Despite AI’s ubiquity, 2025 actually represents a step towards a more human-centric B2B sales ecosystem.
Sales trends like increased personalization in cold outreach and social selling from personal LinkedIn accounts are just a few examples of the various ways sellers are leaning into relationship-building and away from robotic techniques like spray-and-pray.
Overall, sellers who embrace authenticity and personalization will win the year.
Now, whether you’re a junkie for sales trends or recently crawled out of a cave squinting to see what’s happening in your field for the first time in a decade, we’ll help you capitalize on the best practices that’ll make 2025 a lucrative year.
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Sales tools offer greater capacity for sales automation
With AI on everybody’s mind in 2025, sales professionals are more likely to ask, “what can I automate with technology?”
And, thanks again to AI, more of their wishlist automations can be granted.
That means sales reps can spend less time on boring admin tasks and more time talking with prospects.
Use Mixmax to automate your routine sales tasks
Below are some tasks you can easily automate with Mixmax’s sales engagement platform:
- Follow-ups: Make it so prewritten follow-up emails are sent to leads when specific conditions are met (e.g., a lead answering your in-email poll).
- Email writing: Use AI Compose to auto-generate and auto-refine personalized sales emails.
- Lead Creation: Auto-generate leads and ensure accurate CRM recordkeeping.
- Salesforce Updates: Streamline repetitive CRM data entry with trigger-based data automations.
Meeting transcription and follow-ups: With the Mixmax AI Meeting Assistant (coming soon), sales reps can record and transcribe their meetings, highlight key discussion points, and send all attendees a summary with action items—all automatically.
Sales teams embrace multi-channel outreach
Using one channel to connect with new leads costs you money.
Why?
Because leads have different preferences around communication.
For example, according to research, around a quarter of Millennials and Gen Zers never pick up calls of any sort whatsoever.
And even more, we bet, would rather stick their tongues to a frozen fire hydrant than answer a call from a random number.
The best sellers in 2025, therefore, are covering all the communication bases, doing what is called multi-channel outreach.
Multi-channel outreach means using a mix of email, social, phone, and even video messages to get the attention of leads.
Here’s an example of what we mean:
Of course, diversified outreach can be hard to manage and track — “Am I supposed to call the CEO today or email them? What did I say to them last call?”
Therefore, sales engagement platforms like Mixmax are becoming more essential.
With these tools, you can easily build, execute, and even automate these multi-channel sequences.
Plus, reps can track exactly where each lead stands in the journey, as well as any call notes, email responses, and engagement metrics — like email opens and clicks.
This way, sales reps always know what they need to do next to nurture each individual lead.
For example, the Mixmax dashboard below shows the rep that they’re on step 4 with this particular lead. For this step, they have to send a LinkedIn InMail.
Note how there are automated emails in the above sequence. Expect more of this in 2025 as well — sales teams will use email software to automatically personalize pre-written email templates to each lead.
Social selling becomes more personal
In 2025, social selling is one of the best ways to grow and engage an audience of high-quality leads.
For B2B brands, social selling used to mean posting on LinkedIn from their business account.
The post might be testimonial, like a customer success story, or educational, such as a how-to carousel that helps target clients solve a problem.
While posting from business accounts is still popular, the rising trend in social selling is personal brand development.
Founders, executives, and sellers are posting social content from their own personal accounts, sharing opinions, predictions, and advice related to their industry and positioning themselves as thought leaders in the space.
This reputation helps them win more clients, since customers generally want to work with experts..
But posting from your personal account isn’t the only big social selling trend of 2025.
The content of these posts is changing as well. They’re becoming more personal.
It’s hard to scroll the platform without seeing posts containing anecdotes from their life outside of work (or pictures of some CEO’s beloved pug).
A recent, highly popular post, details a CEO’s experience with a month of sobriety:
Such invitations into everyday life might seem cringey to some people, but the end result is often heightened relatability. And, remember Cialdini’s principle of persuasion? People generally buy from people who seem similar to them.
Daily social selling habits to build your personal brand in 2025
To succeed in modern B2B social selling, spend at least 30 minutes per day doing the following from your personal account on LinkedIn:
- Post your opinions, advice, and customer stories related to your industry. Aim to either inspire, educate, or connect with your target audience.
- Connect with ideal prospects and routinely leave insightful comments on their posts.
- Using InMail, initiate sales conversations with warm leads by asking them if they need any help within your company’s area of expertise.
