5 New Year's Resolutions for Salespeople in 2023

The end of the year is usually a time of reflection and a time when we make New Year’s resolutions. 

If your sales team has areas they would like to improve, like closing more deals or having a better reporting system, this is the time to discuss. Find out which part of the sales process needs improving and set your goals accordingly. 

While the goals will vary from one sales team to another, there are a few aspects every sales rep should work on in the new year. 

In order to inspire sales reps, we’ve created a list of the 5 New Year’s resolutions every sales professional should set for themselves. 

1. Improve time management

Did arranging your Black Friday deal go smoothly or did Murphy’s law kick in? It seems like there is never enough time to plan everything out properly, doesn’t it? 

If you want to be able to test out your sales strategies, you need to be better at time management. It will not only help you figure out what deserves more of your time and effort but will also help you stay calm in emergency situations. 

Our advice is to start improving your time management by scheduling your day ahead of time. 

Schedule your day

If you’re waking up every morning not knowing how your work day will go, you won’t feel productive. 

Scheduling your day will help you deliver more results quicker. It’s important to understand when you’re most productive and have that part of the day free to work on the most important tasks without any interruptions. 

Usually, this means closing the email tab on your computer and making a note on Slack for your team members to know not to disturb you. 

You should also plan out a time to check in with other members of the sales team. 

Limit checking email

If you’re anything like the majority of sales reps, your email tab is constantly open and you’re switching to it every time the number in the parentheses changes. 

Although it’s great that you’re trying to answer your emails as fast as you can, this habit can quickly become distracting and unproductive. 

We recommend you limit your email checking time to a few times a day in order to stay organized. 

That way, you won’t be switching between your tasks so frequently, and it will be easier to answer emails if you’re doing it all at once. 

Otherwise, your focus will be all over the place and it will be harder to get into the right mood. 

Bonus tip

In order to better manage your time, make sure you’re always working on just one thing at a time. Don’t try to stretch yourself too thin by focusing on multiple tasks all at once. It will lower the quality of your output. 

Although multitasking is viewed as a helpful skill in business, it can be ineffective in sales. Especially if you want to include that human touch in your sales efforts. 

Since people and companies want a personalized sales approach, they won’t appreciate receiving default emails, proposals and sales decks that don’t outline the custom benefits they can expect. 

That’s why you need to focus on a single task and make sure that all your sales content is custom and speaks directly to the reader. 

Although it may be hard to break habits, if you’re persistent, you’ll see great results.

2. Measure your performance

If you’re not analyzing your sales efforts, you won't know what works and what doesn’t. That is why one of your New Year’s resolutions should be to find an easy way to measure performance.

Luckily, you don’t have to do this manually, since there are great sales automation tools that can help you out. 

For starters, your CRM. It can tell you exactly how many leads turned into sales, how long is your sale cycle, have you been reaching your KPIs and more. 

Once you understand what your shortcomings are, you can focus on bettering them in the new year. Make sure to also talk to your loyal customers and get their feedback. Ask them if they find your newsletters, social media posts and other sales content relevant and helpful or not. 

If you find out that you’re losing out on deals at the end part of your sales pipeline, it’s time to change the way you create business proposals. 

With Better Proposals, you can choose a template and quickly customise it to your needs. That way, you’ll create a beautiful and winning business proposal every time. 

Once it’s sent, you get access to proposal analytics, which help you understand how the reader is interacting with your document.

Not only that, but you’ll also see how much time the reader spent on all the sections of your proposal. 

Having this data will help you structure your follow-up process and win more deals. If you notice that your prospects are closing the proposal as soon as they get to the pricing, you’ll need to rethink the way you present your prices. 

On the other hand, if they’re coming back to your process section, it means that you will have to restructure it and make it easier to understand. 

You can keep track of all your proposals, as well as team members’ performances in proposal reports. 

3. Try to understand why you lose out on sales

Do you qualify a lot of prospects, but have trouble converting them to customers? 

If this is something you struggle with, analyzing and reanalyzing your sales process might not cut it. You’ll need to step outside of your way of thinking and find a new approach. 

The best way to get inspired is by reading how other people did it. That’s why we sat down with our CEO Adam Hempenstall and picked his brain on everything from sales mistakes to advice he has for a struggling sales team.

While he’s proud of his successes, he’s transparent about his failures, so don’t think of this as some puff piece.

This type of insight doesn’t get shared very often so make sure you get the most out of this opportunity. 

4. Get a better understanding of your customers

People buy from people. There is no way around this. 

The best way to get a better understanding of your customers is to spend time getting to know them. 

That’s why we recommend you make better understanding your customers one of your New Year’s resolutions. 

After all, they are the ones using your products and services and getting to know them can help you shape your sales approach. 

If you’ve created buyer personas a while back, but never updated them, now’s the time to do so. Go through your analytics (from Google, social media, CRM) in order to get the newest data on your existing customers. 

After that, talk to your sales reps and find out what they’ve observed about your clients. You can use all of this information to reshape your buyer personas. With that, you’ll be able to better target your audience. 

Get a better understanding of your leads

A lot of times converting a prospect into a customer requires you to build a relationship with them. And the best way to do so is with conversation. 

Once you get to know your prospect’s pain points, you can showcase the strengths of your solution and present them with personalized benefits. 

This process is called consultative selling and it focuses on a strong relationship between you and the prospect. It entails doing research, asking the right questions and active listening. 

If you think of your prospects as people, instead of as numbers, it’s easy to see that they want to be heard and understood by a service provider. That’s why you need to reassure them and provide a personalized sales experience. 

A great way to start is by creating questionnaires that will give them the opportunity to share their wants, needs and buying habits. 

Use their answers as a guide in all future communication. This way you won’t have to do a lot of guessing but will know from the start how to address every prospect. 

5. Develop better communication with the marketing team

It only makes sense that the sales team and the marketing team work together. After all, you both have the same goal of - increasing revenue. 

This means that you can combine forces and create amazing sales content that helps you get more leads in your sales funnel. With your knowledge of the existing clients and the marketing team’s writing expertise, you can create engaging content that will catch the attention of your target audience. 

If you’re struggling with your conversion rate from social media, you might need to make some changes to your sales content, landing pages and more. 

Find out what is holding you back in your social media efforts in our detailed guide. It explains how to gain more leads from social media with helpful tips and tricks. 

Key takeaways

With the year coming to a close, it’s time to re-evaluate your sales process and figure out what works and what doesn’t. 

Change is in the air and if you don’t change for the better, you’ll get left behind. 

With our helpful guide, you’ll easily reshape your work days and become more productive. Share this guide with your team and discuss the changes each of you needs to make in order to get better results.