Want More Sales? Try Smarter, Not Harder

Thoughts

The Illusion of Continuous Growth

Sometimes we forget that if unlocking more sales and growing a business was easy, everyone would be doing it. But it’s not. Especially not in 2025.

Today’s market is cluttered, attention spans are fractured and our potential customers are somehow left still wanting even more than ever before.

In times of uncertainty, it’s important to revisit the constants. One in particular that comes to mind is that most buying decisions are made long before a customer ever fills out a form or gets in touch.

In 2025, today’s customers demand more transparency, personalisation and value alignment than ever before.

Research has also shown us that many buying decisions are now influenced by a company’s sustainability, ethical practices and how well they demonstrate certain values such as empathy and purpose. As Shopify puts it,

"People want to buy from brands that reflect their own values - and who make it easy for them to do so.”

So as we continue to negotiate these transformative years, we’re here to determine what it could mean for our sales strategy in particular. Spoiler alert: more outreach, more content and more hustle isn’t our answer. Smarter systems, however, just might be.

The Sales Reality in 2025

Let’s start with the facts. According to CRO Club’s Sales Trends for 2025, buyers spend nearly 80% of their decision-making process researching online before ever engaging with a sales rep.

From Zendesk’s latest research, 71% of customers expect companies to collaborate internally so they don’t have to repeat themselves - and half of buyers say they’d switch to a competitor after just one bad experience.

Meanwhile, platforms like Shopify and Pipedrive are reporting a steady rise in buyer preference for seamless, digital-first experiences where speed, clarity, and emotional relevance matter just as much as the product features themselves.

Put simply: Your website, your messaging and your digital journey are your sales team. If those channels aren’t building trust, enabling smooth customer interaction, and helping close deals - they’re holding you back.

And if they’re not doing the heavy lifting, your actual sales conversations will always feel like a grind.

The Growth Lever

Think about your last meaningful purchase. It probably didn’t start with a cold email or an Instagram ad. It started with searching, comparing, and evaluating.

If your business isn’t intentionally understanding and improving that journey, you’re likely leaving a significant chunk of revenue on the table.

Whether our clients come to us looking for a website redesign to improve brand perception or a paid media strategy to boost sales, one of the first questions we ask is:

“When was the last time you dissected and mapped your customer journey from end to end?”

Understandably, most say never. Instead, they’ve launched a series of digital misfires - some more successful than others. Occasionally, a campaign lands. But luck is becoming a less reliable growth strategy, not to mention more and more expensive by the day.

Improving the customer journey today is what having a responsive website was ten years ago: the new baseline for doing business online.

In 2025, that means making it easier for your customers to navigate their research and consideration phases. That being said, they should be able to:

Quickly understand the value you bring
Trust your expertise early in their journey
Clearly see what engagement looks like with your brand

The brands getting this right treat their online experience like a product: always evolving, always optimising.

How to Unlock It

So if the customer journey is where opportunity and revenue is leaking - how do you fix it? That’s where we like to begin the conversation.

At Dream Config, our Discovery process is designed for both founders and marketing leads.

Whether you're a business owner navigating making better strategic decisions, or a marketing manager trying to connect the dots between digital activity and results, Dream Discovery creates space to step back, reset and refocus digital priorities in a time of critical transformation or growth.

We developed Dream Discovery to uncover the hidden gaps, misalignments and friction points across the digital ecosystem - something far more effective than focusing on a single channel or platform given how interconnected digital efforts are today.

We don’t begin with assumptions - we begin by asking better questions.

Whether you're planning a new website, launching a paid campaign or reevaluating your product or service’s market fit, Dream Discovery creates a shared understanding centred around your core customer's experience:

Mapping your customer journey across key stages
Identifying content gaps, UX dead-ends or tech constraints
Clarifying your value proposition and how it’s experienced digitally
Prioritising quick wins and longer-term opportunities
Using customer data and customer feedback to uncover pain points and design better experiences for both new and existing customers

The output isn’t just strategy on a slide. It is a roadmap to smarter execution - and how we save our clients time, energy and budget before they start running off in a direction.

"Dream Config brings so much value. The strategic approach to each project, paired with an understanding of how to translate business goals into development goals, was a huge benefit of partnering with them."

- Paul Oliver, Difference Design

We’ve also seen how improvements to email campaigns, CRM structure, and even customer service touchpoints can lead directly to more satisfied customers. These smarter sales systems are especially powerful when they connect across channels - and are grounded in the kind of digital growth strategy that actually moves key metrics over time.

This approach is especially effective when applied to sales enablement for small business, where every improvement to the customer experience matters more.

Practising What We Preach

This year we’re not just helping clients build smarter digital strategies, websites and SEO - we’re applying the same thinking to our own business.

Over the past year, we’ve been curiously refining how we approach our own sales funnel.

It began with a simple question: Are we making it easy for the right clients to understand our value and engage with us as we continue to evolve?

From there, we introduced a new sales function that involves more proactive partner collaboration and a focused emphasis on a specific area of expertise - strategic sales.

So naturally, it’s called Strategic Sales Enablement. It is the equivalent of building our own internal sales enablement platform - designed to better align with our sales cycle, improve customer support conversations, and support data driven decisions from start to finish.

We also use CRM integrations and customer relationship management practices to make sure nothing falls through the cracks - while ensuring we’re helping small business clients achieve measurable business growth.