The Top Challenges Facing B2B Sales Leaders in 2026

 The challenge: 

Growth demands consistency, cohesion, and communication —and many commercial organisations today struggle to sustain this due to entrenched silos within their go-to-market function.

This is backed up by a recent LinkedIn report suggesting that ‘revenue engines’ entering 2026 are deeply fragmented, with the different key role in the sales process – typically Lead generators (SDRs) , Sales Execs (AEs)  and Customer Services/Account Managers (CS) often having different C-Level reporting lines, terminology, processes and supporting technology. 

Add in regional differences into the mix and the issue gets even more complex…

Our own experience:

We completely agree with this and  have found that teams can have diverse definitions of key terms like ‘Qualified Opportunity’ and even fundamentally different views on their companies’ competitive differentiators and value proposition.

It’s not always clear exactly what a team’s role is in the revenue process and how that fits into other teams in the cycle – so no surprise that ‘inconsistent handovers’ from lead generators to sales execs and then onto account managers is a common issue.

One other related factor we are now also finding is the increasing importance of Subject Matter Experts (typically product managers or content owners) in the sale process – largely driven by the increasing complexity of technology solutions – which of course brings another group into the cycle.

The business impact:

The knock-on effects of this are fairly widespread and we have seen…

• An inconsistent buying process – with prospects seeing different messages from each group throughout the cycle
• Confusion as to how teams and individuals are measured – and the behaviours that are expected from them.
• Poor forecasting
• Difficulty in scaling sales operations, restricting growth
• Slower decision making

Our top tips:

So, what do we see top organisations doing?

Well, in addition to the obvious organisational reporting alignment (making the CSO/CRO ultimately responsible for each group), some of the other things we have seen work well include:

• Define and communicate clear metrics for each group – not just the obvious ‘lagging’ measures such as sales numbers, but the key ‘leading indicators’ for each team which would signal that things are on track or not. Example here might be;
  • weighted pipeline as a % of target
  • # identified stakeholders per prospect
  • effective use of specific tools & process

Communicating the team’s performance against each metric via a clear dashboard keeps this transparent – and also acts as a management tool for prioritising a team’s monthly focus

Some clients have taken this to the next level and identified individual personal targets for each metric and even the key behaviours they are looking for.  We worked with one client on this recently and amazingly they found that simply communicating these league tables, motivated individuals to up their performance – especially in areas where they were behind their colleagues…

• Articulate a consistent value proposition for each product or service for each group to use.  Reinforcing the key competitive differentiators their company has.
• Clearly define terminology and handover processes: An obvious one maybe, but again one that is helped the sales leadership team is working effectively together under the guidance of a single C-level exec!