Trend Watch: B2B Sales Predictions for 2025

Your Guide through Human-Inhabited, AI-Driven Terrain

Trend #1: Technology is Making B2B Sellers More Productive, But That Productivity Looks Different

Trend #2: It’s Not About You! Salespeople Are No Longer at the Center of the B2B Sale

Ben: We know from Gartner that 20% of buyers who purchase products or services without interacting with a salesperson are likely to experience regret about their purchase. Despite their preferences for self-education and engagement on their terms and time, they still need and want personalized, guided discovery, solutions, and decision-making. Face-to-face sales are a game-changer and essential for building trust with key customers and prospects. That said, face-to-face visits are no longer about the salesperson. Instead, selling is about adapting to how, when, and where buyers want to be met. Whatever that looks like for your buyers, the bottom line is the sale isn’t about you—it’s about your customer. Empower your team to sell the way they want to buy, and ensure every interaction instills confidence in you and delivers value they can’t get anywhere else.

Some experts say ecommerce has dethroned in-person sales as the top revenue-generating channel among organizations that offer ecommerce as a purchasing channel. Despite salespeople no longer being at the center of the sale and evolving buyer preferences, face-to-face sales still has an invaluable role to play and is a key differentiator for big ticket sales with long cycles.

AJ: The trend toward digital engagement and self-education in the buyers journey we’ve seen in the last few years continues to accelerate. And the B2B sale keeps getting more complex. Rather than a singular executive championing your product, for example, you may have to go through more layers than in the past to accomplish the same goal. Of course, one selling size doesn’t fit all, so the B2B sale is going to continue to require a blended approach. It will demand that the seller nurture multiple layers and roles of decision makers throughout the process. It will be important to keep the value theme similar, while finding customized ways to present the solution to buyers across sales, delivery, finance, and technology.

Steve: It’s about getting to the customer first in the way they want to be engaged. For this reason, B2B sales will continue to become less relationship-based and more self-service oriented. Given the changing role of today’s B2B buyer, sales teams need to be much more prepared. They’d better do everything possible to make those hard-earned face-to-face meetings count—have an objective, make them impactful, and ensure they add value. It’s no longer optional for today’s sellers to embrace new technology. To get results, they should be using it, plus selling best practices, to flex with and influence—ultimately changing—buyer behavior.

Trend #3: Companies Are Drowning in Data Yet Struggle to Bring Value to Their B2B Customers

Steve: Data is the new gold, but only if you can use it to bring more value to your customers. Companies are drowning in data they don’t have the resources to negotiate, let alone leverage. In 2025, the focus will be on bringing together these large pools of data, and the biggest tech investments will revolve around making this vast pool of information practically available. AI is the default answer, but first we need to provide the data for AI to scrape, and we’re still learning how to leverage AI for this work while keeping proprietary information safe. As we vet new AI applications and other tech, our big focus will be on governance, balancing our investment with our clients’ needs, and keeping up with how rapidly our tech partners are evolving.

Trend #4: Educated B2B Buyers Demand Value They Can’t Get on Their Own

Ben: Buyers want to buy from companies that are easy to do business with and can smooth out their path to a solution. Leading companies have (or are building) that make them the easy button for their customers and give buyers several options to interact with and buy from them. Think chatbots that deliver quotes, ecommerce sites for quick order taking, or digital agents that can answer more complex questions in real time, even recalling past conversations with customers to make their next buying experience more seamless and enjoyable. Deploying virtual, on-demand brand experts like AskMe® reps allows buyers to summon real-time help to ask specific questions, compare products, or complete their purchase.

AJ: How buyers seek and consume information means you must offer them value and insights they can’t find on their own. One way sellers can do that is to share their experience and expertise authentically. Authenticity in the selling conversation fosters trust and is paramount to achieving success together. We can’t tell people there’s no uncertainty, but we can be upfront about the conditions within our control, focus on what can help our clients be successful, and construct informed, well-intentioned models for them that have high probabilities of success.

Steve: The value we provide our clients diminishes by 50% every year unless we are intentional about iterating and improving. This services half-life concept fuels our commitment to continuous optimization. We call it Relentless Incrementalism™, and it keeps us in tune with an increasingly complex B2B sale that demands that sales teams, technology, and processes are limber enough to accommodate any new stakeholders that enter the process.

Trend #6: Growth-Oriented Companies Will Crowdsource Their Learning

AJ: We support over 100 clients across dozens of industries. This puts us in a unique position to glean, amass, and share non-proprietary learnings, strategies, insights, and approaches – including how AI is being deployed – across clients in other verticals, who can then apply them to their use cases. The ability to tap into this rich, broad knowledge base allows us to observe the best applications, share them across our client base, and use those learnings to close gaps and provide insights for our clients they wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Steve: Over the last 40 years, we’ve built a massive knowledge base about our customers, their industries, and products. Similarly, AI is becoming a giant knowledge base. That said, it’s expensive and requires a new skill set (i.e., to build natural language models). This demands companies spend less time and money doing AI on their own and get comfortable crowdsourcing information and resources. For instance, this time last year, AI was helping sellers personalize interactions. Now, it’s helping them figure out which customers to focus on, how to engage them, and assess their knowledge so they can bring more value to the customer. New tech can actually mimic a buyer’s personality (informed by DiSC profiles and other indices) and assume the persona of someone who always objects to a sale. From there, you can choose the sales methodology you want your sellers to use so that when the objection comes, they’re ready.

Trend #7: The Strongest Sellers Will Become Consultants

AJ: Providers should take a step back, ask what their buyers want, and figure out how to adapt to what they learn. It can either be a formal phone or email survey, or it might take the form of a mechanism in the contract that triggers renewals. This might feel like too big of a shift for prospects who’ve never outsourced before, however. In that case, they’re going to need face-to-face interactions and education.

Steve: More educated buyers mean it’s no longer enough to be a good seller. B2B sales today is less about what you know than about being willing to learn what you don’t. We help sellers learn more, quickly. Sellers have a chance to differentiate themselves by shifting their approach. Try offering your knowledge from a more consultative posture. Use it to identify your customer’s gaps and explain how you’ll help them close those to become more competitive. When you get in front of them, be prepared, because you only get one chance at it. Be students of your customer’s business, constantly learning. Become experts—masters, even—in their industry. Stay on top of emerging information and best practices that will help them achieve their goals, and don’t squander those hard-fought face-to-face opportunities.

Ben: The consultative sale will involve hyper-automation that makes customers feel seen. When built correctly, automation can speed up sales cycles, help salespeople close deals faster, and improves the customer experience. New AI tech can identify the buyer’s intention, sentiment, and engagement, while hyper-automating the next steps they need to follow to progress. Or it can hyper-automate data collection: 1) to ensure it happens automatically—every time, and 2) so sales can be more responsive, more quickly.

Trend #8: In 2025, B2B Sales Organizations Will Prioritize Closing Revenue Gaps

Steve: In 2025, lower interest rates will pave the way for more spending from B2B investing and spending opportunities. As new tech expands, job growth (especially around AI) will increase. A lot of this will come together in 2026 and fuel further investments. Selling isn’t going away, and companies are never going to stop generating top-line revenue. It’s how your sales expense shows up on the balance sheet that counts. These days, we’re seeing very profitable companies focus on their balance sheets (in some cases, resulting in layoffs), trying to figure out how to reduce the gap between bottom- and top-line revenue. Outsourcing allows you to close that gap without increasing your risk.