be able to build organic relationships.
3. Worried about losing leads with ungated content? A sales tip in 2024 is to track anonymous visitors through software where it can deliver the contact information and behavioral data of leads who didn’t fill out a form!

Key takeaways

• What’s the fastest growing sales trend today? The buyer-first approach, where B2B sales organizations prioritize the wants and needs of prospects and customers and design their sales strategy and activities around them.
• B2B sales prospecting strategies like ABM, social selling, and thought leadership are still popular sales trends in 2024, but organizations are taking drastic steps to ensure their customers are placed at the forefront in conversations and content.
• How do you master the buyer-first approach? Know exactly who your customers are and what they want. Download Lusha’s email finder Chrome extension. It can be used when prospecting on sites like LinkedIn and B2B websites. You’ll get updated and accurate email addresses, phone numbers, and a company profile within seconds. It’s a must-have if you want to have better data insights and implement a customer-centric approach.