It’s a new year and time to take a look at what business processes can be improved.  Taking a look at the 2020 sales trends should be at the top of your list.  Not surprisingly, technology is front and center when looking at what can improve your sales in 2020.  Gartner suggests that building high-performing teams, improving sales enablement, leveraging better sales operations and driving sales transformation will help with your sales going into 2020.  Some of these will be explored here.

To understand what your business should be doing differently this year, here is the list of top trends in sales in 2020:

Top 2020 Sales Trends

Trend #1 Consider Future Growth

Of course, you want to take a look at this coming year to ensure you have the right sales strategy in place but have you thought about next year?  How about three years from now?  Or ten?

In order to plan your sales appropriately, you should know what you want for the coming years.  Have a three, five, or ten-year strategy in place.  Know how much revenue you want to be taking in and what it’s going to take to get there.  Unlike planning for the coming year, you won’t have any idea what the technology trends in sales will be 10 years down the road.

Trend #2 Increase Sales Team’s Knowledge

Sales representatives have quite a bit of responsibility to know everything there is to know about their products.  But, is it enough?  Not really.  A good sales team will not only know their products backward and forward, but they’ll know their customers, their customers’ pain points, and numerous ways to reach out to them.

They should also have knowledge of the tools they use for sales, such as their customer relationship management (CRM) software.  They need to be able to strategize about how to reach their target audiences and be persistent in their targeting with consistent messaging and omnichannel capabilities.

Trend #3 Adopt AI and Machine Learning

If you want to help your sales team do more without having to hire more resources, artificial intelligence (AI) is the answer.  Coupled with machine learning capabilities, your sales team will be able to excel on a new level.

AI is a term used for any number of smart technologies available today.  Leveraging these in 2020, according to the Marketing AI Institute, will help your sales team improve their predictions, recommendations, and decisions based on data already gathered.  And, because AI has the ability to analyze huge amounts of data in a short amount of time, they will be able to personalize their sales.

AI can also help your sales team automate redundant processes and tedious tasks to get things done faster and more efficiently.

Trend #4 Provide Omnichannel Experience

Digital marketing has made reaching customers much easier with numerous options making it easy for customers to purchase on websites, on social media platforms, and in the brick-and-mortar store.  However, turning these digital marketing opportunities into an omnichannel experience will mean a customer can start looking into your product on one channel, Facebook for instance, and wherever they leave off there will continue into the next channel, your website for instance, and so on.

Wherever they are in the customer lifecycle, it will pick up with the next channel.  Your marketing strategy for that individual customer will be based on their behavior.   Shopify suggests starting with a multichannel approach so you are able to use all channels individually before trying to tie them all together.

Trend #5 Include Social Selling

Social media platforms offer a huge opportunity for selling.  Depending on your target audiences, your social platforms may differ.  Younger audiences are less likely to be on Facebook anymore but can be found on Instagram or YouTube more readily.  Your industry may also dictate your social media platforms.  If you are marketing to government entities, you may put most of your focus into LinkedIn, where home improvement DIYers are often found on Pinterest to find their next big idea as well as YouTube to learn how to execute it.

Plus, many of the social platforms out there today have opportunities for you to buy right from the platform.  No need to convince them to go to your website or store.

Trend #6 Collaboration with Marketing

Much of what goes into successful sales is successful marketing.  A sales trend in 2020 will be even more direct collaboration with marketing to collect and analyze data to convert into sales, as well as getting the right messages out.  Sales teams have a great deal of information they can feed to the marketing teams in order to produce marketing communication materials to increase sales.  Sales teams get an extra leg-up by having these materials to distribute to their potential customers.

Each team relies on the other and a highly successful sales team always collaborates with their marketing department.

Trend #7 Increase Your Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is growing in popularity, but it isn’t quite new.  However, trends in 2020 are broadening sales enablement.  In order to do so, you’ll need to go beyond making sure your sales team has the tools, training, and resources they need to move customers through the sales cycle.  Your sales team should also have the support of marketing, operations, customer service, etc. in order to do their job more efficiently.

Forbes suggests looking at all of your company’s processes from the perspective of the buyer so you can identify and eliminate buyer friction throughout the process.

Conclusion

Of course, you’ll still need to ensure your sales team has the best and most up-to-date technology to help them along the way.  Agile CRM is a solution that can help your team considerably while being kind to your budget.  With sales enablement, marketing automation, and customer service at the top of its priorities, it is an all-in-one CRM to get your sales team to the next level.

If you are looking for ways to increase sales in 2020, following above mentioned 2020 sales trends is a good start.  You’ll find that taking a more long-term look at your strategy and leveraging the technology that exists will be of significant help to your sales team and your bottom line.

If you would like to see if Agile CRM is right for your sales team, sign up for a lifetime free plan.