5 Battle-Tested Sales Strategies to Finish the Year Strong

The gap between average salespeople and elite performers lies in process. While most reps chase quick wins and hope something sticks, top producers follow proven sales strategies that consistently deliver results. They’ve mastered the fundamentals that turn prospects into customers and customers into advocates.

If you’re ready to finish the year strong and blow past your quota, these five battle-tested sales strategies from previous podcasts will transform how you sell.

1. Deliver an Unforgettable Customer Experience by Mastering Your Emotions

Your prospect doesn’t care about your bad morning or the three deals that fell through yesterday. When you walk through the door or dial their number, you’re the only conversation they’re having with your company today.

Elite salespeople know emotional consistency separates closers from pretenders. Think of it like a pro golfer staying calm and cruising forward regardless of what happened on the last hole.

As Jeb Blount explains: How your customer feels about you is more predictive of outcome than any other variable. They buy you first, and then they buy your product. They buy you because they feel safe, heard, and confident you will deliver.

This means you have to compartmentalize every interaction. Your fifth appointment of the day deserves the same intensity and professionalism as your first. When you show up desperate, prospects sense it immediately. When you rush through discovery, they feel undervalued.

Jeb emphasizes this critical point: Buying a house, car, or service is deeply emotional for the customer. Before every interaction, take sixty seconds to reset. Acknowledge whatever is bothering you, mentally file it away, then walk in focused entirely on their world and their goals.

2. Commit to the Day One Follow-Up Mindset

Ask yourself: How many times do you attempt to reach a prospect before quitting?

If you answered three or four, you are leaving money on the table. Most reps quit after just three or four attempts, and sometimes without ever hearing a ‘No.’ They just stop and let leads rot in the CRM instead of risking rejection.

As Jessica Stokes reminds us, top producers understand this: While you are tracking your sixth or seventh outreach attempt, for the prospect, every touchpoint feels like day one. They are busy running their business—not waiting for your call.

The problem is not just the number of attempts; it is the spacing. When you leave a voicemail and wait a month to “give them space,” you lose momentum and start from scratch every time.

The winning sales strategy is persistence with velocity. That means touching base every few days or weekly. When you maintain momentum, prospects remember you. The real failure is letting quality leads die because you are afraid to pick up the phone and risk hearing “No.”

3. Turn Your Empathy Into a Weapon, Not a Weakness

If you have ever hesitated before making a cold call because you thought, “I don’t want to bother them,” you are dealing with what Jeb Blount calls projection, and it is costing you deals.

Projection happens when you assume prospects hate being interrupted as much as you do. You start deciding for them before you’ve even made the call.

Successful salespeople recognize interruption is a professional necessity. Your job requires it; your income depends on it.

Letting empathy paralyze your prospecting is dangerous. The internal conflict is real: You want to be an empathetic person, but you also have to be an interrupter.

The mindset shift: Understand that projecting is the most dangerous thing in sales because you are deciding for your customer in advance what they want or need. Real empathy means showing up, asking sharp questions, and letting them tell you what they need. You cannot solve problems you never discover because you were too afraid to start the conversation.

4. Build a Velvet Rope Around Your Business

What if your clients felt less like transactions and more like VIPs getting an exclusive invitation? That is the power of the Velvet Rope framework, a human-centered sales strategy developed by Kristin Andree that makes prospects want to work with you.

Kristin observed that people get excited to attend exclusive events. Her insight led to a three-part framework built around Know, Find, Love:

1. Know your people: Get crystal clear on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
2. Find your people: Execute disciplined activity that consistently fills your pipeline.
3. Love your people: Deliver experiences so exceptional that customers become your most effective marketing channel.

The “Love your people” element is where most drop the ball. Kristin focuses on “surprise and delight”, doing something unexpected that clients don’t see coming.

For example, giving personalized, curated gifts as a surprise creates a ripple effect. Clients talk about these personalized gifts with friends and colleagues, resulting in more referrals because there is a buzz about you. Curated clients don’t just stay; they sell for you. This is genuine relationship building at scale.

5. Develop Velocity Mindset: Speed With Direction

Most salespeople confuse activity with progress. They move fast, make lots of calls, send countless emails, but they are not actually getting anywhere because they are chasing the wrong outcome.

When Ron Karr asks what velocity means, everyone says “fast.” But that’s not velocity. Velocity is speed with direction. Direction requires knowing the destination before you start the journey. The biggest problem for most salespeople is that they are not going after the right outcome.

Ron’s solution? Hold a board meeting with yourself. When you’re stuck or not getting traction, step back and reframe your thinking. Ask yourself: What outcome am I really chasing? Am I pitching features when I should be diagnosing the real problem?

This shift in perspective changes everything. When you get clear on the outcome that matters to your prospect—not the one that matters to you—you stop competing on specs and start filling gaps that matter deeply to them.

When you master the velocity mindset, the close becomes inevitable because you have made the decision obvious.

The Choice is Yours. Stop Making Excuses.

Elite salespeople don’t wait to “feel” motivated. They execute proven sales strategies daily, regardless. These insights from Jeb Blount, Jessica Stokes, Kristin Andree, and Ron Karr give you the roadmap to stop selling on hope and start selling with discipline and certainty.

You have the knowledge. Now it is time to choose.

Do you keep making excuses—or do you show up, execute, and finish strong?

Start winning more on cold calls with our free guide: 25 Ways to Ask for the Appointment on Cold Calls, and boost your results today.