The end of the year is a great time to take a step back and reflect on what’s worked, what hasn’t and what to plan for the coming year.
2024 has been another interesting year for the sales industry, so it’s more important than ever to consider how you want to close out the year and what changes to bring for 2025.
To keep you motivated, we’ve turned to selling experts for their sales advice on how to round out the year and prepare for another in an uncertain climate. Here are some new year sales quotes to help you get the most out of your team and ensure your sales stay high into 2025.
Bringing a strong end to 2024
As the below “getting ready for the new year” sales quotes show, it is vital that you spend some time reflecting on the year you have had.
Liston Witherill
Head of Sales Insights, Serve Don’t Sell.
“As we’re wrapping up the year, it’s a great time to reflect on three things: what worked this year, what didn't work, and how you can adapt to changing conditions. The way your buyers make decisions never changes, but the environment they operate in is constantly changing. And don’t forget, it’s budget season! For all those prospects in your pipeline who want to work with you but haven’t had the budget, reach out and start planning with them so you can work together in the coming year.”
Steeve Vakeeswaran
Business Operations Manager, Zapier.
“Before the holidays, reflect on the wins (and losses) from the year with your team. By celebrating milestones and learning from mistakes, as a leader, you can start the new year in a positive and productive way towards company goals and targets.”
Before considering making major changes to the way you’re selling, focus on ending 2024 strongly.
Lindsay Bennett
Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales, Seismic Software.
“Get back to basics, your sales 101, making sure you’re assuming nothing, that you are asking very detailed questions of your prospects about what the process looks like on their end.”
Keep your fundamentals in place—even if you plan on making changes later, don’t lose sight of what selling is all about.
Now more than ever it’s key to understand your leads’ buying processes and respond to them as individuals. Hone in on exactly what their problem points are and address them, showing your prospects how your product can make their challenges history.
Tom Pisello
Chief Evangelist, Mediafly.
“Through the crisis we’ve seen how stressed our buyers are […] it actually causes risk of a purchase, the perceived complexity of a purchase, and the risk of change dramatically amplifies that, and we have to be very conscious that we can’t add to that stress any more […] you need to be cognizant that because of that stress, if you’re adding complexity and perceived risk and perceived cost to the purchase, that all is going to be amplified.”
By keeping your pitches simple, you’ll be presenting a solution with less ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’, which is what your customers need in a time of uncertainty.
Then, with your sales messages simplified, you can begin to turn to how your sales team has performed and how you can make a start to the new year.
Making a strong start to 2025
Here are some sales quotes for the new year. Set a precedent for the new year by starting strongly. Don’t be fooled into thinking the start of the year means slow sales, as buyers are always looking for solutions for their problems:
Neil Patel
Entrepreneur, author and influencer, neilpatel.com.
“Release a new product. The New Year is the perfect time to do this. From a psychological standpoint, customers are in the ‘new’ mindset. New Year, new you, new resolutions, new everything. So why not a new product? Mentally, the building blocks are in place. Consumers want new. Consumers are ready to convert on new. Use the new-saturated mentality to sell a new product.”
It’s important that your team never stands still. You can make a splash in the new year by targeting your leads with new products, but you can also turn your attention inwards to focus on your team’s wellbeing, ensuring they’re equipped to deal with the changes your team will need to make.
One of the biggest challenges of dealing with the global pandemic has been the reduction in face-to-face time with customers. A great way to start your next year off positively is to regain some of the more personal interactions.
Karina Collis
Founder, Liinea Sales Advisory.
“A common mistake is to count emails and social media interactions as personal while they are rather classified as digital. The best way to introduce human interactions at scale is to include a video chat option to your website or to offer consultations over Zoom to bring experts closer to customers whenever they are needed.”
But remember: your customers aren’t the only ones who need face-to-face time; your team does, too. Why not extend your webchat meetings into the social sphere, or even a less formal hybrid approach that brings together your team and customers?
Tom Pisello
“We’ve created meet-ups with a guest speaker or two and a topic to talk about, but rather than a traditional webinar, which is much more “here’s a presentation and we’re going to tell you all about something”, this is much more casual: it’s a couple of questions and opening it up with live mics and video to the community and basically having community involvement, whether that’s with internal teams that we’re presenting a “lunch and learn” on a specific topic, but making sure that you’re involving everyone in that. That’s helped us stay connected.”
You might find yourself financially stretched at the start of 2025, but you still should recognize your sales team for the hard work they do.
James Ski
Founder of Sales Confidence.
“Money is useful for motivation early in your career, and it’s an important driver for sales professionals if earned as a result of successfully hitting targets. However, recognition internally, how you feel about yourself and being respected and trusted by customers to solve their needs, is more important. Leading by doing excellent work is also more important than money. Yes, money is part of the equation, but it’s not all of it.”
