The 2024 Sales Leader Report

Good Morning and Happy National Pie Day. It’s March 14th, which also happens to be the first 3 digits of Pi (3.14). In case you were wondering, Pi is the mathematical ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. But since we still aren’t really sure what that means, we’ll stick to our sales content. 😆 

In today’s Follow Up:

• Chief sales report 📊 

• Sales tip of the day 🧠 

• Sales around the internet 💻️ 

• Sales jobs, job postings & a meme 😂 

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The Chief Sales Officer Report

Every quarter, Gartner drops a Chief Sales Officer report filed with insights for sales leaders.

And last week they dropped the Q1 24’ report.

It’s 27 pages long, which takes a long time to read, so as your sales bff, we had the intern read through the entire thing and pull out the most interesting things you should know about.

Sales leaders need to adapt their strategies and expectations to the new ways that buyers make their purchases.

To do this, the report suggests 4 areas leaders should focus on:

Working With Other Orgs 🤝 

C-level executives from different orgs need to work together.

But collaboration shouldn’t stop at the C level.

When a customer works with your company, they want to feel like they’re working with one seamless unit, not a bunch of different people from different departments.

It’s common for sales to work closely with marketing, but that’s not always enough. Successful sales teams will get more departments involved in the sales process, such as the product team involved in more sales calls, or sales reps involved in more product meetings.

But to make this work, you need a plan. How many sales calls will product sit in on, when can sales reps join product meetings, etc.

Without a plan, it’s just a cool idea.

AI = A New Teammate 🤖 

There‘s no denying it. AI is coming to the workforce, and it is top of mind for both sellers and buyers.

But rather than thinking of AI as another tool to use, sales leaders should think about it as another teammate.

A very inexpensive teammate who can take care of small repetitive tasks for reps, and make them more productive.

Economic Uncertainty 📉 

“75% of buyers are concerned about potential economic recession.”

Not the best news for sellers…

This uncertainty has buyers pushing longer deal cycles, asking for deeper discounts, and figuring out ways to operate with the tools they already have.

The best way to overcome this is by focusing on sales skills, and specifically on helping buyers feel more confident about their decisions.

When sellers make their buyers feel like they made the right choice, “the buyer is 30% more likely to buy a larger, higher-margin solution.”

Neurodiverse Talent 🧠 

Hiring a top sales rep is hard. Keeping them is even harder. 

As the baby boomer generation of sales reps starts to retire, sales leaders need to look to non-traditional talent pools for new sales talent, and the report says that the new talent pool is Neurodiverse.

Neurodiversity is the fancy way of saying that someone’s brain works a bit differently than most. This includes conditions like ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and many more.

With over 20% of the worldwide population reported as Neurodiverse, chances are you already work with a Neurodiverse person (or maybe that person is you). 

Building a neurodivergent sales team could be a secret weapon for sales leaders.

Checking In On The Job Market

3 years of vaping experience… 🤔 

Sales Meme of the Day