For Presidents’ Day, we flipped back through the history books to find a few pieces of advice that apply as much to life as to sales teams. Here are four of our favorites — along with sales stats from the “State of Sales” report — to motivate your sales team this week.

1. “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” — Harry S. Truman

Collaboration is crucial to streamlining the sales process and ensuring customer success. In fact, 73% of sales teams say collaborating across departments is absolutely critical or very important to their overall sales process.

Sales organizations can no longer exist in silos — they must connect across different departments, channels, and partners in order to have complete visibility into the customer journey. Sixty percent of sales teams say that collaborative selling has increased productivity by more than 25%, and more than half (52%) say it has done the same for increasing pipeline. Another recent study showed that 73% of consumers are likely to switch brands if a company provides inconsistent levels of service (i.e., it feels like they’re dealing with an entirely different company when they talk to a sales rep versus a service rep).

2. “Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation.” — George Washington

I’ll take the liberty of updating Mr. Washington’s quote to recommend that associating with “men and women of good quality” is in your best interest. This matters because a truly connected sales process also includes your partners. The right partners can help companies discover hidden opportunities they wouldn’t be able to access on their own, while still delivering a seamless, branded experience.

For example, if a hotel chain partners with an airline and rental car agency, they can ensure that customers are recognized across their actual journey, from departure to arrival. Similarly, unique preferences learned by these partners can be leveraged by sales reps to tailor their pitches with personalized recommendations. Among high-performing sales teams, 76% rate their partner and customer/prospect collaboration capabilities as outstanding or very good.

3. “Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone…” — John F. Kennedy

Education and training are core to a successful sales process. Top sales teams understand education is imperative to effectively empower reps with productivity-enhancing technologies and ultimately better engage with customers. Training must be built into the evolving strategies as organizations take a more holistic, collaborative, and intelligence-driven approach to the sales process.

High-performing sales teams are 2.5x more likely than underperformers to rate their sales training processes/effectiveness as very good or outstanding. Successful sales teams understand how rapidly the marketplace is changing and the importance of training is during this critical shift.

4. “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.” — John Quincy Adams

If your sales team is looking to “learn more, do more, and become more,” look no further than sales analytics. Seventy-nine percent of sales teams currently use or are planning to use sales analytics technology.

When leveraged correctly, analytics can be transformative, especially in areas such as lead quality or providing visibility to managers. The ability to interpret customer and operational data — as well as act on the insights — opens the door to a more efficient, accurate, and personalized process. High performers are 2.4x more likely than underperformers to rate their sales team’s analytics capabilities as outstanding or very good.

For more sales stats, and a closer look at top teams, get the “State of Sales” research (free to download).