We hope you had a great new year with friends and family. With the new year comes new habits and new trends to watch out for. Don’t worry though, we got you covered with 10 business trends to look out for in the coming year.

If you missed our initial Top Trends to Track you can find it here: Top Trends to Track in 2023. In it, we discussed:

#1 – Uncertain Labor Market
#2 – Hyper-Personalization in Outbound will win
#3 – Organizational Agility will determine winners and losers of ‘23
#4 – Content creation will continue to grow

Here are our next three:

Trend 5: Companies that focus on nurturing will move ahead

 As the business landscape continues to transform, companies that strategically interact with their prospects depending on their buying stage will set themselves up for success in 2023.

This year, purse strings will continue to tighten and buying decisions will be more scrutinized than they have been in recent years.

Why?

Because budgets are shrinking like that cotton shirt you weren’t supposed to put in the dryer.

In an effort to maintain and improve liquidity, deals will pass through extra layers of approval. Even if a business case makes sense, liquidity concerns can kill a deal before it sees the light of day.

So how do companies combat these external pressures?

By staying top of mind with your prospect through nurturing campaigns. When the prospect’s pain is severe enough or the funds are released for use, your company and your sales rep are the strategic advisors who have been guiding them all along. Providing relevant content and resources in campaigns to nurture the relationship with potential buyers will be critical to achieving successful outcomes.

By helping customers understand what a company has to offer and why they’re the perfect fit product-wise or budget-wise, organizations improve their chances of converting them into long-term customers.

Trend 6: Engagement Points on the Buyer’s Journey 

Not every prospect is created equally. Prospects engage with companies at different stages in their buying process and with different knowledge levels about your company and industry. Your nurture strategy should reflect the differences in prospects.

With the amount of data that can be and is collected today, buyers expect to have a personalized experience that is customized using the different data variables. Buyers expect the seller to know these different variables and engage with them accordingly.

To support sales reps, companies should have these different stages mapped out to optimize the conversion rates of each stage of the process. Having specific actions, content and ways to engage the prospects depending on where they are along the buyer’s journey will lead to higher conversion rates and better prospect feedback on your buying process. Providing your sales reps with an outline of what, when and where will have them spending less time figuring those out and more time performing revenue-driving activities.

Tightening up the entire buyer’s journey and personalizing the experience based on where each individual is at is crucial for businesses to achieve success in 2023.

Trend 7: Performance-Based Deals will win in 2023

Win-Win deals make sense for all involved. Having a guarantee associated with budget spend will make it easier for decision-makers to loosen their firm grip on tight budgets.

Companies who are true believers in what they preach, the supporting statistics they produce and the case studies they publish will stand by the results they can drive for their customers through performance-based deals.

The creativity in which metrics will be used to track progress will be key to getting engagements right when working with different prospects and in different industries.

Ultimately, performance-based deals just make sense. It incentivizes both parties to work together to not just achieve but to over-achieve the desired outcome.

If you or your business is struggling to have activity-based deals pushed across the finish line, propose a performance-based deal and see what type of reaction you get from your potential client – you may not hate their response.

That’s it for this week. We would love to hear your feedback and reactions to these. We will round out our list of Top 10 for 2023 in next week’s publication. In the meantime…

Let’s get to work.