Looking for a 2025 Sales Strategy? Talk to Your Customers!

Disruption and volatility have become the over arching themes in 2025!  Tariffs initiated by a new US administration are causing shifting global economies, rising supply chain cost, and fundamentally changing how businesses need to think and act to remain competitive.  This has a trickle-down effect impacting business plans for company’s of all sizes. 

Business development and sales professionals have been profoundly impacted.  In 2025, hyper-informed and sophisticated customers are rewriting the rules of sales and business development. No longer passive recipients of vendor pitches, organizations now have the tools and expertise to define solutions on their own.

In fact, research shows that 60 percent of purchasing decisions are completed before a prospect even speaks with a sales professional.   This was exacerbated by the covid pandemic when supply chains were isolated and clients felt compelled to discover solutions without a BD/Sales professional.  As a result, traditional go-to-market playbooks leave many sales teams scrambling to catch up with customers who are already well down the path to purchase.

To redefine how to engage in 2025, business development and sales professionals are embracing a fundamentally different approach. Rather than chasing established “pain points,” they evaluate prospects according to new criteria—asking not “What problem can we solve?” but “How ready is this organization to act?”

They focus on agile companies in flux—those undergoing acquisitions, leadership changes, or grappling with pricing dissatisfaction—because these organizations are most receptive to disruptive ideas.  Instead of relying on friendly informants, they seek out skeptical change agents who can challenge entrenched processes and champion innovation.

A key shift is coaching these change agents on how to buy, rather than navigating a company’s formal purchasing process.  By becoming educators and strategists, salespeople empower their counterparts to build internal consensus and bypass bureaucratic inertia.

This coaching-first mentality opens new doors: conversations transform from product-centric demonstrations into strategic workshops where customers and sellers co-create the vision for success. In doing so, pricing wars become irrelevant, because value is defined collaboratively—long before a competitor enters the arena.

This isn’t merely a return to “early engagement”—it’s a radical reinvention of it.

In the 1980s, the archetypal salesperson identified a customer’s acknowledged need, aligned a ready-made solution, and outlined competitive advantages. The Zig Ziglar, Carnegie Method and Solution Sales strategies are outdated and irrelevant.  Platitudes do not solve problems, the customer is not always right, and ready-made solutions developed in a silo fall far short of a client’s performance requirements.

Today, that tactic backfires: by the time a need is acknowledged, the customer has often already settled on a vendor or commoditized the offering.  Instead, elite business development and sales professionals engineer conversations before needs solidify, framing the dialogue around emerging challenges and opportunities the customer hadn’t yet articulated.

A Five-Step Framework for Radical Sales Engagement in 2025

1. Assess Decisiveness: Can this organization act quickly on a compelling case, or is it hamstrung by rigid structures and legacy relationships? Target those that can move decisively.

2. Identify Flux: Pursue prospects in the throes of change—whether driven by external pressures, leadership shifts, or dissatisfaction with existing suppliers. These “in-motion” customers are primed for new ideas.

3. Engage Skeptical Change Agents: Build rapport with internal challengers who question the status quo. Their endorsement carries more weight than that of friendly but complacent stakeholders.

4. Coach the Buying Journey: Shift from transaction to transformation by guiding change agents through consensus-building strategies. Teach them how to sell your vision internally.

5. Re-Frame Requirements: When customers arrive with a rigid spec, seize the moment to broaden the conversation. Surface latent needs and invite them into a co-creative process that redefines success.

By adopting this framework—evaluating agility, embracing flux, and coaching advocacy—sales professionals can stay ahead of savvy buyers. Rather than reacting to well-defined requests, they will spark new dialogues, catalyze organizational change, and ultimately, win business on the strength of insight rather than price.