The new year has started! We also wish you a healthy and successful 2020 from the Kenneth Smit editorial team. This year we hope to contribute something to your success as a seller with our blogs, or at least to inspire you. In our opinion, the beginning of January is the perfect time to share with you a number of trends that we expect to play an important role in our field. We're kicking off the new year with 4 interesting sales trends to keep an eye on this year. 

Creativity of your communication

In B2C this trend has been going on for years. Due to the enormous increase in communication stimuli in the daily life of consumers, especially online, it is becoming increasingly important as an organization to stand out from the crowd. How do you do that? By being creative and ensuring that your communication strikes the right chord. We are also seeing this development more and more clearly in B2B. Communication between companies was often very static. Consider, for example, printed brochures. However, in recent years we have seen more and more companies turning to professional advertising agencies to take their communications to the next level. Gamification en augmented reality are entering the B2B sales process. Are you ready?

Augmented reality

We want our sales efforts to become increasingly scalable. Visiting all our customers personally is often no longer an option. A large part of communication takes place via digital means. The big disadvantage of digital is (or rather was) that it is not tangible. You cannot easily show your product in full glory, which is often a crucial facet for B2B. The arrival of augmented reality makes it possible to actually display your products via digital media. We therefore see that companies that produce (technical) products in particular are increasingly using augmented reality to make their products tangible for the prospect or customer. For example, watch this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r4kYzZgL1Y

Security & privacy

Security and privacy no longer only play an important role in consumer marketing. As a seller you must take this relatively 'new' phenomenon within our industry into account. There is a lot of ground to be gained, especially in security. It often happens that during a sales process data is shared between prospect and salesperson, for example via email or even social media. These are often unsecured documents containing business-sensitive data, such as briefings, debriefs, customer data, etc. Always be aware of the sensitivity of your data and preferably only work with protected/secure documents. Your customer or lead will certainly appreciate that you handle this carefully and critically. A simple NDA is no longer always sufficient.

Use of data versus gut feeling

Salespeople are proud of their gut feeling, experience and nose for business. And rightly so, that is to a large extent our distinguishing feature. If we also combine that with data, we have an unbeatable combination. By using data you can personalize and substantiate your sales process. For example, consider using LinkedIn as a data source to personalize your communication. Who are the important DMUs, what interests and/or hobbies do they have, what is their background? This is all information that is often publicly available. In addition, data is increasingly used within B2B to improve customer retention. For example, by digitally collecting customer feedback and linking it back to your production. Or by offering chat options for questions and issues. In a sense, data ensures that sales and service are increasingly intertwined.

These trends are of course the only trends that will matter in 2020. Which other sales trends do you think will play an important role in 2020, and how do you respond to them with your organization or department? Share it with us!