You can read more quotes like the one above in our sales quotes article on the biggest sales myths. If you want some words of inspiration, read our list of motivational sales quotes.
Never forget another key date with this 2023 US sales calendar
Planning for 2025
With the unforeseen changes in the selling environment over the last year, adapting to them has been difficult. However, now we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, it’s time to put what we’ve learned into practice and design a new focus for our selling teams in 2025 that adapts to the more fragile buyer situation. Here are some new year leadership quotes to help you start.
Karina Collis
“B2B salespeople need to stop acting like door-to-door sellers and start working as trusted advisers and industry experts. Having a good sales rep team that can add value to every conversation with a prospect and communicate with a client without bounding the offer person means the clients will most likely buy the product. With reduced sales friction comes increased chances of making a sale.”
In times of stress, buyers want reassurance. They want to trust you and they want to be looked after, so be there for them in their buying journey and help guide them to what they need. Now more than ever, it’s crucial for your sales team to display their empathy.
Lindsay Bennett
“[Empathy selling is] not only trying to understand and ask smart questions about what’s happen to that organization, what is the current business climate, the priority, but to spend as much care to understand the buyer […] what is their perspective, what are they up against as an individual within their role, and how is it you can enable their success while enabling the success of the business. It’s going beyond just listening to the needs of the business, but how you creatively approach a partnership that might be a little different to how you would have done it a year ago.”
Being empathetic may mean rethinking the way you do partnerships and deals, or at least having the ability to be flexible and creative with each of your customers. Remember that your organization has needs too, and by being honest with your buyers about what you need from a deal, you can forge partnerships based on trust, with both sides of the deal understanding the position of the other.
Having a flexible approach is key. With the landscape changing so rapidly, you can’t afford to stick to rigid guides on how to sell to your audience. What your product means to a buyer, how they consume it, how they discover it: all these things are in flux in times of uncertainty, so make sure you’re prepared to experiment and be adaptable in how you sell.
That flexibility may even see an acceleration in your timelines for adopting new sales technologies and sales processes—it’s a great opportunity to push through with changes that can more easily reach your audience.
Neil Patel
“If you want to do well, you are going to have to leverage AI and automation. If everyone else is using it and you aren’t, you are going to get crushed because it will make changes faster and more accurately than a human. Again, it’s the only option you’ll have if you want to continually compete.”
But remember to invest in your team—without training them to use your new automation integrations, you won’t be harnessing the full capabilities of your new system.
Maria Black
President, WW Sales and Marketing, ADP.
“You can't just give [your team] the best-in-class tools and the technology. You really have to train on how to leverage it, how to make it meaningful [… ] We make sure that we’re continuing to train and continuing to feed the machine, both the actual machine as well as the seller machine, with real actionable insights.”
You’ll need to think about how you want your reps to function in the new landscape. These new year leadership quotes encourage you to think about the key skills you need your reps to have when it comes to implementing new systems and being flexible.
Mary Shea
Principal Analyst, Forrester.
“Historically, you would look for a salesperson who is a great communicator, a great problem solver, someone who can overcome objections and kick open that door and close that deal. I'm not saying those things aren't important anymore but they're really lower on the scale. What organizations need to hire and train for are people who are digitally adept and creative.”
Transitioning to the new year
Despite the changes this year has brought, as these new year sales quotes point out, there’s still a lot you can do to finish the year strongly and prepare yourself for success in 2025.
Focus on a more empathetic approach to the way you sell and refine your pitches to the basics of what your leads need to solve their issues. By taking the time to understand your buyers’ individual situations, you’ll have a much better chance of responding in a way that both reassures them and clearly solves their problems.
But don’t let empathy stop with your clients—extend it to your team too. Work at creating webchat forums ( or joining one like Pipedrive’s Community) with a more social, less formal tone, designed to bring you all together and keep camaraderie high.
Listen to what they say when it comes to making changes to the selling process—it’s imperative you’re flexible at this time to stay on the curve of how buyers want to be sold to. Make sure you’re skilling them up to take advantage of all the technology and software you have at your disposal to fully actualize their value.
Finally, consider speeding up your timelines for adopting new automations and systems. Your team needs as much time as possible spent learning about and interacting with leads, not filling out forms and spreadsheets.
It’s never been a better time to fast-track to the most effective selling solutions and keep your team on the cutting edge of selling techniques—with so much uncertainty you’ll want to ensure your team has the best chance of converting their leads, so empower them to do so by investing in them and your systems.
For more new year sales quotes, check out our article full of motivational sales quotes.
