With a new year underway, salespeople can expect yet another set of challenges — whether they’re simply looking at new sales goals set by management or significant changes within the industry as a result of technology, economics or other external factors.

If the past few years are any indication of what’s to come, most managers will be focusing on boosting performance to hit quotas, improving sales process implementation, and optimizing lead generation, according to a CSO Insights study. It revealed that 91 percent of the companies surveyed reported that 41.9 percent of their sales reps did not hit quota. Yes … a whopping 91 percent.

Managers also may be still working on increasing efficiencies among their sales teams. CSO Insight’s 2014 study revealed that sales reps spent only 37 percent of their time actually selling, while the rest of their time was spent on administrative and account management duties.

Here are 3 ongoing trends worth checking out to increase your team’s sales performance this year:

1. Increased Use of Sales Enablement Tools

By automating the sales process with mobile tools that allow them to access documents, presentations and other content, sales reps will be able to streamline the sales process.

2. Freeing Up Sales Reps Schedules

Sales managers will continue to look for new ways to boost the efficiency of sales performance, so that sales reps can be freed up to spend more with prospects. Sales prospecting enablement, for example, can give teams the ability to focus on one-on-one conversations with prospects while the outsourced team keeps calling until a contact is made.

3. Sales Training

With sales performance slipping in recent years, more managers reported that they would be investing more funds in sales training. If the 2014 study is any indication, this could be a sound strategy. It revealed that sales organizations that investing in training their reps converted more leads.

Maybe it’s time to give your sales team one or two less challenges to deal with. MonsterConnect’s sales prospecting enablement solution does all the upfront dialing so your reps can focus on talking to key decision-makers in one-on-one live conversations. Contact us to see how we do it.