What Does It Take to be APAC’s Next Top Sales Professional?

If you want to remain at the top of the sales profession, it's likely that you will have to change the way you do things, because your prospects are changing the way things are done. Studies suggest that by 2020, 46% of sales professionals will come from the millennial cohort. The trend is similar on the buyer side. The tides are changing, and sales is changing. 

At LinkedIn, we surveyed more than 2,500 sales professionals worldwide to help us put together a guide to the State of Sales today. Even better, we’ve created three guides to the State of Sales relevant to us in the Asia Pacific. One each for our sales friends sipping iced lattes in Australia, kopi C in Singapore, and chai tea in India.

Across all three markets, we discovered these key findings:

• Technology gives sales professionals the competitive edge they need.
• Millennial sales professionals tap into marketing insights at higher rates.
• Trust remains the no. 1 value for top sales professionals in closing deals (ranks above ROI and price)

For each of the three markets, these findings stood out:

Australia

• Nearly all sales professionals (93%) surveyed use sales technology to close more deals.
• 48% of decision makers in Australia say websites are a company's top asset influencing purchasing decisions (compared to 44% in Singapore and 39% in India).

India

• 93% of surveyed sales professionals in India say they're most active on LinkedIn for business purposes (compared to 80% in Singapore and 62% in Australia).
• 86% of decision makers in India feel the sales professionals they work with are essential partners all or most of the time (compared to 78% in Australia and 65% in Singapore).

Singapore

• 81% of surveyed Millennial sales professionals in Singapore say they see excellent leads from marketing at 10% higher rates than non-millennials.
• "Representing a well-known company with a strong professional brand" is the most important factor that influences decision makers in Singapore for initial engagement.

We also discovered that sales professionals that rely on sales technology are outperforming everyone else. Sales technology could be customer relationship management (CRM) tools, such as Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics; collaboration tools like Google, Dropbox; and networking platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Where we’re going with this

With the State of Sales survey, we want to get a good gauge of where we are at in sales technology. We also want to make sure we’re using the numbers that matter in our part of the world. Of the aforementioned 2,500 we surveyed worldwide, this report involved a sample of 500 more responses coming from top sales professionals in each of the three markets we covered in APAC.

In 2019, we’re using better sales tools. But we need a guide to help us understand how many sales professionals in our region are using it to close deals.

Take a look at our guide to the state of sales now: Australia, Singapore, and India.

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