Even with solid planning, hitting your company’s quarterly sales quota can sometimes be a sprint to the finish.
Navigate through these urgent times in a way that not only brings in revenue today, but also paves a smoother road for the future.
Bottom-line results rule in sales, but the subtext honoured by the wise is that the journey is as important as the destination.
A sprint to the finish taxes the entire organization in unhealthy ways. Sales’ demands of accounting and admin spike as it hurries to push orders through the system. Procurement, production and shipping are stressed to maximize capacity to fulfil those orders, and customer service braces for the aftermath.
Some classic – and bad – strategies to deal with a sales sprint to the finish are:
- discounting to provide incentives for immediate purchases. This kills margin and puts your business at risk. Business won on price will ultimately be lost on price
- asking good customers to accept “beefed-up” orders. This results in excess inventory to be managed, and credits follow. Not good; and
- asking good customers to place regular orders early as a “favour.” See the previous item to learn why this is risky. Also, aren’t we the ones who should be doling out favours, not our buyers?
Managing the sprint to the finish requires forethought. Healthy ways to handle that sprint include:
- taking the pressure off your team members to produce rosy 30-day sales forecasts. Allow them to get real. Get a true picture of your funnel by asking to see only business with a 90% or greater chance of closing within the month. This one action will identify much of what is working or not in your sales process overall;
- measuring sales results against quota as frequently as is prudent. Track transactional sales results daily. Track key account sales weekly. Compare actual results to the 30-day forecast. Linking these will make both better;
- sharing the results. Let everyone know how they and their colleagues are doing. Done appropriately this builds a culture of achievement. It also promotes observance of trends, which will supplant waiting for alarms to sound;
- acting early. Create strategies to address projected shortfalls by increasing sales velocity where it can be done. Implement immediately;
- meeting often to check on tactical implementation. How is the sales situation unfolding? Poor implementation of good sales plans is a classic pitfall that can easily be avoided; and
- setting your marketing calendar appropriately. Marketing pushes at quarter-end promote a sprint to the finish. Customers also get trained to curtail buying until the end of the quarter because that’s when the deals hit.
Even with great planning and execution you might still be in a sprint to the finish. A good place to look for stray revenue is in your reps’ pending order files. Are there orders there waiting to get entered? Get them processed.
And what about your customers’ pending order files? Call your clients that order online or via phone to ensure they get the on-time service they, and you, require. How about your shipping room? Are there any “on hold” or backorders that can be unstuck and shipped?
When all these avenues are exhausted take the remaining revenue shortfall and spread it among all your reps. Give each person a small hill to climb rather than having a few folks scale a mountain.
In the short term, leading your team like this will provide a good chance of hitting quota. For the long term, you will identify the root causes of your sprint to the finish cycle and create strategies to avoid it in future.