No matter where you are in your career, you can always improve your sales skills and find more satisfaction in your work life. If you’re ready to make some improvements, use the following five steps to re-focus, improve, and take control.

Clarify Your Mission

It’s difficult to stay focused on improving your sales skills if you don’t have a clear mission. To clarify your mission, think about your sales niche. What is it that your company does best? Who needs what you sell or offer? What is the best way to approach these prospects? What are they willing to pay for what you offer? The answers to these questions can help you to crystallize your mission, and once you’ve done this you’ll be in a much better position to see where you need to improve.

Formulate Specific Goals

Once you have clarified your mission, you can write down activity goals that will help you to improve your overall performance. For example, if prospecting is an area in which you’d like to improve, you could set a goal to make a certain number of calls per day and a certain number of proposals for month. These specific, concrete, measurable goals will give you plans of action to work toward as you improve your sales skills.

Track Your Progress

With your specific goals in place, you can start measuring your progress toward excellent sales skills. This can be done on an individual or a team basis. Either way, it’s motivating to see your improvement in black-and-white. There are many ways to track your sales performance. You can simply keep track of your goals in a spreadsheet, or you can use one of the many software programs or apps designed to help you track your progress.

Ask for Feedback

Even the best sales people have room for improvement, but sometimes it’s difficult to know specifically what skills you should work on. This is where a second set of eyes can be very helpful. Teaming up for sales calls can be very helpful because you can critique each other’s performances. Likewise, it can be helpful (if a little intimidating) to have a colleague or supervisor sit in on a few of your phone sales calls. You may not realize that you’re doing something that could dampen your prospect’s enthusiasm, but someone else might be able to point it out.

Another way to ask for feedback is to ask your customers how you’re doing. Customer feedback can be extremely valuable when you’re trying to improve your sales skills. Tell them you want honest feedback so you can improve your sales skills, and then be humble as they give their answers. Remember that nobody is perfect, and there’s always room for improvement. This kind of attitude will go a long way toward improving your sales skills.

Maximize Your Time

The most successful people, in sales and in life in general, figure out how to make the best use of their time. As you work on improving your sales skills, focus on your goals. Prioritize each activity as to its importance and urgency. Create an ideal schedule for yourself, and then test it against your actual time use. If you have adopted time-wasting habits, do what you can to spend your time more wisely. Remember that if you can manage to use just one hour a day more productively, you’ll have more than six extra weeks of productive time this year. Think of what you could do with six extra weeks this year to improve your sales skills and find success in your career!

If you’re ready to improve your sales skills, follow these five steps. Consistent, measured progress is motivating and satisfying and will inject your career with new energy.