What are the top eight focus areas for sales leaders in 2024?
We asked a range of sales experts to share their focus areas in 2024.
Perhaps unsurprisingly their biggest priority is the impact of AI.
1. Harnessing AI
AI and specifically generative AI like ChatGPT is the buzzword in sales for 2024. These cutting-edge technologies are advancing quickly, and sales teams are urgently trying to wrap their heads around how to leverage them. The potential for AI to automate tasks, provide predictive insights, enhance interactions and more. But with opportunity comes responsibility. Sales leaders need to establish ethical guardrails as adoption accelerates.
Getting this right will require sales leaders to be clear about the heart of their function. While processes can be automated, revenue is generated by connecting human to human. The sellers who thrive in the AI age will be those who double-down on emotional intelligence, complex consultative skills, creative problem solving, and building trust.
Sales should embrace automation but an exclusive focus on smart tech will fail. The message for 2024 is clear; human relationships still drive sales success even as AI transforms the experience. Leaders who embrace this human-machine balance will future-proof both revenue and reputation.
2. Proving the value of sales
With widespread layoffs and belt-tightening now impacting sales teams across almost every industry, sales leaders are facing pressure to clearly demonstrate the value of the sales function. They need to showcase through hard data and analytics how sales activities directly drive revenue, growth, and overall business success. By highlighting sales’ strategic impact with numeric proof points, leaders can justify retaining and potentially growing headcount.
3. Understanding the buyer journey
The pandemic further changed buyer behaviours and the purchase journey. With more happening digitally, and buyers conducting more self-directed research, sales needs to dive-deep into better understanding how prospects learn, evaluate and make purchase decisions.
Leaders should prioritize enablement programs to help sellers truly understand their buyer’s purchase journey and create tailored, consultative outreach.
4. Rethinking sales management
Managing remote and hybrid sales teams requires skills that some managers have yet to learn. Sales managers will benefit from further education on leading through influence, motivating at a distance, monitoring productivity virtually and encouraging collaboration digitally. It’s time for sales leaders to revisit management training programs.
5. Focusing on skills development
As automation takes over more basic tasks, sellers need to refresh their relationship-building, complex solution-selling and softer skills like the use of emotional intelligence.
Sales leaders should collaborate with learning and development to identify in-demand capabilities and revamp enablement programs, mentoring, and career paths accordingly. Data and assessments can help.
6. Supporting seller well being
Burnout and stress have risen considerably for sales teams. The expectation is to be always on top of your game and hitting ever increasing targets.
Sales operations need to take charge of monitoring workloads, helping sellers establish proper work-life boundaries and supporting leaders to spot signs of teams becoming overwhelmed. Offering flexibility, modelling healthy behaviours and support can often help. Addressing wellness retains talent.
7. Advancing EDI in sales
Diverse sales teams are proven to out-perform consistently, but hiring and promoting from minority backgrounds still creates gaps in sales teams. Leaders must embed equitable practices into recruiting, enablement, goal setting, evaluation, coaching and succession planning, while establishing accountability mechanisms to drive change.
8. Adopting sales technology
With boards scrutinising budgets more closely, sales operations will need to prove that technology investments align to business goals and clearly demonstrate a strong ROI. Innovation is imperative to support digital selling, enable remote team unity, provide skills reinforcement, exploit AI and enhance the customer experience. Prioritising those technology tools which check multiple boxes is prudent when bidding for investment.
Opportunities for the future
In summary, sales needs to embrace AI but there are many other things to consider. Leaders who understand AI’s responsible use will transform their function, but they forget the human side at their peril.