After working closely with over 30 B2B service and SaaS businesses this year, we’ve got some insights worth sharing. Here’s a candid view of what we’ve learned and what we think will be the key trends for 2025.
What 2024 Taught Us
- Sales and Marketing Silos Are Still Causing a Massive Headache
From what we’ve seen in 2024, we can count on one hand the businesses that are really aligned when it comes to sales and marketing. Sure, teams are making a conscious effort to work more closely together (which is a start), but there’s still a lot of misalignment in the ‘how’ which is holding back growth potential. - Quality Over Quantity in Lead Generation
Generic email blasts are finally going away. Buyers and email service providers have little tolerance for copy-paste approaches. Personalisation and refined segmentation has become a must if you are leveraging outbound. - Conversion Blind Spots
Not enough focus on demand conversion. Time and time again, we’ve seen missing assets at critical points and friction in the buyer journey. There’s still too much time focused on top of funnel, which is costing more than most would like to think. - Budget Inefficiency
Spending more doesn’t mean making more. We’ve seen a lack of understanding of what’s actually driving conversions and qualified pipeline, which leads to budget bloat and wastage. Precision is now key over chasing vanity, disconnected metrics. - Sales Inefficiency
There’s still a focus on lead volume with the opinion that if we throw enough at it, then some of it will stick. The reality is, due to point 4, businesses are still chasing lead volume to report on metrics like ‘lead volume’ over qualified pipeline. We’ve also seen a distinct lack of separating out high-intent opportunities, with all leads being treated as equal, which creates further inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and wasted resources. You can see an example of how this plays out below:
- Go-to-Market: Not Just Marketing’s Problem
More often than not, go-to-market responsibilities still sit on the shoulders of marketing. In reality, it’s a business-level problem that needs to sit at the C-Suite level, as it’s too broad for pure-play marketers to manage alone.
2025: What to Watch
- Workflow Automation
Workflows and automations will grow massively. Tools like n8n and Make will significantly increase efficiency on repetitive tasks across RevOps, sales, and marketing – GTM engineers will become a real thing. - AI Content (obviously)
AI will continue to get better at understanding audience and personalising content across sales cycles – from metrics such as social engagement and real-time intent to improvements in AI-driven customer engagement and service. We’ll also see improvements in visual AI content, with new tools like Sora.com set to transform how we generate videos, and I’m sure there’ll be more in 2025. - First-Party Data Enrichment
Tools like Clay are giving sales and marketing teams capabilities they never dreamed possible. There’ll be more focus on enriched and up-to-date CRM data to create huge efficiencies across both sales and marketing teams. - Channel Expansion To Capture Demand
Let’s be honest, Google has hardly painted itself in glory this year and is playing catch-up. Marketers will diversify budget into AI-powered SEO and continue to grow their social efforts too. - The Human Element
Ironically, as tech gets smarter, genuine human connections become more crucial. Building deeper relationships with customers, peers, or contributing to a community will be as key in 2025 as it has been forever. - B2B Influencers and Bite-Sized Content
B2B influencers will become more established along with more ‘snackable’ content. We’ve seen a huge rise in B2B short-form video across LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok in 2024, and we can’t see it slowing down either.
2025 belongs to the adaptable, the precise, and those who understand that technology should enhance human connection, not replace it.
If any resonate with you and you want to chat through what you’re seeing and how to unblock it drop us an email at hello@scaled.co.uk and we’d be more than happy to walk through it with you.
Here’s to a great 2025!
