As the year winds down, it’s typically a time of reflection. You spend the months of November and December looking at performance for the past year, spreadsheets and sitting in budget meetings that never end but even with all that planning, it’s hard to feel like you’re doing something new or better to make the next year’s performance better than the last. There’s only so much looking back you can do until you need to look forward.

And I know we all look back. We have to. That data is the foundation for standards in the next year. But when is it time to just take a side step away from the monotony of the day to day and start figuring out where you can find some new ideas for the new year. Where do you even start looking?

The options are endless but they’re also solicited. You need unsolicited advice from people who actually source, right? I mean, if you’re bored I guess you can hop from sponsored blog post to sponsored blog post to try to drain out some relevance.

Wait, you’re busy? Can you sense the sarcasm here? I hope so.

We get it.  That’s why we’ve done all the legwork here. We created a secret sourcing group on Facebook and started to have a little fun with it. The rules were simple: share your sourcing tool and tag a sourcer to share theirs, it was that simple.

These tips were so great, we pulled together the top 7 tips and came up with this ebook featuring the favorite sourcing tools from our favorite sourcers. These recommendations were completely unsolicited – no one is getting a check for sharing. We just wanted a list of solid sourcing tools you can use.

So check them out, give them a try and let us know what you think.