15 Sales Trends Shaping 2026 (Backed by New Data)

Every LinkedIn guru is telling us that sales is changing. Sure – AI is changing the way we get work done. However, it’s not changing sales fundamentals. Those remain rock solid.

Now is the time for savvy teams to get ahead. Charge to the front of the pack by leaning into what makes sales uniquely human: connecting with prospects and going the extra mile to connect the right people with your offering.

To understand how sales teams are operating in the agentic era, we surveyed 4,050 sales professionals worldwide, including 350 across Australia and New Zealand, for the State of Sales Report . This research explored exactly how teams are combining AI with the human touch to close more deals, along with flagging potential challenges in this space.

In this article, we’re going to share the trends shaping modern sales teams, what separates high-performing teams from the rest, and give you some fresh ideas to help improve your process.

1. High-performing teams are using AI agents
2. AI agents are being used across the sales cycle
3. Buyers want to understand the expected ROI
4. Customers expect personalised experiences
5. Sales cycles are getting longer
6. Sales teams are automating non-selling work
7. Teams are using AI agents for prospecting
8. Sales teams are using AI agents to coach their people
9. Having AI skills has become a career advantage
10. Successful AI adoption depends on data quality
11. Security concerns are slowing down AI adoption
12. Sales teams are consolidating their tech stacks
13. Sales teams are prioritising data hygiene
14. Customers prefer usage-based pricing
15. Most teams have partners, but aren’t using them to their full potential

Sales teams across Australia and New Zealand are increasingly treating AI agents as a core part of their operations. According to our State of Sales Report , 92% of sales professionals in the region who already use agents say they are essential for meeting the demands of their role.

This is because AI agents can take on high-volume workflows such as lead engagement, quoting, and renewals, giving sales teams more time to focus on conversations with customers and closing deals.

Fisher & Paykel is an excellent example of the power of AI agents in action.

Top sales tip: For sales teams that are interested in how agents could support their work, we recommend identifying one or two high-volume workflows where AI agents can help support your process. For example, use agents to score leads and direct salespeople to the deals that are the most likely to convert.

For high-performing sales teams, AI agents are now supporting multiple stages of the sales cycle, including prospecting, lead engagement, quoting, and order fulfilment. We found that 54% of sales teams already use AI agents, while another 34% expect to adopt them within the next two years.

Most teams choose to implement agents across their sales cycle to remove repetitive administrative work so their people can focus on conversations with customers.

Top sales tip: Rather than having team members wade through old emails or CRM records, AI can find the key details, serve them in a summary, and let your people jump straight into a call with a customer.

Customers are increasingly asking sales teams to demonstrate the financial value of a product before committing to a purchase. According to our research , 69% of sales professionals say measurable ROI is more important to customers than it was last year.

This shift means traditional product-led sales pitches are often not enough. Buyers want clear explanations of how a solution will reduce costs and generate revenue.

Australian SaaS company Canva offers demo bookings and ROI-focused resources to help businesses understand the value of the platform before they book a call.

This approach of showing customer value up front has supported Canva’s rapid growth, with the platform now reaching more than 240 million monthly users and 95% of Fortune 500 companies.

Top sales tip: When your people can clearly explain the financial impact of your solution, it becomes easier for buyers to justify the purchase internally and make a quicker decision.

Customers increasingly expect sales conversations to reflect their specific needs, industry, and stage of the buying journey. We found that 67% of sales professionals say personalisation is more important to customers than it was last year. This shift matters even more in the age of generative AI, where customers see more automated outreach than ever.

Top sales tip: To stand out, sales teams need strong communicators who bring their own voice into conversations, using AI to personalise messages for each customer.

You can also use personalisation to give your website traffic a premium experience. For example, jewellery brand Pandora uses Agentforce to personalise digital shopping experiences based on each customer’s browsing behaviour and preferences.

This means they can give the same level of care as in-store, by recommending relevant products, answering questions, and guiding customers through their journey on their website.

Customers are taking more time to evaluate purchases, which means sales teams need to stay engaged with prospects for longer. (Fifty-seven per cent of sales professionals say customers take longer to decide than they used to.)

When deals stretch out, momentum can slow down unless teams stay proactive between conversations. This can be hard to do, as most salespeople want to focus their time and attention on deals likely to close within the month.

Top sales tip: Use AI agents to nurture leads and keep communication flowing in the background until prospects are ready to be supported by a human.

This is exactly how our customer EasyPark kept prospects engaged, even over long sales cycles. Using Agentforce Sales, they deployed an AI Engagement agent that qualified inbound leads, answered questions, and nurtured prospects before handing them to a salesperson.

This agent support helped EasyPark achieve a 50% faster response time for new sales contacts and 40% year-on-year growth.

Any salesperson will tell you they spend a large portion of their week on tasks that do not directly involve selling. We were able to qualify this in our latest report, with 60% of salespeople saying that their workweek is spent on activities like data entry and creating quotes.

When processes cause administrative work to take up most of the week, many organisations respond by using automation and AI agents to handle routine tasks. For example, using Agentforce Revenue Management, you can have agents build quotes using the data from prior conversations.

Top sales tip: Activities such as logging data, qualifying leads, and organising prospect information can be managed automatically, giving salespeople more time to build human relationships and move opportunities forward.

Prospecting is often seen as the least enjoyable part of the sales job, but AI agents are starting to change that. According to our State of Sales Report , high-performing teams are 1.7 times more likely than underperformers to use AI prospecting agents. We also found that 34% of sales teams that use AI agents already use them for prospects, and 92% say that they foresee AI agents benefiting prospecting.

