OREANDA-NEWS. December 23, 2015. Even if your colleagues or competitors have started their out of office replies for the holiday season, you don’t have to lose out on several valuable weeks to finish the year strong. So before you open up the champagne and belt out “Auld Lang Syne,” here are three sales tips alongside three apps from the Salesforce AppExchange to help you close out 2015.

1. Configure leads and opportunities with a rules-based engine

Think about how you and your team handled leads in 2015. Were you efficient? Did you respond to new leads quickly? Did the right sales reps get the right leads? If the answer to any of those questions is no, then now is the perfect time to make a change. Implementing a rules-based engine to distribute leads dependent on factors such as territory, skill, or language can cut down on the amount of time needed to get into the sales cycle.

Distribution Engine from NC Squared is an easy-to-use Salesforce app that enables sales teams to assign leads quickly, fairly, and intelligently. The native Salesforce app ensures the best leads go to the best sales reps and allows managers to focus on things other than assigning leads.

2. Sync your email and CRM

Your email is a treasure trove of information, replete with valuable lead and opportunity information. But we all know what can happen to an unattended inbox (hint: it can quickly go from treasure trove to landfill). So for 2016, update your Salesforce accounts directly from information in your Gmail or Outlook inboxes. You’ll save hours by eliminating the need to log updates from emails and calls, allowing you to focus on moving opportunities forward and closing deals.

One app that can help you accomplish this is Yesware’s Gmail and Outlook Inbox, Phone, and Calendar Integration for Salesforce CRM. Yesware is a sales solution that syncs Gmail, Outlook, and iOS to Salesforce and helps sales reps automatically capture activity data in emails, track engagement and opportunities, and update Salesforce accounts directly from their inboxes.

3. Move your proposals and contracts out of Word documents

The old way of managing pricing proposals involved a ton of time and effort to move information back and forth within Word documents, and frequently editing data greatly increased the chances of making a deal-breaking mistake. CPQ software has significantly reduced the number of errors made in the sales process. According to research conducted by Aberdeen Group, by standardizing sales language, terms, and conditions, “CPQ users improved on proposal quality at a rate more than two-and-a-half times that of non-adopters.”

SteelBrick CPQ helps you move on from Word documents. Sales reps will reduce quote errors, manage proposals, and automatically generate customer-friendly quotes that are complete, accurate, and personalized to each customer, all without leaving the app.

For more great apps to help your sales teams move into 2016, check out the sales apps category from the AppExchange.