Top SalesTech Trends for 2024

By Luba Reynolds, Managing Director at Sales Expand Ltd.

It is already the second month of the new year, with many Sales Kickoff (SKO) events taking place. So, as usual, it is now time to reflect on the previous year and review the market and trends to set goals for 2024.

Looking back at 2023, the major trends that dominated tech Sales were:

• Tough market climate across multiple industries and multiple regions, with customers cutting back their budgets and trying to optimise operational performance with the pressure of finding products that can help in business KPIs optimisation while providing value for money.
• Significant competition in tech with saturated markets across the globe making it harder to sell.
• ChatGPT created massive hype, with many companies turning to Generative AI as a ‘magic’ solution, still trying to understand how to integrate it to resolve complex bottlenecks in business processes.

Based on the results of the previous year and the upcoming trends in software development, these are our predictions for 2024:

1. GenAI tools are here to stay and will continue to dominate the trend. However, from the general LLM models used in ChatGPT, new LLM models will be created to adopt specific sales-related tools, like Salesforce and sales data sets.

We are already seeing multiple vendors working in SalesTech adopting AI to their products to optimise sales productivity, training, enablement and performance. Ask the vendors you currently use how they are planning to enrol AI features in their product suite so that you can set up and prepare the business for upcoming changes.

2. Buyer Enablement will become a new hype trend, starting a shift from Sales Enablement and Sales Performance tools which make sellers more productive to direct buyer attention, making the customer choose, play and pay for the product without major involvement from Sales teams.

It is a known fact that more than 60% of customers would prefer to avoid dealing with sellers. On the other hand, marketing automation and lead generation tools have become very sophisticated, making the next step of product selection and payment possible for buyers.

Digital Sales Rooms are one of the hottest investment trends in the SaaS market at the moment. In the near future, they will allow the customer to check the product, play with it using specific demos and pay using integrated payment solutions. Some SaaS vendors are already adopting some elements of Buyer Enablement. This allows them to cut the cost of Inside Sales & SDRs and reduce lead-to-close time while giving them the ability to segment and profile customers better. Sales teams will still be there, but they will be more specialised in dealing with specific customer requests and unusual situations, resulting in a heavier emphasis on AE skills.

3. Shifting to a Consumption-based model and strong value incentives for license pricing.

The subscription-based SaaS model has been very successful; however, in times of high competition, it is becoming more difficult to predict revenues. Introducing Consumption-based licensing (as a unit/piece of software that can be tracked per consumption such as volume of data, documents, processes, etc.) and restricting consumption in user-based licenses is already helping many profitable software companies in better revenue planning.

Consumption-based licensing does require some product updates to track consumption and make customers aware of the consumed amount, but it also requires new training approaches for Sales Reps and shifting to a different sales psychology (get in on a new account at a lower ticket, help customers to adopt, then expand). This trend is especially crucial for late-stage scale-ups that are slowing down with market expansion and need to adopt new ways of pricing and new GTM strategies.

4. All the above will result in finding new ways of training and enabling a new generation of sellerswith a mix of multiple sales methodologies and training approaches. Some service providers will start to adopt subscription-based models for services oriented to the achievement of specific KPIs. One example of this is the Sales Enablement as a Subscription Services model that Sales Expand Ltd is launching this year. Please connect with us if you would like to find out more.

This article is not written with the usage of ChatGPT. GenAI may help spot the current general patterns but, by definition of its model, lacks creativity on what needs to be done in the future.