Finishing Off October, Setting Up November

During the past few days, I have been suggesting to my clients several ideas to ensure they finish off the year in a strong style. I thought I would offer them below and ask for more ideas from our team of readers.

During October

• Increase the number of days per week you perform one-on-one sales strategy coaching to verify that all salespeople know where they are in the sales cycle and have asked the proper questions. Make an extra phone call where you can coach and question sales actions.
  
  
• Encourage your salespeople to work together on challenging each other's sales strategies. Team them up. 
  
  
• Create an end-of-year sales contest with individual and team goals.
  
  
• Add two mornings of telephone blitz days for prospecting. Invite people to a November seminar/business breakfast meeting. Increase your prospecting ratio to load up December and January pipelines.
  
  
• Create a fun event -- Halloween parties, fall seasonal events and so on. There is a lot of stress and pressure in the end-of-year push. Thank your own team.
  
  
• Assign a certain number of customers (say, 10) to each salesperson each week. Make sure they have a good reason/strategy and product/service offering for each client. Make sure they make the calls to the appropriate person at the client's office. Inspect this!
  
  

Setting Up November

• It's the Thanksgiving month! Create a Customer Appreciation Event. Via a postcard or a letter from the president, invite everyone to your offices. Add a few vendors, as well, and offer additional services/product offerings. Invite your best end-of-year prospects, too.
  
  
• For those early-stage prospects in October who will make a decision in November, a special Thanksgiving discount/promotion code that ends on Nov. 23 can be suggested and then launched in November.
  
  
• Roll out a 25-point weekly sales game where each salesperson must earn 25 points a week based upon activity (for example, 5 points for a presentation, 5 points for an order, 5 points for prospecting, and so on). Send me an e-mail and I will send you a  sample.
  
  
• Make each salesperson review their entire 2012 calendars from January to October. Ask them to look for missed appointments, suspects that did not make a decision or any  networking individuals that need to be follow up with.

Let me hear what other ideas you might have -- e-mail me or leave a comment below. Let's all work together to make 2012 finish strong!

Posted by Ken Thoreson on October 08, 2012