If there are two things always on a salesperson’s mind, it’s closing more deals and closing them faster. Sales reps are always looking to be more effective and get to “yes” faster. 

Here are some quick tips to help accelerate your sales cycle and close deals faster.

According to comScore, 176 million people in the U.S. owned a smartphone as of November 2014. That’s over 50% of the entire U.S. population that carries a supercomputer in their pocket. Sales, customer service, marketing, and every other part of your business is being revolutionized by mobile. 

LinkedIn reports that 70% of clicks to sponsored updates happen on mobile and Facebook had 1.12 billion mobile monthly active users as of September 2014. Considering that there will be 5 billion smartphones by 2017, 75 billion connected products by 2020 (largely used on mobile devices), and consumers have downloaded 140 billion mobile apps globally, the mobile imperative has never been greater.

As I've written before, social media can be a great place to generate new leads. Your organic social reach, though, typically will reach people who have already heard of your brand and products.  Social ads can be a perfect solution to augment your social strategy and bring in more new leads, brand awareness, and engagement with a unique audience.

Businesses are always looking for more customers and to generate new leads. Social media is a great place to build a community and engage with audiences for small businesses and startups. Not only can social media help you raise brand awareness, but it can also be used to acquire new leads and ultimately new customers.

Below are nine ways to acquire new leads and customers using social media.

Face it — founding, running, or working for a startup is hard and can be extremely stressful. The only constant is change, priorities are always shifting, and productivity is the key to success. 

As an entrepreneur or employee at a startup, it’s vital for you to be as productive and efficient as you can. Not only will this help you be more effective and efficient at your job, but it will also help reduce the stress that comes with running and working at a startup.

Today’s marketing leader must be more agile, data-focused, and customer-obsessed than ever before. For The State of Marketing Leadership, a joint research report from LinkedIn and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we surveyed more than 900 senior-level marketers on LinkedIn to learn what’s top-of-mind in their roles—whether director, VP, or CMO. 

We sought out to learn senior-level marketers’ top marketing goals and objectives, their measurements for success, their effectiveness with marketing technologies, and where they see growth in the future.

At the beginning of the year, my team released the 2015 State of Marketing. In the report we surveyed over 5,000 marketers globally and asked about their budgets, priorities, channels, strategies, and metrics for 2015.

We researched the most pressing business challenges, the top areas for increased spending, the hottest trends in social, mobile, and email marketing, and more. We found that 84% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their marketing budget in 2015. Thirty-eight percent of marketers also plan to shift spending from traditional mass advertising to advertising on digital channels in 2015.

"In an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent of sitting still." - Pico Iyer

After returning from one of the most amazing trips of my life, I've been taking a great deal of time to reflect and really think about that experience. Too often I become engrossed with living life through a screen. Even on vacations most of us often succumb to enjoying ourselves through a camera lens. Some of the most impactful moments on that trip, though, were when I learned the art of stillness and to enjoy "going nowhere." 

As we enter into 2015, we are bound to see countless resolutions made (and broken) over the next few weeks. With the beginning of a new year also comes yearly planning, sales forecasts, and goal setting in your professional life as well. As you start to map out your strategic plans and goals for your marketing organization in 2015, I've included five resolutions below that should be on every marketer’s resolution list for 2015.