Reflect & Pivot
This week rounds out the end of the 3rd quarter for all calendar year organizations. How is your business looking financially? Are you meeting/exceeding your targets, or falling short?
The end of Q3 is a great time to reflect on the past 9 months to update your approach to Q4 in preparation of the next fiscal year.
Maybe Q4 should be used as a build-up, overhaul quarter to set yourself up for massive, sustainable success next fiscal year!!!
As sales professionals, we tend to engulf our focus on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracking and comparison. The world of sales is very competitive and individuals with the personal drive to win typically have more success in new business development roles. Which can cause some problems for sustainably achieving desired results.
Have you ever found yourself counting the days, or even hours, you have left to hit a specific goal prior to the end of a period? (Whether that be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual KPIs) Many sales professionals start off in the hole and they have to dig out. This happens for a few different reasons:
- Lack of training
- Short runway to take off
- Zero roadmap to success
- Inferior or absent tools/resources
- and the list goes on…
Get ahead
New hires are almost always hungry and eager to hit the ground running as fast as they can. As a business owner or leader, this excites you as well. To see this new, fresh blood eager to help you grow your business. It’s a powerful feeling that most are caught up in, running as fast as they can. Easy to fall into this trap of sparking a fire with gasoline and forgetting to provide it with lasting resources to burn well into the night.
Traditional Timeline: Cart before the Horse
- Offer given and accepted
- On the first day in the office, start training
- Get your first sale as quickly as possible
- Meet your pre-determined KPIs as quickly as possible
- Struggle every period to meet your goals
- Exhale at the culmination of each period so you can inhale enough oxygen to start running again
- Repeat until you collapse of exhaustion
New Timeline: Get Ahead, Stay Ahead
- Offer given and accepted
- On the first day in the office, start training
- Sell alongside a peer or superior
- Internalize your new organization’s key traits
- Value Proposition
- Target Market
- Vocabulary (industry and customer)
- Etc…
- Start building out strategic connections
- Develop a repeatable approach to close the type of business you need
- Create and maintain fruitful relationships
- Begin leveraging relationships
- Sell your first deal at the same time you have multiple other deals that could close at any time.
Nothing better than closing your 1st deal and your 3rd deal in the same day, week, month. Varying of course by the difficulty of sale, length of the sales cycle, etc…
Let’s end the roller coaster ride…
Leadership
Are you fostering a culture that permits proper ramp-up and overhaul time? Do your sales professionals have an adequate runway to get ahead of their KPIs?
I do not like bearing the bad news, but I have to tell all business owners that your sales professionals are doing one of two things at the end of any given period:
- Pushing everything they have, emptying their funnel to hit a goal
- Holding back business that could be installed now
Their choices vary based on compensation plans, personal desires, and pressure levels from upper management. There is a right time and place for each scenario, but if your leadership is constantly pushing for number one, then your sales team will burn out and lose all sense of urgency, while constantly attempting to dig out of a hole, refilling an empty sales funnel over and over again.
Let us slow down, build out a sustainable strategy to onboard and train your new sales professionals with some grace. Set them up for ongoing success by jumping ahead of their sales quotas with full funnels from the get-go.
Your end result – Happy, stress-free, successful sales professionals accomplishing their goals each and every period with a little to spare for a solid kickstart to the following period. Then, if it becomes TRULY urgent, you can always pull up that customer or two that has already been sold to hit a BIG period close.
If you could use somebody to talk through this mindset shift, reach out to Kassner Keen for a brainstorming session!
