Top 3 Trends for Sales in 2022

Author: Steve Kornreich, ThunderAct

If you’re like most people, you’re probably wondering where 2021 went. But with the holiday season hot on our heels, 2022 is right around the corner. With that in mind we wanted to discuss some of the trends related to sales organizations, understanding what’s happening and where things are likely to continue to shift in 2022 and beyond.

Greater Alignment with Marketing Departments

The relationship between most marketing and sales departments has been one that’s often tenuous for most organizations. This is mostly rooted in the fact that for years, they’ve largely operated as separate entities within their own company — even though in practice they should be very tightly knit in working together to achieve shared goals and outcomes.

But this is changing.

In fact, we’re seeing a shift in how companies organize certain roles and responsibilities which can serve as an undercurrent for more tightly aligning these two different areas of a business. One in particular that’s of interest is that more and more folks are sliding the traditional Sales Development function to reside under marketing rather than how it’s traditionally sat within the sales organization.

On the one hand, this shift makes a lot of sense. We’re personally big proponents of this, as it allows for a true focus in driving attention and interest of prospective buyers to be the responsibility of marketing, and qualification and closing to reside with sales.

But this shift also provides for an environment whereby certain challenges, questions, and issues will inevitably rear their heads. Here are some:

• How do we create accountability and responsibility for shared KPIs between marketing and sales that allows us — as a company — to hit our revenue targets predictably?
• How does this shift create new potential career paths for our junior hires to rise through the ranks? How do we identify who should be groomed into which future role based on their performance, their skillset, and their passions?
• What tribal knowledge and data needs to be made available/accessible cross-departmentally in order to enable this type of shift?
• How will we measure success? Are there ways to understand in fine detail what’s working well and what isn’t?

A Greater Emphasis on Training, Learning, and Development

In light of what’s happening at the macro-level with “The Great Resignation”, the smart companies are becoming more attuned to understanding what it takes to retain their top talent.

We’ve never quite experienced a time like this, where more and more companies are not just aware, but providing solutions to things their employees want like hybrid or remote working, mental and emotional health resources, and personal and professional development resources.

For sales leaders, this is equally an opportunity and a challenge. A consistent focus on leveling up your workforce provides for not just a more productive or effective team, but one that’s also happy and more likely to stay rather than jump ship to a perceived “better opportunity”.

The challenge is understanding where sales leaders should be investing their L&D budget. Most of this is rooted in a lack of understanding as to the holistic “health” of their sales organization; what we do well, what we don’t, how we can positively impact.

The reason for this is because most dashboards within CRMs only tell half of the story. Conversion metrics, deal KPIs, and the like are all super valuable. But when it comes to understanding the skills in need of development across your sales organization, those types of data points leave a lot to be desired.

Venture Capital Trends = Increased Expectations

As outlined here in TechCrunch, 2021 has been an especially wild year for venture capital funding. Prior to 2021, global funding had never reached $100B in a single quarter. Here’s how this year has looked so far:

• Q1Y21 = $135B
• Q2Y21 = $159B
• Q3Y21 = $160B

To put it lightly, in some respects there’s never been a better time to be a Founder seeking to raise capital.

But it’s not just the sheer amount of capital that’s being deployed across the entire ecosystem. It’s the size of these funding rounds as well. Funding amounts of $100mm or more grew 97% year over year.

With increased capital, however, comes increased expectations for these companies. We’re of the belief that sales — likely more so than any other department — is going to be under intense scrutiny to perform at levels that they’ve likely never encountered before.

They’ll need to pull on every lever available to them — increased volume, significantly better conversion metrics, higher deal sizes, etc. — to put themselves in a position to execute on these increased goals brought on by capital influxes through venture funding.

To do these effectively, sales leaders and their direct reports will need to understand their buyer’s journey more deeply than ever before. And similar to the above, quantitative data points only go so far in telling this story.

Learn more about ThunderAct here.