This entry is our 10th anniversary of making B2B sales predictions. We started exploring sales trends in 2015 and have since listed the six most significant trends we expect to gain popularity among B2B sales professionals each year.
Below, you will find all the predictions from 2016 until 2024. As you can see, there are 54 predictions in total 👇
Already 8-9 years ago, we predicted that Sales Automation and Artificial Intelligence would become hot topics in B2B sales. We also saw the rise of new roles, such as Sales Development Reps (SDRs).
5-6 years ago, it was all about sales playbooks, Sales Operations, and personalization, driven by the increasing amount of data available for sales organizations.
Post-COVID, many companies started to invest in new tactics such as Product-Led Growth (PLG) and digital sales rooms, and salespeople became more hybrid. Revenue Operations (RevOps) was a new concept implemented across many industries. Lately, the buzz has been around generative AI (GenAI), and companies have started to explore new AI tools and agents.
Last year, we also wrote about signal-based selling, which helps salespeople pursue conversations when the window of a sales opportunity is likely to open up. Another new term mentioned last year was near-bound, as we saw many companies investing in ecosystem-led growth, where partners played a larger role in pipeline creation.
How about 2025? What are the most important trends shaping the B2B sales industry in the upcoming year?
Without further ado, here are our six predictions for 2025.
- AI Agents and Co-pilots starting to become mainstream
- Discipline as a competitive edge
- Founder/Executive-led sales & lead generation
- Retention is the key
- Self-serve adoption continues to grow
- Time for Chief GTM Officers
B2B Sales Trends 2025
1. AI Agents and Co-pilots starting to become mainstream
The largest CRM vendors, Salesforce, Microsoft, and HubSpot, have all released their CRM copilots. These copilots assist salespeople in recurring tasks such as writing emails, updating CRMs, researching prospects, creating workflows, and building dashboards.
In addition, thousands of vendors provide AI applications for every aspect of the B2B buyer journey. Many companies even have internal AI projects that aim to provide something concrete and tailored for their sales teams to enhance productivity.
Our Prediction: In 2025, many tests and pilots will happen in different parts of the organization. Some of these tests will fail, but some will end up in production and be adopted for broader use in the organization.
This reality puts extra pressure on Revenue Operations teams that oversee Go-To-Market (GTM) technology stacks. How do they ensure that salespeople have a documented way to use the technology most effectively?
One interesting side-effect of the AI boom is its impact on sales technology user interfaces. For years, salespeople have had to learn how to navigate between different tabs, modules, and features in their sales tools.
Soon, most sales tools will start providing natural language user interfaces, which means fewer clicks and easier navigation. Salespeople will need to be good at describing what they want to do and achieve with these tools—in other words, prompting.
The largest CRM vendors, Salesforce, Microsoft, and HubSpot, have all released their CRM copilots... In addition, thousands of vendors provide AI applications for every aspect of the B2B buyer journey. Many companies even have internal AI projects that aim to provide something concrete and tailored for their sales teams to enhance productivity.
2. Discipline as a competitive edge
In a world where, every day, there’s a new application to try out, a new framework to utilize, and a new must-do-this trick to stay competitive, the most successful salespeople will be good at one thing: Doing their job systematically.
We believe that discipline is what sets successful salespeople apart from the ones who fail to meet their goals. You don’t have to follow every tip from LinkedIn or implement yet another shiny AI automation app to build your pipeline and close business. Instead, “all” you need to do is be disciplined and consistent and ensure you maximize the time you spend with your potential customers.
It’s challenging to map any customer journey 100% right in the digital world. We all know the sales process is rarely linear and rarely goes as planned in the sales playbooks. But that doesn’t mean we need to overcomplicate things, either. Simplicity is a good way to regain trust, and simplicity can be implemented in the sales process and how we communicate with our customers. And we need to do it systematically and in a disciplined manner.
discipline is what sets successful salespeople apart from the ones who fail to meet their goals... “all” you need to do is be disciplined and consistent and ensure you maximize the time you spend with your potential customers.
3. Founder/Executive-led sales & lead generation
It might sound cliché, but B2B is H2H. Buyers don’t trust and follow brands—they trust and follow people. Social selling through influencers is by no means a new trend, but we expect an increasing number of founders and executives to take an active role in demand and lead generation.