Check out this interview with Mandy McEwen for tips on how to nail social selling |
More data-driven selling
The market for sales tools with AI-driven analytics features is growing. And these tools make it easier for sales professionals to gain analyst-grade insights into their accounts, prospects, and sales process, thus promoting a data-driven sales culture.
For example, conversation intelligence tools like Mixmax’s AI Meeting Assistant (being released in Feb 2025) use AI-powered algorithms to analyze meetings, identify key topics and action items, generate follow-up emails in under five minutes, and send to participants.
Churn prediction software, like Azio, can detect patterns that suggest a customer is about to churn. Customer success reps can then step in and save the account.
And sales engagement platforms like Mixmax offer AI engagement scores that help you assess the quality of each lead so you can better prioritize them.
Mixmax also offers AI Smart Send, which uses machine learning algorithms to predict the best time to send emails to prospects:
More more on machine learning in sales, check out 7 Ways Teams Use Machine Learning in Sales to Engage Prospects & Customers |
3 steps to become a more data-driven sales team
- Define what metrics matter most for your specific sales process and ensure your CRM fields align with these metrics perfectly. Train your team to input data consistently for these key fields.
- Choose sales analytics platforms that integrate seamlessly with your tech stack and offer visualization features your team will actually use. Start with basic dashboards showing pipeline health and conversion rates, then gradually introduce more advanced features like predictive analytics.
- Make data review a required part of every sales meeting and tie compensation to data quality and usage. Celebrate team members who make data-driven decisions and share their process with others.
Increased personalization in cold calling
Every year some sales guru on LinkedIn claims cold calling is dead, and every year they’re wrong.
In 2025, picking up the phone may very well be the best way to stand out from the crowd. With phone-shy Gen Z entering the salesforce as SDRs, email inboxes are increasingly crowded and phone lines deserted.
How to ace cold calls in 2025
Banging out 100 or even 50 cold calls per day is not just exhausting. It’s ineffective.
There’s no way you can deeply research each person and their company while hitting those numbers.
And deep research is what wins you meetings in 2025.
Aim for 25 calls per day, or even just 15 hyper-targeted ones. Think of yourself as a strategic AE rather than a telemarketer. Find ways in, ways to connect, ways to be valuable. That’s how you get attention on the phone.
Before placing a call, you should come prepared with the following:
- A few trends/challenges in the lead’s industry (demonstrate your expertise)
- Common pain points for companies like theirs (prove you’re a problem-solver)
- Intel about the lead’s role and responsibilities (show them you understand their world)
- Recent personal achievements or online activity (show them you know them!)
Use that information to create an opening — some highly relevant reason that they should have a five minute conversation with you.
For example, a sales trainer company rep might say— “I noticed you purchased a new office for your expanded sales team. That’s amazing! I’m wondering though — are you experiencing any issues with training all these new employees?”
“I noticed” should be the phrase you aim to use on almost every call.
Nothing builds credibility faster. Those two words are a sign that you’ve been studying their business, looking for ways to help, not just calling down some list.
Learn more about cold calling in our article How to Improve Your Cold Calling Scripts |
A reformation of the generative AI religion
In 2024, a lot of sales reps started using generative AI tools like Chat-GPT to write their cold emails.
The results are pretty predictable.
Buyers are overwhelmed by avalanches of generic emails that were obviously written by AI without much editing from the seller.
Take this prospecting email we received the other week:
It’s bland, filled with irrelevant details, and shot through with that vagueness so characteristic of the rookie using generative AI for writing.
How to use Gen AI to write cold emails that get responses
First, try using a gen AI writing tool that’s built into a sales platform. These are often designed to take your buyer persona, value propositions, and solution information into account when generating text.
Mixmax’s AI Compose, for instance, is purpose-built to write personalized sales emails:
After using your tool to produce the foundation of copy, take out your chisel.
It’s time to further personalize the email to the recipient:
- Start with an opening sentence that shows them you know them. (e.g., “I noticed that you recently X.”
- Replace any pain points or benefits that might be irrelevant to this specific client.
- Add specificity wherever there is vagueness (e.g., “can you meet for 10 minutes to discuss how we can help you increase sales efficiency” is better than “can we discuss?”)
Let’s see what happens when we apply these cold email best practices to that email we received:
Much, much better (right?).
Sales trends for 2025
Trying to update your sales operation all at once is overwhelming for your sales reps.
So start small.
Pick 1-2 of the above best practices to focus on integrating into your sales process in 2025. The others you can keep in mind for later.
And when making sales decisions, remember the themes of 2025 — authenticity, personalization, and specificity.
If you include these qualities in your sales language, whether in an email or demo, 2025 should be a better sales year than 2024.