Happy New Year! It's a great time to dust off your playbook and think about what your strategic plans are in sales and marketing for the coming year. A good way to start is to start by taking your management team through a series of new year's resolutions. What are your new year's resolutions for sales and marketing? Are you going to boost your lead generation? Are you going to invest more heavily in telesales to reduce your sales cycle? Are you going to commit yourself to double digit sales growth for your company? Are you going to finally invest in search engine optimization in order to improve your company's online visibility using natural and organic search engines? Are you thinking about boosting your performance for lead generation through direct mail campaigns? What about refreshing or developing a new website with better content that's more compelling against your competitors? These are all new year's resolutions that companies should be considering as they think about how to accelerate their sales this year. We're working with a number of companies that are specifically targeting improvements to their sales and marketing programs and now is a great time for you to do that. The year is just now getting started and if you get an early jump on your sales and marketing activities for this year you'll have the best results for converting those investments into actual sales growth. What's your sales and marketing new year's resolution?

The first thing you should be doing is considering an investment in your own business and making sure that your putting dollars into it first before putting dollars into the owner's pockets or into the shareholder's pockets. Why? Because over time, your shareholder value will increase the more you invest in good marketing and good lead generation to accelerate your sales. So that's one of the things we're doing this yearwere going to make sure we put our marketing programs first in order to generate the kind of leads we need to drive top line sales growth during the coming year. Another great new year's resolution is to try something new and different that sets you apart from all of your competition. How is your company differentiating itself? Not only through its messaging and positioning, but also through the types of marketing programs that it is doing in order to reach its audience. If all of your competitors are going to trade shows, what about spending more money on search engine optimization or e-newsletter campaigns that provide nurture marketing to your best prospects and allow you to stay in front of your long term customers. Thinking of doing something different and innovating in your marketing and sales programs is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from your competition and be more appreciated by those companies that are looking to partner with you or looking for a partner in your particular product of service area.

Another great new year's resolution is to terminate your relationship with unprofitable customers. The ones that are costing you the most money to service and require and eat up all of your resources, delay your projects or aren't paying you well. These are the kinds of customers that we all have had some experience with and one of the best things that we can do is find a way to end those relationships as we go into the new year. Ending those relationships is a wonderful, liberating thing for your company and it also allows you to free up the opportunity cost that is associated with spending your resources to serve customers who are unprofitable when you could be going after profitable customers that could really become an engine for growth for your business. We've all experienced having frustrating customers that end up chewing up a lot of our resources. My feeling is now is a great time for you to go through a list of those businesses that you're doing and figure out which ones it's time to sever the relationship with. Let them go to your competition. Why? Because then your competition can chew up all of its resources and absorb all of its time trying to serve those customers. And that will keep them from going after the best ones that you want for your business.

Another new year's resolution you might want to consider, is if your sales team has worked really hard, the question I have for you is what are you doing to celebrate your successes in sales day in and day out, week after week? One of the things that we're doing this year is spending more time doing internal atta boys and celebrating and high-fiving for all of the sales wins that we have as a company. Why? Because boosting the moral of your sales people and boosting the moral of your employees around sales wins has a multiplier effect on your sales effectiveness and that's what we're looking to do, is to improve our sales effectiveness by celebrating more of our successes and recognizing the effects of those people who are working so hard to produce those results that we need in order to power our business up.