What Sales Teams are Facing Right Now
Every year, sales teams face new pressures. New technologies. New buyer expectations. New economic realities. To better understand what sales professionals are experiencing right now, Carew International asked a simple question:
What is the biggest challenge facing sales teams today?
- What Sales Teams are Facing Right Now
- What We Heard
- The Economy Isn’t Just Background Noise Anymore
- Getting In The Door Has Never Been Harder
- The Pace of Change is Breaking The Sales Process
- Management Is Still The Missing Link
- The Attention Economy Is Eating Sales Culture
- What This Means for Sales Leaders
- Frequently Asked Questions About Sales Challenges, Sales Leadership, and Sales Performance
- What's the Biggest Challenge Facing Your Sales Team?
The responses came from sales professionals across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia representing industries including manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, education technology, industrial supply, agriculture, packaging, and more.
What emerged was both surprising and revealing. Despite the attention artificial intelligence continues to receive, very few respondents identified AI as their biggest challenge. Instead, the overwhelming majority pointed to much more immediate concerns: economic pressure, difficulty gaining access to buyers, shifting customer priorities, inconsistent coaching, and the growing challenge of maintaining focus and momentum in a rapidly changing environment.
Taken together, the responses reveal a profession caught between external pressures it cannot control and internal challenges it must solve. Buyers are more cautious. Decisions take longer. Competition for attention is fierce.
At the same time, sales leaders are being asked to develop teams, maintain accountability, and drive growth in an environment that seems to change by the week. This report summarizes what we heard, what it means, and practical actions sales leaders can take in response.
Who Responded:
Roles:
- Sales representatives
- Account managers
- Sales managers
- Directors
- Executives
- Consultants
- Business leaders
Industries:
- Manufacturing
- Distribution
- Packaging
- Dental and medical devices
- Education technology
- Telecommunications
- Industrial supply
- Animal health
- Agriculture
- Professional services
While the specific challenges varied, five themes emerged consistently across industries, geographies, and job titles.
What We Heard
Responses fell into five primary themes.
- Economic Pressure (37%)
Pricing volatility, budget freezes, freight costs, raw material scarcity, and general market uncertainty dominated the conversation. This was the single largest category of response.
- Prospecting and Access (33%)
Getting appointments, reaching decision makers, breaking through to buyers who are already committed elsewhere, and converting initial contact into real conversations.
- Change Management and Shifting Priorities (11%)
Buyers whose priorities shift week to week, organizations struggling to keep pace with rapid external change, and the challenge of selling into uncertainty.
- Sales Management, Coaching, and Accountability (9%)
Managers who aren’t translating frontline intelligence into action, reps who won’t follow the process, and organizations where coaching is an afterthought.
- Mindset, Motivation, and Culture (7%)
A cultural drift toward short-term thinking, distraction, and apathy that is making sustained sales performance harder to maintain.
The Economy Isn’t Just Background Noise Anymore
More than a third of respondents named economic conditions as their defining challenge this year, making it the single most cited theme across every industry and region represented.
Respondents described buyers who are cutting spend across the board, delaying decisions, going out to bid on contracts they previously renewed automatically, and showing up to conversations already looking for reasons to say no.
“Customers feel they have to skimp like crazy. The economy is going in the trash.”
Price has become the loudest voice in the room. Respondents from packaging, distribution, industrial supply, and dental named price increases and margin compression as their defining challenge. The pressure isn’t coming from one direction. Raw material costs, freight, tariffs, and competitive bidding are all hitting at once.
“Soaring freight costs on delivered orders have narrowed margins, making them difficult to address and hard to sell without losing goodwill.”
“Our biggest challenge is managing pricing pressures resulting from economic uncertainty and raw material scarcity.”
When buyers are under financial pressure, value selling becomes the only approach that holds up. Reps who lead with price get dragged into a race they cannot win. Reps who can clearly articulate business impact, build trust, and earn the right to have a real conversation about value have a fighting chance.
What Sales Leaders Can Do Now
- Ask every rep to identify their top ten at-risk accounts and what specifically is putting them at risk.
- Review recent lost opportunities and look for patterns around price-related objections – are reps losing on price, or losing before value is established?
- Run a team discussion around value stories. Ask each rep to bring one example of a time they successfully shifted a price conversation to a value conversation.
Discussion question for your next team meeting:
What are buyers most worried about financially right now, and how are we helping them address those concerns?
