Don’t look now, but we’re officially a few days away from kissing 2017 goodbye and waving hello to 2018. As we draw close to the end of the year, businesses are working tirelessly to end this year’s sales on a high note; and for good reason too. In 2017, we saw a number of disrupters and game changers to the way people traditionally performed sales. We saw an unprecedented number of natural disasters that hurt business owners from Texas to Puerto Rico. And as we saw the tastes of consumers evolve and their voices became louder than ever, businesses across a variety of industries underwent dramatic changes to keep up.

Yes, every year has its fair share of ups and downs, and we experienced nothing like the recession of 2008, but 2017 had a particularly deafening slowdown that business owners can only hope to overcome in 2018. As we look ahead to the upcoming year, it’s time to think about what your sales goals and strategies will be to make 2018 your best year to date. In order to put your best foot forward, here are a few ways you can create a stellar sales strategy for next year.

Use Your Tools
The days of knocking door to door for leads and tracking your sales in a ledger are virtually in the past. Yes, you’ll still see a few salesmen wandering through your neighborhood every now and then; typically asking questions like, “When was the last time you had your roof repaired?” or “Can I interest you in solar panels”. However, the world of capturing leads and making sales has a slew of tools, sites, and plug-ins available for usage. Implementing something as simple as a website reservation system on your site can create a significant uptick in how your business captures and converts clients and sales. Many of the tools and apps available take the repetitive manual labor out of the daily tasks and automates them for a smoother day-to-day.

Identify Key Opportunities
The best way to identify important an opportunity to explore in 2018 is to perform a market analysis. This analysis will give you the best outlook on what opportunities are available in each market, which goals are short term vs. long term, and which provides you the best growth available. When reviewing your market analysis, it’s important to take into consideration your product or service and the company culture you are trying to create. How do those new opportunities feed into vision and plan that you have in mind for 2018? It’s something that needs to be considered when identifying which opportunities are worth pursuing.

Create a Plan
If there is one crucial piece of advice that can be given that sums up this article and every article written on this topic, it’s to have a plan. It’s easy to use tools and have spreadsheets upon spreadsheets about what you think is possible to achieve. However, none of that matters if you don’t know how to implement the tools and opportunities that you’ve discovered. There needs to be a list of goals and targets for 2018. Make a plan for 2018 on how you want to grow your business and how the tools and opportunities can be used to create tangible and achievable goals.

The sooner you think about your goals for next year, the better. With these three actionable pieces of advice, you can work on making 2018 your best sales year yet.