3 Top Trends for Chief Sales Officers in 2025

B2B buyers are completing purchases through different channels, increasing the need for sales and marketing collaboration. Yet sales and marketing continue to struggle to collaborate — 80% of key commercial activities are missing contributions from one function or the other.

It’s worthwhile for CSOs to seek out ways to bridge the sales-marketing gap. When the two functions collaborate on key commercial activities, organizations are 2.3 times more likely to attain strong commercial growth than organizations using a siloed approach.

A CSO’s No. 1 priority is to set and execute a sales strategy that drives revenue. It’s a tough mandate when sales organizations undergo an average of four sales transformations over two years. 

Achieving in-year results while trying to implement multiple sales transformations creates a new challenge for CSOs. Nearly two-thirds struggle to adapt their strategic sales plans to sudden change, and shift budget and resources to an emerging priority. 

To balance short-term execution with longer-term transformation, look for ways to build adaptability into the sales organization in 2025. Sales organizations that are able to leverage key adaptive-by-design tenets are 3.2 times more likely to have strong commercial performance than less adaptive organizations.

When considering how to boost seller productivity, CSOs typically pull the levers they’re most familiar with — training and upskilling, enabling sellers with new or improved technology or tools, and improving sales manager coaching. But these traditional methods are no longer sufficient to improve seller performance.

The challenge? Seventy-two percent of sellers feel overwhelmed by the number of skills required of them, and 70% feel overwhelmed by the technology needed to do their jobs. Already-overburdened sellers are less likely to succeed, leaving it to the CSO to find ways to simplify the seller role, reduce overwhelm and increase productivity. Simplifying seller roles as a method to meet this challenge pays off; sales organizations that simplify seller roles to improve productivity are 4.5 times more likely to be top sales organizations compared to those that don’t focus on role simplification.