Where Carew Helps
Dimensions of Professional Selling® teaches reps to identify buyer problems and position value in terms of business impact before price ever enters the conversation. The LAER® framework gives reps a structured approach to handling financial objections without conceding ground.
Getting In The Door Has Never Been Harder
One in three respondents named some version of the same problem: they cannot get in front of the right people. Across industries and geographies, access to buyers ranked as the second most pressing challenge facing sales professionals today.
The language varied -“getting appointments,” “getting in the door,” “getting ghosted,” “decreased face time with key decision makers,” “buyers having time for our presentations” – but the underlying challenge was identical. Buyers are harder to reach, faster to ignore outreach, and more protected by layers of gatekeepers, competing priorities, and inbox overload.
“I’m constantly getting ghosted.”
The rise of remote and hybrid work has compounded this. The casual hallway conversation, the drop-in visit, the relationship built over lunch – these touchpoints have not fully returned for many industries. Buyers are reachable in theory but unreachable in practice.
“Getting appointments with qualified buyers and influencers feels impossible.”
“I’m finding it difficult to earn even small opportunities.”
Reps who show up with generic outreach are invisible. The ones breaking through are arriving with something specific: a problem they’ve already diagnosed, a question worth answering, a reason for the conversation that stands on its own.
What Sales Leaders Can Do Now
- Pull a sample of your team’s recent prospecting messages and count how many open with something about the seller versus something about the buyer. The ratio will tell you everything.
- Ask each rep to identify three specific customer challenges they can bring genuine insight around – not product features, but problems they understand deeply enough to have a useful conversation about.
- Roleplay a cold outreach message in your next team meeting. Have reps answer the question a prospect is silently asking: “Why should I give you thirty minutes of my time?”
Discussion question for your next team meeting:
Why would a prospect take a meeting with us next week – and what would make them glad they did?
Where Carew Helps
Positional ProspectingTM teaches sales professionals to approach prospects from a position of relevance rather than interruption – identifying the right entry point, navigating buying organizations strategically, and creating reasons for conversation that buyers want to have.
The Pace of Change is Breaking The Sales Process
One in ten respondents pointed to something subtler and harder to solve than price or access: the speed at which everything is changing. Buyer priorities shift between meetings. Market conditions evolve faster than proposals can be revised. Internal tools, processes, and organizational structures are in a constant state of flux. The result is a sales environment where what was relevant last week may not be relevant today.
The playbook that closed deals 18 months ago may be the same one losing them today.
The challenge for sales leaders isn’t just external. Training programs, playbooks, and messaging built for the conditions of 18 months ago may be actively misleading reps today. Organizations that can teach reps to read a changing room and adjust in real time -rather than execute a fixed script – will have a structural advantage.
“Customer priorities change every day. Sometimes work done last week is not relevant today. Projects and the market are changing fast.”
“I’m struggling to keep up with the exponential pace of change both internally and externally while striving to maintain sales momentum and upskilling their sales acumen.”
The sales professionals who are winning in this environment share one trait: they ask more questions than they answer. When everything is in flux, curiosity is more valuable than certainty. The rep who walks in genuinely wondering what’s changed for the customer will always outperform the one who walks in assuming they already know.
What Sales Leaders Can Do Now
- Ask your reps what customer priorities have shifted in the last 90 days. If they can’t answer specifically, that’s a discovery gap worth addressing immediately.
- Review your current messaging and value propositions. Are they reflecting today’s economic reality, or last year’s?
- Encourage teams to increase the ratio of questions to presentations in every customer conversation. In a fast-changing environment, listening is more valuable than presenting.
Discussion question for your next team meeting:
What assumptions are we making about our customers that may no longer be true?
Where Carew Helps
One of the foundational models taught throughout Carew’s training programs is LAER®: Listen, Acknowledge, Explore, Respond. Rather than relying on scripts, LAER equips sales professionals to confidently navigate changing customer needs, unexpected objections, and evolving business conditions. When the pace of change is accelerating, adaptability becomes a critical sales skill.
Management Is Still The Missing Link
Nearly one in ten respondents pointed directly at the manager layer as the place where sales performance breaks down – a number that likely understates the real scope of the problem, given how rarely people name management as the issue when management is the audience.
The single greatest predictor of rep performance is the quality of the manager’s coaching.