Some founders build their companies like a reality television show. They share the good, the bad, and the ugly. And they do it multiple times each week, sometimes even daily or many times daily. They educate the market, share lessons learned, and encourage others to do the same. Some of them manage to build a meaningful audience among their ideal buyers and end up being one of the most successful lead generation sources for the whole company.
This trend is most visible in the technology industry, but we expect founders and executives in other industries to follow suit in 2025.
Some [founders] manage to build a meaningful audience among their ideal buyers and end up being one of the most successful lead generation sources for the whole company.
4. Retention is the key
The macroeconomic environment has not been too easy the past couple of years. Even though there are some signs of recovery, we expect longer sales cycles, more thorough purchasing processes, and CFO involvement in sales processes to continue in 2025.
Because new business acquisitions have been and will continue to be challenging, many companies have focused more on customer retention. While not all companies operate with recurring revenues, such as subscription businesses, selling to existing customers is often cheaper than gaining new customers.
Centralized revenue operations teams will segment existing customers just like they have been segmenting prospects for years. Analytics and data teams will be busy assembling health scores and identifying new potential upsell and cross-sell opportunities within the existing customer base. Gross and net retention and customer lifetime value (CLTV) are being reported in more and more executive team and board meetings.
While not all companies operate with recurring revenues, such as subscription businesses, selling to existing customers is often cheaper than gaining new customers.
5. Self-serve adoption continues to grow
Our 2018 trend report highlighted that millennials were joining sales teams. Now, they are also increasingly decision-makers. This is worth noting because, according to Gartner, millennials are more skeptical of sales rep interaction and prefer a digital self-serve buying process more than their predecessors.
Forrester predicts that in 2025, more than half of large B2B transactions ($1M or greater) will be processed through self-serve channels, such as the vendor’s website or marketplace, as millennials and Generation Z increase their market dominance.
Even if the transaction is processed through self-serve channels, it doesn’t mean the sales process is conducted without a sales rep's involvement with these high price points. It just changes salespeople’s role; they must reposition themselves as guides and navigators to help their buyers buy.
B2B sales teams with a low price point and transactional outbound sales teams must find the right balance between the price point and sales involvement. We expect a steady increase in the price point that buyers are comfortable deciding without a direct 1-to-1 involvement from the buyer side.
[millennials] are increasingly decision-makers... [and they] are more skeptical of sales rep interaction and prefer a digital self-serve buying process more than their predecessors.
6. Time for Chief GTM Officers
Fancy titles come and go. Sales and marketing alignment has been discussed for years, and several titles, such as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), Chief Operating Officer (COO), and Chief Growth Officer (CGO), have been suggested as an answer to the potential misalignment between sales and marketing.
In today’s business environment, sales and marketing alignment is not enough. We’ve seen it in the operations function, where SalesOps and MarketingOps people have started to move into the new cross-functional team called Revenue Operations. These teams try to break the silos not only between Sales and Marketing but also between Customer Success, Product, and Finance.
More data, technology, tools, and frameworks are available to go-to-market teams than ever before, and that means the time may be right for Chief Go-To-Market Officers to emerge to keep the overall revenue generation strategy clear and concise.
Like RevOps teams, these executives will work closely with Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product, and Finance. They will report key metrics, such as customer acquisition cost (CAC), net retention, product usage, and annual/actual contract value (ACV). They will oversee the Go-To-Market organization, its strategy, and budget. They will lead the market approach, including Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Total Addressable Market (TAM) analysis and sales and marketing structure.
Chief GTM Officers are leaders of selling—wherever and whenever it happens—rather than leaders of sellers.
the time may be right for Chief Go-To-Market Officers to emerge to keep the overall revenue generation strategy clear and concise.
See you next year!
The rise of AI agents, co-pilots, and data-driven decision-making will shape the future of B2B sales, shifting the sales organization toward digital-first strategies. Retention and disciplined execution will emerge as competitive advantages, alongside the continued growth of self-serve models and the popularity of founder/executive-led sales.
This transformation highlights the need for new leadership, such as Chief GTM Officers, to integrate these trends into practical go-to-market playbooks and strategies. Organizations will need to make sales decisions based on data and analytics instead of intuition and gut feeling.
Despite all these trends, however, an individual salesperson's success depends on the same things as before: How well can you figure out the customer pain, showcase the value, and disciplinedly execute the go-to-market playbook daily?
