Seriously, why not? Give me one good reason—just one!—why this isn’t the year you should close more deals, bring in more revenue, and pocket more cash. Can’t come up with one? Be it resolved: 2012 is your year.

Since we all need coaching, here’s some smart advice to get you started.

• 7 Steps To Scoring New Business In A Bad Economy
• 31 Pro Tips for a Successful, Satisfying, and Insanely Profitable 2012
• How to Get Good at Making Money
• New Year’s Resolutions: Grow Fast in 2012

Bonus: John Tierney offers some science-based tips for sticking to your New Year’s resolutions.

According to McKinsey Quarterly, we’re all marketers now:

At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.

The upshot is that your marketing has to match buyer expectations—which have changed dramatically in recent times. On the downside, consumers are more demanding and price conscious. The good news is that they respond very positively to companies that make the time to connect:

Today’s more empowered, critical, demanding, and price-sensitive customers are turning in ever-growing numbers to social networks, blogs, online review forums, and other channels to quench their thirst for objective advice about products and to identify brands that seem to care about forming relationships with them.

And how do you engage this empowered, always-connected consumer who cares about having a relationship with your brand? You dissolve the wall of separation between your marketing and your actual product. You don’t just add marketing budget to help sell more widgets. You become a marketing company that also sells widgets.

To engage customers whenever and wherever they interact with a company—in a store; on the phone; responding to an e-mail, a blog post, or an online review—marketing must pervade the entire organization. … The starting point is a mind-set shift around customer interaction touch points. Companies typically think of them as being “owned” by a given function: for instance, marketing owns brand management; sales owns customer relationships; merchandising or retail operations own the in-store experience. In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience.

McKinsey Quarterly | We’re all marketers now

So, a few things stood out for me in this 20-minute video of a young Steve Jobs giving a speech. (Disclaimer: I know, I know. Everything there is to say about Steve Jobs has been said in about six or seven different ways since he died, but bear with me for at least a few sentences … )

1. If you can be comfortable with a mic, your work is already halfway done

Look at how comfortable Jobs is speaking to the crowd—so totally natural. There’s nothing stiff or canned about his delivery, yet he’s also quite economical: every word is in the service of his point or story. There’s no filler, fluff or jargon.

Which reminds me of Tim Westergren’s recent advice to entrepreneurs (Westergren started Pandora Radio):

Of all the skills that an entrepreneur can have, I think the ability to convey an idea or opportunity, with confidence, eloquence and passion is the most universally useful skill. Whether you’re pitching a group of investors, rallying your employees, selling a customer, recruiting talent, addressing consumers, or doing a press tour, the ability to deliver a great talk is absolutely invaluable. And it is perhaps THE most under-recognized and under-nurtured skill.

Today, Apple’s products do their own marketing. But in the early days Jobs had to do the heavy lifting all by himself. He had to persuade people. He had to knock on doors and deliver a pitch. And …

2. The guy could *sell*

We tend to think of Jobs as a master marketer and tastemaker. But here’s the thing: he was a consummate salesman above all else. He knew how to connect with people and tell a story. And he worked really, really hard at it.

When Jobs recounts one of Apple’s early breaks in the video (3:50), you get the sense that it wasn’t a “lucky break” as such.

I was out trying to pedal PC boards one day and walked into a bike shop, and Paul Tyrell (sp?), the owner of the bike shop, said that he would like to take 50 of these computers. And I saw dollar signs in front of my eyes. But he had one catch, which was that he wanted them fully assembled and tested and ready to go, which was a new twist. So we spent the next five days on the phone to distributors and convinced the electronic parts distributors around here to give us about $10,000 worth of parts on thin air, just on enthusiasm.

You have to admire that kind of hustle and persuasiveness. Which brings me to takeaway number three.

3. It was all about shoe leather and elbow grease

It’s easy to think that Jobs’ success was somehow inevitable or automatic, as if a set of invisible train tracks guided Apple from obscurity to dominance. Not even close.

Raise your hand if you hate cold calling. Raise your hand if you shudder at the thought of walking into a building to sell a product or service. I don’t think I’m alone in my distaste for these things.

But these are the things that separated Steve Jobs from the wannabes. Sure, there’s a degree of luck behind every successful entrepreneur, but hard work multiplies the effects of good luck, and Jobs clearly knew when to lace up his New Balance sneakers, pound the pavement, and say “Yes, we can do X” before knowing if X was even possible.

We spend a lot of time and money reading business books and attending workshops that promise clever shortcuts, surefire formulas and foolproof templates, all of which conveniently distract us from the hard truth about how success really works. As Steve Jobs demonstrates in this video, it’s mostly about working your ass off.