How to Level Up Your Sales Career in 2023

Feeling like your sales career is stuck in place? That you’re trying to climb the ranks within your team, but it just doesn’t feel like you’re truly levelling up?

Let’s be honest, you have some lofty goals for your life as a sales pro (as you should!).

Maybe they involve a penthouse suite in New York City.

Maybe you’re trying to provide for your family and give your spouse the freedom to only work if they want to.

Maybe it’s just having the peace-of-mind to pick up the check when you’re out for drinks with friends without worrying about the number at the bottom.

No matter what you’re striving for, you need to level up your sales career to get there. And you can’t seem to kick this feeling of stagnation in your career.

You’re stuck.

And you don’t know what’s causing it. You can’t pinpoint any one thing you should be doing that can get you unstuck.

So what should you do?

Good news! In this post, I’m going to dig into 3 things you can (and should) be constantly thinking about to level up your life in sales.

Let’s get to it!

1. Invest in yourself

Think you’ve already learned all there is to know about sales?

“BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!”

Yeah, that’s the alarm clock ringing telling you it’s time to wake up.

Let me make this loud & clear:

Just because you read The Challenger Sale, Secrets of Closing the Sale & To Sell Is Human does not mean you’ve checked off the “self-education” box.

Yes, there are a lot of great books on sales that you can (and should) read. (And no...binge-reading some sales blog posts when you got your first sales rep job doesn’t mean you can call it a day either.)

Here’s the truth about learning in the sales world:

You can never truly stop.

And if you do...get ready for someone else to eat your lunch.

DOWNLOAD THE SALES NEGOTIATION BOOK →

If you want to be great at sales, and if you want to be a true industry leader, you need to be constantly investing in your own education. And I mean investing both your money and your time.

It’s one thing to get your company to buy an online sales training course and skim through the material. Maybe you read a few section titles, watch a few videos—you do the easy things.

But the real levelling up comes from investing your time into doing the work and learning, and constantly refining your sales techniques.

2. Embrace automation

Your time as a sales professional is valuable. If you’re working on commission, your time truly is money, and it’s a big difference whether you spend your time actually cold calling, or doing administrative sales work.

The more time you spend on the phone talking to prospects, the more potential you have to make sales and bump up your commission check.

But far too many sales pros are stuck spending hours and hours per day doing painful data entry and sending manual follow-up emails over and over and over...

Here’s my tip:

Find tools that take work off your plate—not tools that add more to it.

Why bother spending your time logging every single detail of every single sales call inside your CRM when your CRM can do it for you?

Why sacrifice call volume by dialing every phone number when you can automate that entire step with a predictive dialer?

If you’re doing cold email outreach, why waste your time manually sending follow-up emails when you can use automated sequences?

By the way, creating cold email templates can be daunting, but with our powerful AI tool - the cold email generator - you can automate the process and create professional-grade outreach without any hassle.

The time that you’ll save by not doing these tedious, time-sucking, tasks is time you can put toward reaching out to more prospects.

3. Adopt new technology

So you’ve bought into the value of automation.

You know that flipping the boring tasks onto autopilot can help you level up the value of your time. The next question is this:

How do you actually do it?

And this is where great tools will become your best friend.

First things first, if you’re used to keeping your entire contact database in a spreadsheet, allow me to introduce you to lesson one:

Start using a CRM platform.

Sounds simple—pick one and pay for it right?

Not quite. This is where I see a lot of sales pros get lost. They don’t do their due diligence on which features the CRM offers and match up their needs with the right tool.

And that’s what I’m going to help you with right now.

Suppose you’ve already graduated from the little black book. Let’s say you’re currently stuck using one of the big CRMs (you know the two I’m talking about). It’s easy to assume it’s the right fit for you just because you invested time and money into the setup and onboarding when you bought it.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Figure out what you’d love your CRM to do for you
2. Research which CRMs offer those dream features
3. Don’t be afraid to take the leap of faith when you find something new

The key to levelling up your sales life is not to assume the old tools are the right tools forever. Just because it was doing the trick five years ago, when you signed up, doesn’t mean it’s still the one and only option.

Embrace new tools and technology because the field of inside sales tools is evolving fast.

Find something that’ll take the boring work off your plate. Call automation, email automation, automated reporting—figure out what you want and find the right tools to do it.

Now over to you…

No matter what career goals you’ve set for yourself, feeling like you’re stuck in place can be frustrating. Use the 3 lessons above to keep yourself from stagnating and start levelling up your sales life.

Here’s a quick recap:

1. Invest in yourself: You can never stop learning.
2. Embrace automation: Your time is money! Don’t waste it on boring tasks.
3. Adopt new technology: Don’t be afraid to make a change, if the time is right.

And if you’re looking to test out a CRM that can automate those boring tasks, sign up for a 14-day free trial of Close. Give it a spin and feel free to reach out with any questions along the way.