The research on sales manager effectiveness is consistent: the single greatest predictor of rep performance is the quality of the manager’s coaching. Organizations that invest in equipping managers to coach – not just manage activity, but develop behavior -consistently outperform those that don’t.
“The biggest problem is managers who do not listen and react to what the customers are telling their frontline sales people. I believe that answer to be correct for the past several decades.”
“My biggest problem is getting the reps on my team to follow the process.”
These two responses describe opposite sides of the same problem. In one case, management isn’t listening to what reps are hearing in the field. In the other, reps aren’t doing what management has asked them to do. Both are coaching failures. Both are leadership failures.
What Sales Leaders Can Do Now
- Listen to three customer conversations this week – not to evaluate, but to understand what buyers are saying. Then ask your managers to do the same.
- Schedule one dedicated coaching conversation per rep this month and have a conversation about behavior, skill, and development.
- Ask your managers what they’ve learned from customers in the last 30 days. The quality of the answer reveals how connected they are to the field.
Discussion question for your next team meeting:
What behavior, if improved consistently across our team, would have the greatest impact on performance?
Where Carew Helps
Excellence in Sales LeadershipTM is built for sales leaders who want to move from managing numbers to developing people. The program covers coaching methodology, performance conversations that change behavior, and building a culture of accountability that doesn’t rely on fear or micromanagement.
The Attention Economy Is Eating Sales Culture
Nearly one in ten respondents named something that doesn’t show up on a pipeline report but shapes everything that does: a creeping erosion of focus, motivation, and professional culture.
The most direct response came from a sales consultant:
“The greatest threat to sales culture is apathy. In the marketplace, in work, in our culture – driven by short form content and short burst dopamine.”
Apathy is a systemic problem sales leaders are increasingly confronting. The same forces reshaping consumer attention – the scroll, the short video, the instant notification – are reshaping the attention spans, motivation levels, and patience of sales professionals themselves.
Sustained prospecting requires tolerating discomfort over time. Consultative selling requires genuine curiosity and the discipline to listen before speaking. Both are increasingly hard to sustain in a culture that rewards speed, surface-level engagement, and immediate gratification.
A Marketing Manager in telecommunications named the shift at the buyer level: the need to move from “always be closing” to a modern customer experience mindset. A Sales Manager in packaging pointed to the internal version – the tendency for reps to see every conversation through the filter of what they want rather than what the buyer needs.
What Sales Leaders Can Do Now
- Ask each rep to identify one prospecting or selling behavior they know they should do consistently but don’t. Naming the gap is the first step to closing it.
- Introduce a brief reflection practice into team meetings – one question, five minutes, no pipeline discussion. What did you learn from a customer this week that surprised you?
- Recognize and celebrate patience. When a rep nurtures a relationship over months without a quick win, make that visible. Culture follows what gets recognized.
Discussion question for your next team meeting:
Where are we taking shortcuts that are costing us relationships we haven’t built yet?
Where Carew Helps
In a culture that rewards speed and distraction, sales organizations must be intentional about developing and reinforcing the behaviors that create trust and long-term customer relationships. Carew’s sales and leadership programs provide the structure, coaching, and reinforcement needed to keep those behaviors alive long after the workshop ends.
What This Means for Sales Leaders
The challenges in this report are connected.
A buyer who is financially stressed is harder to reach, slower to decide, and more likely to go silent. A rep leading with product instead of problem gets ignored. A manager who isn’t coaching watches those reps repeat the same mistakes. An organization that isn’t investing in skills development falls further behind as the environment keeps changing.
The antidote to all of it is the same thing it has always been: genuine human connection, disciplined process, and relationships that take time to build and can’t be automated.
The sales professionals who will thrive in this environment listen first, arrive with insight instead of information, and treat every conversation as an opportunity to understand rather than to close.
This isn’t a new idea. But in 2026, it may be the most important one.
Team Discussion Guide
Use these five questions with your team to turn the findings in this report into a work conversation.
- Team Impact: Which of the five challenges in this report affects our team most right now?
- Behavior Change: What specific behaviors need to change – and what is making them hard to change?
- Top Performers: What are our top performers doing differently in response to these conditions?
- Current Market: What should we stop doing – because it made sense before but doesn’t fit the market we’re selling in today?
- Company Impact: Where are we seeing the effects of this most clearly: in our pipeline, our close rates, or our customer relationships?