The Future of B2B Sales Is Not New, It Is Disciplined 

The Future of B2B Sales Is Not New, It Is Disciplined 

This article draws directly from a candid, no-filter conversation I hosted on the Driving Growth podcast with three sales leaders who are in the work every day and seeing these shifts up close. George Leith brings the perspective of building and scaling complex, global B2B sales motions. Leslie Venetz operates at the sharp edge of modern outbound and buyer-centric go-to-market strategy. Robbie Butchart lives in the intersection of technology, growth, and real-world selling. What follows is drawn from their lived experience, hard-earned lessons, and unfiltered views on what’s working in B2B sales as we head into 2026.

B2B sales is not getting “harder” because buyers have changed. It is getting harder because sloppy selling has finally met a buyer who has options, information, and zero patience for wasting time. 

The last decade trained a lot of teams to believe volume is a sales strategy, that activity is a proxy for effectiveness, and that automation can replace preparation. That era is ending fast, and the teams that do not adapt will not just miss quota; they will lose credibility in their market, and they will feel it in every conversation. 

If you want predictable growth in 2026, stop treating sales like a numbers game and start treating it like a profession again. Because professionals do the work before they ask for attention, and they earn trust before they ask for a decision. 

What must stop right now 

Most bad sales results are self-inflicted, and most of them come from the same handful of habits that buyers have been complaining about for years. 

First: spray-and-pray outreach. The “connect then pitch” LinkedIn routine is not modern selling; it is digital littering, and it tells your buyer you care more about your sequence than their business. Robbie Butchart said it perfectly when he called it “the spray and pray approach,” and he is right, because it treats humans like a list. 

Second: generic messaging disguised as personalization. If your outreach could be sent to any company, it should be sent to none. Leslie Venetz nailed the hidden cost of this approach when she said, “they burned 20,000 bridges on the way to get those 30 responses.” That is not pipeline, that is reputation damage that shows up later as lower reply rates, colder referrals, and buyers who flinch the moment your brand appears in their inbox. 

Third: showing up unprepared. George Leith put it in the blunt language every buyer is thinking: “Pullin’ it out of your ass just doesn’t work anymore.” Buyers are doing more research than ever, and the moment you ask a question you could have answered yourself after spending three minutes on their website, you signal that the meeting is about you, not about them. 

Fourth: seller-designed processes that ignore the buying process. Too many companies still run sales like a relay race, handing the buyer from one person to the next because the org chart says so, not because the buyer benefits from it. When the process feels gated and bureaucratic, buyers feel like a number, and once that happens, the deal becomes a commodity comparison. 

If your team is still relying on volume, winging it, and forcing buyers through internal steps, you are not losing because your product is weak, you are losing because the experience is weak. 

What buyers expect now 

Buyers have not become allergic to salespeople, they have become allergic to sellers who do not add value. 

They expect three things that used to be optional. 

1) Transparency, especially on pricing 

If you sell something at standard pricing and hide it behind a “book a demo” wall, you are not creating leverage; you are creating friction. Leslie shared what many buyers now believe: if you gate pricing, “they’re done,” and in some cases, they will refuse to buy on principle because the move signals control, not partnership. 

Transparency does not mean you publish every custom variable; it means you respect the buyer’s need to self-educate, and you make it easy for them to understand what a fit looks like before they give you their calendar. 

2) Preparedness and insight 

A modern buyer is not looking for a guided tour of your features; they want help making a decision that will survive scrutiny inside their organization. George brought up the real-world complexity of buy-by-committee deals, with IT, compliance, procurement, and leadership all shaping the outcome, which means a seller needs to show up with more than a pitch. 

The new expectation is simple: if a buyer spends time with you, they should leave smarter. 

3) Help for the internal sale 

In B2B sales, your champion still has to sell the deal internally, and if you do not equip them with the narrative, the risks, the proof, and the rationale, your deal dies quietly in someone else’s meeting. 

