Stop your Sales year slipping by

At the start of any sales year you might think you have plenty of time. The year stretches out in front of you and maybe you had a good year last year and are looking forward to a sales kick off event and a nice pay day. Suddenly it’s late February and before you know it, the Easter break. You make a push to build some pipeline and get closing but sure enough the summer holidays seem to start sooner and last even longer than you remember.

Before you know it, you are in late September with 15 weeks of the year left and a typical 3 month sales cycle, potential clients have no budget left and look to bake things in for next year. How did that happen?

It happened because it’s easy to assume things will happen just the way they did the previous year. But maybe last year you had a few lucky breaks or some deals you had been working on for years came off. Your success was built on strong foundations but because you were so busy that foundation isn’t there any more.

It is a sad fact that many sales people think it comes easy, that they have some unique magical gifts that have led to their success and that they can just ‘wing it’. These are the loud one’s, first to the bar, swapping cars all the time and spending as they earn. That’s fine, every organisation has some of these fireworks and a good sales team has a blend of sales types.

From experience, the personnel that achieve consistent success  are those that plan ahead, that do the diligent work, use diary discipline to ensure their sales year doesn’t slip by. They do this by organising their sales year, typically into 3 distinct periods, aligned to how their customers buy.

For the purposes of this blog I used a calendar sales year.

January- Easter

Time to build contacts and create opportunities. Disciplined prospecting ensures you speak to all known contacts while networking for new one’s either in existing accounts to broaden your supporter base or in new prospects. You are building awareness of the value you can create, building up your account based marketing and ensuring you are wringing everything out of company events, webinars and training.

Easter – Summer

This is the time to turn that network you have built into sales opportunities. Here you are proactive, organising customer showcases and uncovering areas of pain that you can address while finding budget holders able to pay. Your aim in this time isn’t to swiftly close deals it’s to grow the scale of the opportunities. It’s not if we do this but when.

September to year end

This is closing time. Now is the time for working with key sponsors, creating joint value statements and ROI illustrations. You are working closely with your main champions to build support for your solution, insulate against the competition and agree terms.

These three periods should be in your mind as you go through they year. Of course you will have different distractions like key renewals or campaigns to support. Product launches create their own calendar as you work to support the wider sales strategy.

Now to be clear, you should always take the opportunity to network and build new contacts and of course if a customer has budget to spend by the end of March you aren’t going to ask them to wait. But for your sales territory you should plan to work in this way – it is proven to work across many industries and can act as a useful prompt for those (rare) moments where you have a free slot.

It takes a bit of discipline but by using diary reminders you can easily prevent the sales year from slipping through your fingers.

Smooth Sales is a collective of Sales experts able to transform your commercial organisation. Specialising in 3–24-month contracts we become part of your team to drive real change. www.smoothsales.co.uk