Sales Tech Trends to Watch in 2023 and Beyond

No-code and low-code software aims at SDRs

As an automation geek and coding enthusiast, I’ve been keeping an eye on this trend for the past few years. While the concept isn’t new (it first emerged around 10 years ago), no-code and low-code software started getting traction in the SaaS communities a couple of years ago. And it has also found a few use cases in sales as well – mostly among the tech-savvy SDRs.

I’ve shared some of my top picks among no-code and low-code tools earlier. All in all, they allow you to do the following:

1. automate as many tasks as possible,
2. move data across all apps in their tech stack,
3. speed up existing operations and tasks.

While most of them offer a universal solution to those needs, we can see the rise of no-code tools targeting sales departments specifically. These include:

• Airtable is the spreadsheet on steroids. It can be used as an internal database, to build custom CRM, store and manage prospecting lists, etc. There are even multiple ready-to-use templates you can copy and customize.
• Rows is another spreadsheet-like software often used for prospecting and list building. It allows you to organize your data, enrich it from publicly available sources, and automatically update it.
• Clay is great for prospecting and list-building. Using this tool, you can get live data from LinkedIn, automate Google search, look up keywords, scour tech stacks, scrape info from job listings, etc.
• PhantomBuster is the growth hacking powerhouse that allows you to streamline dozens of lead generation tasks across multiple platforms – from extracting data from any website to engaging with prospects on social media.

Artificial intelligence goes mainstream

If you haven’t yet played around with the new shiny AI tool called ChatGPT, I strongly recommend you do. We at Reply couldn’t be more excited about it and firmly believe that it will have a huge impact on the future of sales communications.

But that is only one way AI is currently affecting the sales tech landscape. There are more use cases I’ve recently noticed getting traction.

• Conversation & revenue intelligence

These tools read your emails or listen to all the sales calls, collect best practices across the whole team, and suggest what each rep should change to improve their performance and conversion rate.

Some will also offer handy add-ons like real-time meeting transcription, the ability to automate the note-taking process, analyze talk ratio, etc.

In this category, the market leaders here remain the same: Gong, Outreach, Salesloft.

What’s more interesting is the fact that 4 tools in this category were acquired by other market leaders, namely:

1. ZoomInfo acquired Chorus.ai
2. Clari acquired Wingman
3. Allego acquired Refract
4. Mediafly acquired ExecVision

In addition to that, HubSpot also invested in Avoma a couple of years ago!

So, for me, it becomes clear that the top industry players like ZoomInfo and Clari are betting on AI and conversation intelligence as the next big thing in sales. This is a great addition to the core product that will allow them to retain their customers. Plus, I assume they will be building more features around Conversation & Revenue Intelligence soon to strengthen their selling proposition.

On the other hand, Conversation & Revenue Intelligence market is becoming more accessible. Over the past 5 years, mostly bigger organizations could afford to purchase software that cost $20k+. 

Yet, as cloud computing and cloud storage costs are declining, more affordable tools like pickle.ai, Jiminny, Rafiki, etc. enter the market allowing smaller teams to benefit from AI and conversation intelligence.

Product-Led Growth tactics meet sales development

You’ve probably heard buzzwords like “PLG,” “product-led growth,” “product-led sales,” etc. circulating around the sales communities. All that noise isn’t for nothing. This is clearly another trend in the sales tech world (which I already predicted last year among non-sales-led growth tactics). Simply put this means growing a tech or SaaS company relying solely on its product rather than the sales force or community. 

Some prominent examples of successful product-led growth strategies are Airtable, Zoom, Slack, Miro, and Figma.

In this case, sales teams are mostly focused on enterprise deals ($40k+), while the rest of the prospects can make a purchase as a self-service, without contacting sales.

When it comes to the PLG trend in sales development, such software usually integrates with the company’s whole tech stack – CRMs, data warehouses, billing systems, support tools, sales engagement tools, product analytics, etc. – to keep track of the buying signals and notify your sales reps when a prospect is ready to make a purchase. 

As a result, a sales rep gets a 360 degree view of every single prospect at every step of their buying journey.

This market is growing rapidly, so here are a few tools to keep an eye on:

• Endgame helps you connect the dots between product signals and sales opportunities
• Correlated – product-led revenue platform
• HeadsUp.ai provides product usage insights to predict conversion and qualify leads
• RevenueHero instantly connects qualified prospects with the sales reps 

Virtual product tours and on-demand demos are all the rage

As I mentioned earlier, B2B sales don’t change on their own but adapt to the changes in the world in general. And our next trend is a great example of this. 

Because of the growing popularity of product-led growth tactics, salespeople simply can’t interact with all the prospects that might be considering a purchase. And it’s totally fine for most of them (81% of consumers, to be precise). On the other hand, there will still be prospects who would want to have a demo of a product before making a purchase.

That’s where interactive demo platforms come in.

This category is relatively new – it emerged 2-3 years ago, probably driven by the global shift to remote work (and sales specifically). But there are already enough options to consider it as a serious sales tech trend.

Some of the most interesting tools in this category are:

• Reprise helps you create live and guided demo experiences in a controlled environment
• Navattic allows you to build, customize and share interactive, hands-on product demos
• Walnut offers personalized product demos and lets you collect insights on their usage
• Storylane – auto-personalized product experience on demand
• Demoleap guides you in real-time to run perfect qualification, discovery, and live sales demos

Sales engagement is shifting gears

Well, this isn’t new – and I might be biased – but I would like to share some of my observations (and I do keep track of all our competitors). The sales engagement tech market has been growing like crazy and there’s still a huge room for growth.

The B2B sales market is getting wild in the face of recession. VCs want money – they require profitability because of the global economic uncertainty – revenue goals keep climbing and sales quotas are getting more aggressive. This puts salespeople under pressure to keep their pipeline moving, get more demos, and close more deals.

The most obvious solution to this is to reach out to more people, use more channels, etc.

As a result, there’s a growing need to automate routine tasks related to email outreach, LinkedIn engagement, and calls to name a few.

That’s why more B2B sales teams will adopt sales engagement tools like Reply in the future, looking for a way to scale their outreach while keeping things personal.