When theres 7 weeks left in the year to surpass your Q4 sales objectives. Here is what you should be doing to ensure you land at your stretch goal by December 31st.
Identify your shortlist of qualified deals to close
- We must eliminate distractions and urgent / unimportant activity from our calendars at this time. Defer “holiday lunches” and demand generation activities until January.
- Focus all efforts on closing these deals.
Map out your close plans for each deal
- Write down the internal and external activities and gates required to get a signed agreement completed by December 31st. Remember at this time of year, your legal support (and your Prospect’s legal team) are inundated with contracts to review so allow plenty of elapsed time for these activities.
Align your close plans with the buying influencers
- Do not keep your objectives a secret from your Prospects. Tell them your plan is to close the deal prior to year end. If they do not agree or have objections to the plan, it is better to know and address them TODAY vs. December 21st.
- Adjust your plan based on their feedback – for example they may advise that the deal must be reviewed by an internal steering committee by a certain date and therefore all business and legal terms and conditions must be agreed to prior to that event.
- Add their feedback to the milestone plan, share it with them and jointly track progress against it.
Commit to closing these deals
- Our job is to drive revenue for our companies. This is the life we have chosen (and love). The most difficult thing about our profession is committing to an outcome that we are not certain of, however, our management teams expects us to commit to deals and bring them in, that is our role in the company.
- The act of “committing” to close the deal publically also increases the leverage and pressure we put on ourselves to ensure it happens.
- This is all positive. We do what we say we will do.
Work your plan DAILY
- What is preventing your deal from signing today? The answer to that question often identifies the priority activities that we should be completing to move your deal forward.
Remember, hope is not a strategy when it comes to achieving sales plans and closing Q4 deals.