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 year