Q4, a Survival Guide

It’s that time of year, salespeople!

Q4.
End of year.

It’s when you get the chance to put a stamp on the year that was, contribute heavily to your team, department, and company goals, and put your name atop the ranks as the highest producer. Whether you’re a seasoned salesperson or this is your first go-around tackling the Q4 sprint, here are some tips to lean on to help ensure that you close as much new business as possible.

Managing the Shot Clock

As of the writing of this post, it’s the beginning of October. If your company runs on a traditional calendar year, you have until 11:59 PM local time on December 31st, 2021 to close new business that will count towards this year. For many, the default line of thinking is that you have up until that point in time to create pipeline.

But that’s not true.

Depending on what levers you have at your fingertips in terms of incentives and the like, deals can certainly move faster than normal. But rather than rest on those laurels, plan against the mean.

However long your company’s sales cycles typically run, subtract that from the last day of the year and give yourself an extra 7-10 day buffer to create pipeline. That will be the subset of deals that are most likely to close by the end of the year.

Moreover, if there’s ever a time to overcommunicate with your prospects, it’s now. Be forthright and direct in setting the table for the steps required on your side to take you from where you currently reside in the process, and ask early and often what they require in order to get paperwork executed. Ask, confirm, and reaffirm those plans at each subsequent step.

In this regard, do not stop at just the next step, either. Get out in front of the entirety of the process — not just to deal closure, but onboarding, implementation, and the like.

Over Shoot Pipeline, Both Volume + Dollars

Optionality is both King and Queen in many areas of life. But this is especially true in the final quarter of your year as a salesperson. Prospects are smart. They know that if there’s ever a time for them to get a sweetheart deal for a product/service that they need or want, it’s now. They’ll use this as a negotiation tool.

We’re of the belief that even during these times of the year, salespeople should run professional sales cycles and not cut corners:

• Sell against/towards a strategic imperative

• Create levels of differentiation that place your product/service as the only solution that solves the challenges staring them in the face

• Understand the value, both in terms of what it means to the business and the people

Do this, and the need to discount with end-of-year incentives gets minimized.
But it’s not eliminated.

But, if both the volume of qualified opportunities and pipeline dollars are abundant, you’ve placed yourself in a unique situation to walk away from deals. The general rule of thumb for SaaS sales folks is to have 3x the gap to your goal in pipeline. (Depending on your conversion metrics, this can certainly be different). Amplify that further to cater to the realities of Q4 to say, 5-6x.

You likely should have ramped activity in the months prior to get out in front of this. But if you haven’t, there’s no better time than TODAY to get focused. Calendarize your activities, get hyper focused on what’s required; number of prospects to enroll in sequences on a daily/weekly basis, volume of cold calls, etc. etc.

Pool Resources and Knowledge, Lean on What’s Worked

Hopefully the executive team has done a good job of getting cross-departmental cooperation that allows for Herculean outcomes to be achieved at this stage of the year. But if they haven’t, there are still things you can do as an individual contributor to help put yourself (and subsequently others in your shoes) in the best position to succeed.

Pool Resources and Knowledge

Some of the best selling we’ve done over the course of our career has been alongside other individual contributors. Get someone else who is stylistically very different than you and co-work each other’s deals together. It’s important to note that this is a two-way street; you help them, they help you.

In the short-term, having another viewpoint, style, and perspective allows for higher probability closure of deals. It’s another set of eyes and ears on the road, and they’re likely to pick up on things you miss (and vice-versa).

There’s a softer and equally meaningful benefit of developing your own skills as well. You’ll see in real-time how others sell, communicate, follow-up, present, etc. and you’re likely to add tools to your skillset. Moreover, this construct can serve as a first taste for many of what goes into managing others.

A safe space to test this might be a lost opportunity that might warrant dusting off. You tried to sell them on your own previously, so maybe bringing in another personality might help.

In addition to folks on your team, seek assistance from outside of your department. Leverage marketing, sales/revenue operations, customer success, implementation/onboarding folks to broaden your understanding of what’s going well:

• Are there industry use cases that have become more prevalent that I just don’t know about?

• Are there alternative roles from the ones I’ve been targeting that we’ve found success?

• Can we leverage website traffic behaviors to generate meetings with folks that we aren’t actively marketing to?

• What are the newest success stories of companies we’ve helped?

Lean on What Works

While you’re looking for creative ways to collaborate cross-departmentally, you should also be taking a look back at the year that was to see where you’ve shined the brightest. Dig into the data and take a look at where you’ve succeeded so far this year. It could be a particular segment of prospects, be it by size, industry, or role. It could be a particular solution or tier that you’ve sold more frequently than others.

Reinforce the fact that you’ve won before in these areas, and if you double/triple down on the top of funnel activity in a targeted fashion, you’re likely to achieve success there again.