by Anneli Thomson, Managing Director, August 2014
The summer is already half over. July probably flew by with holiday, warm weather and social events. Before you know it, September will be here and that switch in our brains will flip from planning days, to planning to hit our Q3 targets.
Often we move through the seasons and forget to stop and assess our lessons learned from the past months and take a detailed look at how it will affect our sales funnel. The “summer mentality” we can slip into may leaving us feeling that the rug has been pulled from beneath us once the warm front moves out, we return from holidays and reality sets back in.
Are you prepared to stop, think, and assess before diving in again?
Think about yourself last year at this time. With summer holidays, was your pipeline less than full when fall rolled around? Did you relax into a laid-back state of mind during July and August, only to panic when September suddenly arrived?
If not, congratulations – you have some sort of extraterrestrial mind-control powers that we would love for you to share. If this sounds familiar on any level, take an hour out of your breezy summer day to make sure you are not tearing out your hair come next month.
That being said, here is my number one piece of advice for surviving the cold, hard truth of when summer ends: don’t skip your prospecting calls.
With everything you need to wrap up before holidays, perhaps this has fallen to the bottom of your list. Believe it or not, most people find it very easy to procrastinate when it comes to prospecting. It may sound something like, “I need to get my clients sorted before I leave”, “ I really must get that project sorted”, or “I’ve really got so much on my plate since I’ve been back.” Perhaps you’re feeling like you can simply get back on the phone when you return or have more time.
The problem here is that when you do return, you will have an empty funnel, and waiting to fill it will leave you without meetings, and sales. Will that gap in your funnel lead to missing your Q3 targets? Will a lack of opportunities harvested throughout the summer lead to a very hungry autumn?
Start planting your seeds this summer, even if it feels inconvenient now. Make time to prospect and book sales meetings for when you return and you will thank yourself for it later.
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