Top sales tip: AI agents can handle specific prospecting tasks like researching companies and decision-makers, drafting personalised outreach emails, scheduling meetings, and automatically logging activity in the CRM.

Salespeople increasingly want development opportunities like personalised coaching. The problem is that managers rarely have time to provide coaching, much less consistently follow up on how their people are developing. This might explain why 34% of sales teams report using AI agents to support coaching.

In practice, coaching agents can run roleplay scenarios, simulate customer objections, and review sales calls to provide feedback on messaging and tone. This allows sales teams to turn coaching into a continuous process rather than something that only happens during occasional manager reviews.

Top sales tip: See for yourself! Check out our Dreamforce session on coaching, programs, and Agentforce, now streaming on Salesforce+.

Sales representatives increasingly see AI skills as an important part of their career development. We found that 82% of reps who work with AI agents say knowing how to use AI gives them better career prospects.

This shift likely reflects the growing use of AI in sales workflows. Salespeople who know how to work alongside agents are better positioned to take on more strategic responsibilities. In response, many organisations are building programs that teach their teams how to use AI tools.

Top sales tip: You can find courses on Trailhead that help teams build these skills through guided learning paths that cover topics such as building AI agents and data best practices.

This focus on AI literacy is also reflected at a national level with Australia’s National AI Plan , which aims to help businesses and workers capture the opportunities created by AI.

AI agents can only deliver useful insights when they are working with accurate and complete data. We found that 46% of sales professionals using AI agents say data quality issues are hurting their sales efforts.

Without reliable data, agents cannot personalise messages, recommend next-best actions, or give sales teams a clear view of their customers.

Top sales tip: Prioritise a unified customer record that brings sales, service, and marketing data together in one place.

An example of quality data leading to quality outputs can be seen in Formula 1. By using Data 360 to unify fan and customer data into a single view, the organisation can deliver more personalised content and recommendations across digital channels. With this stronger data foundation, Formula 1 achieved a 22% increase in clicks on agent-generated content.

Since AI is becoming more common, 71% of salespeople say that customers are asking salespeople more detailed questions about how their data is stored and protected. As a result, 51% of sales professionals say security concerns have delayed their AI initiatives.

When your customers are unsure about how AI systems handle sensitive information, particularly for customers in regulated environments, deals can slow down while their security teams review the risks. Sales teams, therefore, need clear, credible explanations of how their organisation protects customer data.

Top sales tip: Companies should address this by equipping their people with answers to security FAQs and compliance documentation to help answer questions early in the sales process. This helps buyers move through security reviews more quickly and keeps sales cycles moving.

Many organisations are simplifying their technology stacks to reduce complexity and improve how their systems share information and work together. We found that 84% of sales teams without an all-in-one platform plan to consolidate their tech.

Top sales tip: Too many disconnected tools can overwhelm sales teams and make it harder to deploy AI effectively. This is why many organisations are rationalising their stack around a core platform like Salesforce, which connects sales, service, and marketing data in one place.

Sales teams are placing greater focus on keeping their data clean and up to date because it directly impacts their AI strategy. We found that 74% of sales teams using AI say they are prioritising data hygiene to support it.

As teams use more AI in their workflows, poor data becomes harder to ignore. When tools are fed outdated or context-poor data, the outputs become unreliable, which lowers trust and wastes time.

Poor data not only gives you incorrect insights, but it also holds your team back from getting the benefits of AI.

One example of how good data can lead to positive outcomes can be seen from our customer, Pacific Smiles Group. They linked their data warehouse with Data 360 and Agentforce to respond to patient enquiries and suggest available appointment times. As a result, they saw an 80% reduction in booking times and a 30.4% increase in appointments.

Top sales tip: Prioritise your data hygiene before diving all-in with AI, as AI's outputs are only as good as its data inputs.

Usage-based pricing means customers only pay for how much they use a product or service, rather than a fixed fee. It’s widely used across industries like SaaS, AI, cloud, telecoms, fintech, utilities, and logistics, where usage can be measured.

It’s also becoming more popular, with 76% of sales leaders saying it matters more to customers than it did last year. That’s because usage-based pricing makes value easier to prove, which helps teams retain customers and close deals more efficiently.

However, while the model brings pricing closer to value, it also makes revenue harder to predict.

Top sales tip: To fix this, teams are starting to connect usage data to their CRM so they can see how customers are using their product and respond accordingly. This helps agents and teams spot changes in behaviour and take action before it's too late.

Eighty-nine per cent of sales teams say that partners are a core part of how they hit their revenue targets.

Despite their large role in generating revenue, most sales teams don’t have a good process for working with their partners. A key part of this is not having the tools to keep in touch with them and instead relying on email threads. This slows down deals and makes it harder to give consistent support and be there at crucial parts of the deal.

Top sales tip: Using a platform like Partner Cloud makes it easier to stay up to date with the deal and message back and forth with your partners.

While the fundamentals of connecting with customers remain, teams now have more to juggle than ever before. AI has taken away tedious tasks, but it has also introduced new challenges around data quality and implementation.

When teams are able to implement the right systems to overcome these issues, they can get all the benefits of AI without the setbacks. This is backed by data showing that 88% of sales professionals say AI increases their chances of hitting targets and makes them more productive.

If you’re ready to join other high-performing sales teams, Agentforce Sales can help you bring AI agents into your workflow to help with tasks like qualifying leads, surfacing insights, and nurturing prospects. Watch a demo or start your free trial today to see the software in action.

For a deeper breakdown of these trends and the data behind them, explore the full State of Sales report .