92% of sales teams use AI. But only 1 in 3 knows how to make it work
What's actually changing in B2B sales
October 15, 2025
Most sales reports feel like déjà vu: same charts, buzzwords but a different year.
Still, I think they do one useful thing: help you see if what’s happening inside your team mirrors what’s happening across the market.
The latest HubSpot report landed recently. We skimmed it with that lens, not for surprises, but to check how it maps to what we see in outbound and AI-driven sales work.
I’m Rinat — CEO at Sally, where we build outbound systems for B2B companies in SaaS, fintech, and services. Over the past year, we’ve worked on 20+ projects across the US and Europe, helping teams turn outbound into a predictable leadgen channel.
A few points from the report lined up almost perfectly with what we’re seeing in the field, especially around AI adoption, multichannel outreach, and stakeholder-heavy deals.
Here are the four that stood out, and what they look like in practice.
1. Everyone’s using AI but most are still stuck at surface level
92% of sales teams now use AI. But for 32% of them, “getting actual value from AI” remains the biggest challenge. By comparison, only 29% name competitive differentiation as their top concern.
Our take: The biggest opportunity for AI in sales right now is in data operations. Segmentation, pre-call research, trigger extraction, and CRM enrichment are what drive actual performance lift. That’s where AI is most needed and most underused.
2. Social has overtaken email on reply rates
Social channels now outperform email in terms of engagement especially among younger teams & products and newer markets.
Our take: Email still works, but it’s noisy and oversaturated. If you’re only running cold email, you’re leaving pipeline on the table. Add LinkedIn, conference apps, Telegram, Reddit, even Instagram. In our experience, multichannel is one of the most reliable growth levers. Don’t listen to anyone preaching email-only.
3. Buyers show up pre-loaded with research
Thanks to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and the like, buyers now join sales calls with a baseline understanding of the space, 2–3 alternatives in mind, and a rough idea of their objections.
Our take: The goal of a sales call isn’t to sell but to facilitate the decision. That means understanding context, mapping constraints, building trust, and helping the buyer make sense of nuance.
To make this scalable, we’re strong advocates of building a shared product knowledge base and objection libraries into lightweight RAG setups. Even a native Notion AI search on top of well-kept docs can help reps respond faster and personalize outreach at every stage. It helps the whole team stay aligned and respond fast, even to tough or unexpected questions.
Understanding buyer context has become the key success factor in outbound.
4. Stakeholder count is rising
In mid-size and larger deals, the average number of stakeholders is now around five.
Our take: Pitching a single decision-maker no longer works. You need to design your funnel to target multiple roles within the same company because that’s how decisions are made.
Each stakeholder comes with their own priorities, pain points, and level of awareness. A VP of Sales, СЕО, and Head of Ops will all care about different things and your messaging needs to reflect that.
At Sally, we build outbound systems for B2B companies, combining segmentation, enrichment, and AI-powered workflows to make outbound predictable.
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