This is not persuasion, it is enablement, and it is one of the most under-practiced skills in sales today. 

What is making a comeback because it always worked 

Not everything “old school” is outdated. A lot of it simply got abandoned when tools made it possible to hide behind screens. 

The fundamentals are coming back because they still produce the one thing every buyer wants: a real, coherent experience. 

Phone calls are working again 

Not because the phone is magical, but because it is rare. Robbie said it plainly: “Making phone calls baby.” He is also right that you should ask your customers what they will respond to, because the channel that wins is the one your buyer prefers, not the one your rep feels comfortable using. 

Leslie added the point most teams miss: cold calling is not just “making calls,” it is using voicemail strategically as part of a coordinated sequence, because many buyers read voicemails now, and a thoughtful message can create familiarity before the next touch. 

Direct mail and in-person are back, but only when they are integrated 

A mailer that shows up at the right time, tied to a narrative, coordinated with email and LinkedIn, and followed by a call, creates what George described as “putting heat around the prospect.” It works because it feels human, and it breaks the pattern of digital noise. 

The same is true for face time. Events, site visits, real conversations, and white-of-the-eyes moments are coming back because trust compounds faster in person. But George also made the point that sales leaders forget to prove: if you travel, you define the outcome, and you measure the ROI, because intent without accountability is just expensive movement. 

Multichannel is the new baseline 

The buyers do not see channels; they see a brand. If your outreach is scattered, inconsistent, or repetitive, the buyer experiences you as disorganized, and disorganized sellers create perceived risk. 

Leslie’s standard is the right one: use at least three channels so the buyer can engage on their channel of choice, and run it as one coordinated plan, not a random set of touches. 

The path forward is full-funnel ownership and true Go-To-Market alignment 

Here is the shift that decides who wins: the organizations that grow in 2026 will stop treating sales, marketing, product, and leadership as separate worlds, and they will operate as a revenue team within a well-defined go-to-market system. 

George laid it out with a metaphor that every leader should steal: when information gets passed around without the right stakeholders present, it degrades like copied music, and you lose the raw truth that drives good decisions. If your customer experience, operations or product teams are not hearing what customers are saying, they build in a vacuum. If marketing is not aligned with the sales narrative, they generate interest that does not convert. If leadership is not looking at the same numbers, they fund the wrong activities. 

Alignment is not a meeting. Alignment is shared outcomes, shared language, shared scorecards, and shared accountability. 

And yes, AI is part of this future, but not as a shortcut. 

Leslie’s warning is this: apply AI in ways that do not erode trust, because trust is the foundation of all selling, and anything that makes you feel synthetic, lazy, or careless will cost you more than it saves. 

The modern seller wins with discipline 

Robbie delivered the clearest operating principle for individual performance: be ruthless about revenue-generating activities, and call out your own excuses before someone else does. He said it best: “Call out your own bullshit,” because the top performers are not superhuman; they are simply honest about what moves deals forward, and they build their week around those actions. 

This is why the 80/20 rule keeps showing up, because the top sellers are not doing more things, they are doing the right things, consistently, with a scorecard that forces reality into the conversation. 

If you want predictable revenue, you build a predictable sales system, and that system is not built on hope, it is built on preparation, buyer-centric design, multichannel discipline, and a team that owns the full funnel together. 

A final challenge for 2026 

If your pipeline is messy, your forecasting is shaky, and your team feels like they are working hard without momentum, you do not need more hustle, and you do not need another tool that promises “more leads.” 

You need a sales strategy and system that mirrors how buyers buy, you need messaging that earns attention instead of demanding it, and you need the courage to remove anything from your process that creates friction without creating value. 

Selling is not dead, and buyers do not hate sales, buyers hate being treated like a target instead of a human. So build the kind of sales experience you would want if you were the one signing the contract, and then hold the line on it with accountability every single week, because sustainable growth is not an accident, it is engineered, and the teams who engineer it will be the ones celebrating at the end of 2026. 

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