5 Sales Rep Best Practices To Drive Sales in 2023

Are you hitting your targets? If not, you aren’t alone: Only an estimated sixty percent of reps hit their quotas.

Sales is a challenging field. At times, it can feel like the odds are stacked against you. After the twentieth unsuccessful cold call or the third canceled meeting, you might be ready to tear your hair out. However, with the right practices, you can drive massive profits and meet your quotas over and over again.

This post will give you five best practices you can use to drive sales and level up your individual skills in 2023 and beyond.

Leveraging Trends to Drive Sales in 2023

If you’ve been in the sales game long, you know that change is the only constant. If you want to succeed in sales, you need to keep an eye on shifting industry trends and ensure you aren’t driving away prospects by using outdated tactics and strategies.

So, what are some sales trends for 2023? Here are a few you should keep your eye on:

Automation: Automating administrative processes can free you up to spend your time engaging with your prospects.

Social Media: Social selling isn’t the be-all end-all of sales, but it’s a useful tool for selling and prospecting that you should consider incorporating into your strategies.
Shifts in Buyer Expectations: Modern buyers are more informed than ever. Additionally, they crave a personalized experience. Taking a tailored, consultative approach will win you more deals in 2023.

As an individual sales rep, it can feel like you don’t have much power to leverage trends or drive sales. I beg to differ. The only person responsible for your success in sales is you. You can make a significant difference in your organization and your sales numbers with the right practices.

Practice 1: Be Mindful of Your Mindset

My number one best practice for driving sales is to master your mindset. Sales can be a challenging industry. You may find yourself struggling to handle rejection and maintain your focus. To overcome this, you must embrace an indomitable mindset.

You can build an indomitable mindset by rejecting things that don’t serve you or your success and focusing instead on:

Maintaining optimism
Seeing the abundance of your opportunities
Finding the courage to act
Focusing only on what you can control
Leaving people better than you found them

When you nail down these five focuses, your mindset will be strong enough to overcome any number of rejections or challenges.

You’ll also want to ensure you’re leveraging a one-up mindset. When you have a one-up mindset, you set the conditions for success for yourself by gathering information about your prospect and creating value for your prospect.

Practice 2: Organize Your Schedule

In many cases, multitasking is the death of productivity. This hard truth is why organizing your schedule is another best practice that can help you drive sales. The best way to organize your schedule is by utilizing calendar blocking.

You should block out time on your calendar for two types of tasks:

Tasks you’re likely to avoid (such as cold calling)
Tasks likely to distract you (such as email inbox time)

Mastering your calendar and taking charge of your weekly and daily schedule will help you use your time more efficiently, selling more in less time.

Practice 3: Track Your Own Metrics

Your leadership or management team likely has organization-wide metrics and KPIs they track to keep tabs on the success of the sales team as a whole. You should also track your own, individual sales metrics if you want to drive sales and increase your individual close rates.

When you set personal goals, you can gamify your sales efforts by keeping score and competing with your past self. This practice helps to ensure you’re always improving and growing.

Some metrics you may want to consider tracking include:

Meetings booked per day
New opportunities created per week
Number of won deals
Revenue in dollars from won deals
Quarterly win rate
Average deal size
Average sales cycle

Practice 4: Find a Mentor

The easiest way to find success is by repeating the actions of successful people. This truth is why the fourth best practice on my list for driving sales is to find a mentor.

Is there a more experienced rep or sales leader in your organization who you can approach to ask for guidance, direction, and feedback? If so, this contact could become an invaluable source of knowledge and advice for you.

If you don’t have anyone you can approach for mentorship, you can also learn from the advice of sales professionals in the form of sales books, podcasts, YouTube channels, and more.

Practice 5: Seek Training Opportunities

The last thing successful sales reps do to drive sales is seek training opportunities. You’ve likely attended a sales training or two in your organization. Perhaps you’ve attended the kind of training where you’re ushered into a conference room, then left four hours later unsure if you’ve gotten any value out of the experience.

This is not the type of training I’m talking about.

Instead, you should seek opportunities, programs, or seminars that can provide you with actionable insights and usable skills.

My Sales Accelerator can help you become your team's revenue growth leader by providing instant access to hundreds of lessons, scripts, and workbooks that can help you level up your mindset, strategies, tactics, and more.

How You Can Drive Sales and Become a Top Performer

Following these five best practices will help you take your sales to the next level and set you up to be a top performer in your organization. However, best practices alone aren’t enough to help you reach your true sales potential. The only way to make significant strides in your sales goals is to leverage the knowledge and teachings of more experienced sales professionals through training.

I offer a training program for individuals called the Sales Accelerator. This program will teach you the skills, mindset, and insights you need to embrace a modern sales approach and crush your targets.

Check out my Sales Accelerator and start winning more deals today!