Here we go – a new calendar for sales ops leaders. What will you do with it?

More of the same?

More band-aids and short-term solutions?

More shelf-ware (products you buy with good intentions that end up living on a shelf instead of getting used)?

Or more strategies, tactics, and solutions?

Evolution or Revolution?

Will you create/foster evolution? Will you incite a revolution?

What does your company need most?

There is no universal answer for what is the best route to take – when the company and team needs to evolve itself, the processes, and toolkit, and when you need to burn things to the ground and rebuild from the bottom up.

Will this be the year you finally put in a CRM that matches your size, scale, and needs as a company? Or will this be the year you put in accountability and expectations to get your team to ACTUALLY use the CRM you already have and pay for?

Real Training for Real Results

Will this be the year you provide your leadership with leadership training and your salespeople with real sales training? Not the in-house stuff you keep trying to do or the assumption that if you hired the right people they should know what to do (which is not how humans and employees work). Or the ‘free’ online content you share with your team. But real, impactful and actionable training for your leaders and teams, like what I provide for companies.

Will this be the year that you build an intentional and effective recruiting process that identifies and moves forward the candidates that will have the best chance of being that successful salesperson that your team needs? Will you build tests and hoops that allow you to identify a candidate’s true nature versus the nice, smooth, successful sales story they tell you in the interviews?

Sales Processes: Best Practices or Best Excuses?

Will this be the year that you build a sales process based on best practices of the right, successful salespeople on your team and roll it out as a required process, instead of as an option and/or nice to have sales process? Will you actually hold your paid employees to a standard that you know generates consistent, profitable results? Or will you continue to let your salespeople convince you that salespeople don’t need ‘scripts’ and processes (“Just let me do what I do best – show up and talk people into buying things.”)?

Will this be the year that you hold you build in automated tech solutions for ensuring that your prospects and leads are moving through the pipeline in a consistent way? Will this be the year you hold your team accountable for making their follow up calls? Will this be the year you drive down your acquisition cost by making the most of the leads that already fill the sales pipeline?

Leads and Reps: Not All Are Equal

Will this be the year that you realize that not all leads are created equal, and not all salespeople should be treated the same? Where a lead in the hand on one rep could lead to significantly better results for everyone involved (including the potential customer), but in the hands of someone else it will statistically lead to nothing? Will this be the year you stop running the team like a communist-democracy (yes, I made that up), where everyone has a vote and they all feel like things should be fair, despite effort and results?

Will this be the year that your team understands that their sales job doesn’t end once the deal is closed, an agreement is signed, partial or full payment is made? That the sale never stops? That your company and the customer only care about long term success, not the short-term benefit of a closed sale? Will this be the year that you help them do more, including after the ‘sale’ is done?

Will this be the year that you fully leverage a mission, vision, and core values to ensure the right people are on the team and the wrong people identify themselves for removal? Will you use this to help facilitate change easier by anchoring everyone to both a destination (mission/vision) as well as the road map to get there (values)?

The Hope for 2025

I hope for you, your team, your leaders, your company, and most of all – your future customers that you do all of the above (over the next 12 months). I hope you put these things in place, so your team can do less of the things that get in the way and more of the things that AI still can’t replace – helping other scared, confused, worried humans (prospects) who have goals, hopes, dreams, and a place they would rather be make the right, best decision for themselves.

Here is your success in 2025!