By John Reese

One thing you can always count on when it comes to the future is change. To get you ahead on sales organization trends that are expected to affect change in 2015, we recently connected with top sales experts and authors to get their predictions on the big sales ideas for next year.

We simply asked each expert to complete the following sentence: “2015 for sales leaders will be the year of…” and here’s what they said:

1 – Craig Rosenberg, co-founder and chief analyst at TOPO, says 2015 will be the year of the highly-optimized, process-driven sales force.

2 – Jamie Shanks, managing partner, Sales for Life,suggests 2015 is the year for big data and success for social selling, it’s about sales enablement teams, marketing and executives actually implementing a social selling program.

3 – Lori Richardson, sales strategist at Score More Sales, suggests that in 2015, successful sellers will get a handle on crafting better messages, using innovative strategies, such as video, and making messages shorter, simpler and about the buyer, not about the seller.

4 – Colleen Francis, founder and president of Engage Selling Solutions, predicts that in 2015 and beyond the trend is that the practices buyers use to make personal (consumer) buying decisions are spilling into the business to business (B2B) world. It’s no longer B2C or B2B, its B2All.

5 – Jill Rowley, founder and chief evangelist of #SocialSelling, recommends sales professionals move from using LinkedIn as their online resume, to managing their digital reputation. Instead of optimizing for the recruiter; optimize for the buyer.

6 – Koka Sexton, leader of the LinkedIn #SocialSelling movement, predicts that 2015 is going to be the year that sales and marketing finally get on the same train. We will see a connected workforce unlike we have ever experienced, with employees becoming brand advocates.

7 – Peter Ostrow, vice president and group director, Aberdeen group, predicts that next year we will see a lot of movement in the marketplace where organizations are using data to drive a kind of coaching, training, sales effectiveness and career management that we’ve never seen before.

8 – Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0 and Founder of Oracle Direct, suggests 2015 is the year for rethinking your sales organization and your sales model.  Some of the fastest growing businesses are generating revenue in new ways – rethinking roles, territories, comp plans and their whole sales model.

9 – Jill Konrath, bestselling author of Agile Selling, SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies,suggests that with constant change as the new norm, learning agility emerges as the crucial skill. Forward-thinking sales organizations will recognize its importance in on-boarding new hires, shortening the path to proficiency, adapting to changing conditions, launching new product/services and overall salesforce productivity.

10 – Trish Bertuzzi, president and chief strategist of The Bridge Group, Inc., predicts that 2015 is going to be the year that sales and marketing executives finally realize that inbound and outbound got married. The person that responded to your content and/or filled out the web form, in all likelihood, is not your perfect buyer. View that contact as an arrow to opportunity.

11 – Josiane Feigon, CEO of TeleSmart, says 2015 is about keeping millennials engaged, inspired and motivated. Today’s millennials work at a different rhythm than any other generation and have already transformed our sales organizations.

12 – Joanne Black, American’s leading authority on referral selling, suggests that 2015 will be the year of technology challenges, sales leaders will be bombarded with even more technology tools, but the problem is salespeople are not productive with the tools they already have. Top salespeople build connections and relationships online and offline. They leverage technology to strengthen those connections, but they don’t rely on it to do their jobs.

13 – Aaron Ross, author of #1 Bestseller Predictable Revenue, says there’s a lot of manual work involved in prospecting, and in 2015 more apps will become available to automate it, streamline it and make it easier to measure and analyze.

14 – Bob Perkins, founder and chairman, American Association of Inside Sales Professionals, says that in 2015 we’re going to see Inside Sales teams move from a traditional team selling model to that of a discrete model.

15 – Nancy Nardin, foremost expert on sales productivity tools and strategies to drive revenue, says 2015 is the year to empower your sales reps. You hear a lot about sales enablement solutions. Reps don’t need to be enabled, they need to be empowered. Empower your sales reps by giving them back their selling time so they can have real live conversations with real live prospects.

Originally published by Velocify on November 24, 2015