It quickly became a canonical sequence in film history. In it, Mel Gibson, on a horse and with his face painted blue for battle, delivers a heartfelt, motivational speech before sending his troops into a fight for freedom. It’s a powerful scene, and one that teams of any size and field can relate to.

Every so often, a team needs some inspirational words to boost morale, build trust and rapport, and get everyone re-invigorated to hit their goals. In other words, everybody can use a movie speech from time to time. That’s why sales kickoff meetings exist.

Sell. More. Faster. That’s the ultimate goal of any sales organization. In practice, this means round-the-clock pressure for salespeople to hit their quota, close more deals, and increase revenue. Salespeople are no strangers to stress.

But if stress starts to escalate out of control, and sales targets seem as challenging as climbing an eight-thousander without supplemental oxygen, you need to re-examine your sales process and figure out the stages you can tweak to boost productivity.

With the end of the year approaching, we’re continuing tradition and predicting the coming year’s most important trends affecting B2B sales.

The past decade has treated B2B sales well. Nowadays, sales leadership is commonly a part of the company’s management team and a focus area in the company’s strategy. Universities have introduced sales courses in their curriculum, and talented salespeople are entering the job market more than ever before. It seems sales is doing better and taken more seriously than ever before.

This is the starting point in which we’re predicting next year’s trends—and here they are:

Sometimes, in our endless hustle and our striving to succeed, we get lost. We focus on the things we think matter for our short-term results, and make compromises on the things that really do matter in the long run.

Across industries, salespeople lose between 60 and 90 percent of their potential deals after the first contact. The reason for the big drop-off after the prospecting stage is that many companies still reach out to anyone who loosely sounds like they’d be interested in their offering. It’s far more efficient to only reach out to prospects who fit your solution and have a need for it.

Ensuring that you focus your sales and marketing efforts on the right companies, and the right people within these businesses is never easy. However, one thing is for certain: it’s even harder if you haven’t defined your ideal customer profile and buyer persona—the peanut butter and jelly of your sales process.

A common cause of death among salespeople and marketing professionals is death by quicksand. Figuratively speaking, of course. And by quicksand, I mean being buried by an ever-growing, uncontrollable, gigantic pile of irrelevant, erroneous and outdated customer data. To dig yourself out of trouble before it’s too late, you want to make data cleaning (aka data cleansing) a habit that sticks.

Today we're launching a rebranding of our logo, our visuals, our messaging, our mission and values, and how we operate as a team. A full update to our identity, from top to bottom.

This post is here to explain why.

It's an understatement to say that there's no shortage of information on pretty much any company in the world today. However, as we all know–quality beats quantity almost every time.

To draw reliable insights from company data and subsequently boost sales performance, salespeople must a) have easy access to the data most relevant to them, and b) be sure that the data they're acting on is accurate and up to date. This is why data enrichment and data cleaning has come to play a central role in today's data-driven sales world.

In today's hyper-competitive business landscape, a canned sales pitch is more likely to lead to the person on the other side of the line hanging up on you mid-sentence than an encouraging "please, tell me more."

Company data is the solution to fixing poorly targeted sales efforts. When you only connect with companies when there's a data-driven reason to do so, and tailor your messaging according to the prospect’s situation and needs, you'll significantly improve your hit rate in every step of the sales process.