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Seven Essential Steps to Help You Hit Your Year-End Numbers
by Sam Reese, President and CEO of Miller Heiman
August 11, 2008
T
he way I see it, the real end-of-the-year push starts in the third quarter. I remember
competing in races consisting of quarter-mile laps, and the key to being a world-class milerlies in
the third lap. That third lap puts you in a position to win. That’s where you build the momentum
you need to come out ahead in the fourth.
The same strategy holds true for selling—and managing and motivating a sales team—through
the end of the year: Start gearing up now to guarantee a strong finish. This is the time to
prioritize. Just as important, this is the time to stay focused on the customer.
Following are seven steps to help you achieve both those goals—and, as a result, move toward
hitting your milestones when the year comes to a close.
1. Identify and
prioritize your best opportunities. Too many sales executives make the mistake of giving
in to their natural sense of urgency as the fourth quarter approaches, insisting that their staffs
try to close as many deals as possible before the year ends. Focusing on quality, rather than
quantity, is a far more effective approach. Sales organizations have to be especially careful about
how they allocate their resources at this time. They need to make sure their salespeople are
spending the right amount of time on the right deals.
That determination requires taking a systematic and collaborative approach to identifying
the best opportunities, starting with the ones already in your sales funnel. Focus on those closest
to your “sweet spot”—that is, the ones that best match your company’s target audience and your
capabilities for delivering exactly what those customers need. Then estimate the likelihood of
closing each important deal by year’s end. You need to really understand what’s happening with your
high-priority deals. Take a look at where each of those deals is today and what you need to do to
advance it.
Working with facts rather than gut feelings, estimate the odds of closing the most promising
deals by year’s end. For any given opportunity, is the likelihood 50 percent? Seventy-five percent?
Ninety-five percent? Making such determinations will help you pinpoint the high-priority
opportunities and set the strategy to move them forward.
2. Know the business issues that key customers want to address. Examine each deal
not only from your own perspective, but from your customer’s point of view. Figure out how urgent
their issue is to them. You really can’t prioritize an existing opportunity if you don’t know the
client’s concept—what they’re trying to fix, accomplish or avoid.
In fact, trying to move ahead without such knowledge is a common mistake, especially during
the year-end push. Salespeople sometimes push too hard too early, trying to close the deal while
the customer is still trying to figure out the problem. You have to address that issue first. You
need to understand what exactly they’re trying to do and why. If you can’t quickly articulate the
business issue they’re trying to address, you aren’t ready to close the deal.
If you’re trying to close customers when they still don’t know exactly what their problem
is, it creates a big sense of dissonance. In other words, you might get the short-term gain of a
quick sale, but possibly at the expense of jeopardizing future opportunities with that particular
customer.
3. Align your sales process with your clients’ buying processes. It’s also
important to understand each client’s decision-making process—who’s involved, who the key
stakeholders are and who makes the final call. With that information, you can understand the
specific obstacles you’re facing, and you can figure out the specific actions you need to take to
overcome them. Then you can craft a plan to move the deal forward—again, focusing on the customer’s
desired business results rather than on your own.
In the long run, trying to “jam” through a deal won’t benefit you or the customer. Don’t
short-cut the sales process in order to try to expedite things. The sales process and the client’s
buying process have to stay in alignment. If you lose the deal today, it also falls out of the
pipeline for the future.
4. Always be creating. It’s important to prospect for and develop new business
throughout the second half, as opposed to just pushing through existing opportunities in hopes of
hitting great year-end numbers. You still need to build a robust pipeline to next year. That may
seem like common sense, but it’s not all that common. Most people nod their heads and say, “Of
course, we do that”—but few really do it. The rationale: People assume that if they don’t close in
the fourth quarter, the business will spill over into the following year and they’ll have the whole
first quarter to catch up. No wonder the second and third quarters are often weak.
Change the old sales cliché “ABC” from “Always Be Closing” to “Always Be Creating.”
Regardless of the time of year, all sales team members should constantly spend time working on new
opportunities and relationships. Develop some programs to keep the prospects growing.
Such initiatives aren’t necessarily formal, complex or time-consuming. They can be so
simple. Just encourage people to schedule a little time specifically for identifying new
opportunities—even just two hours a week. Then make sure sales managers have good systems in place
for talking about those efforts—not necessarily official reports, but regularly scheduled
discussions about how and when to proceed.
5. Remember your existing customers. Everyone knows that it takes far more time
and energy to develop a new customer than to keep one you’ve already got. But it’s surprising how
often salespeople forget that in their dash to the fourth-quarter finish line. People often get so
busy with new deals that they forget about their largest existing customers. But, it’s very
important to remember your biggest clients as you push toward the end of the year. Why bother, if
they’re already your best customers?
As you continue to strengthen those relationships, other opportunities will start to emerge.
Meanwhile, letting your biggest clients coast puts those relationships at risk.
For those reasons, sales organizations should constantly assess the value they’re providing
to their best clients. That way, they can suggest additional solutions that solve those clients’
problems or help them achieve their goals. When you do that, you become a trusted advisor rather
than just a provider of goods or services—and that’s likely to pay off with even more business.
One way to gain deeper knowledge about your best clients: Collaborate with colleagues in
other departments who also deal with them. They can help you develop comprehensive profiles of
those accounts that will, in turn, let you get a better handle on what those customers need—perhaps
even before the customers know themselves.
6. Involve and engage your salespeople. In discussing how managers can keep their
employees growing as they push toward the fourth quarter, there are three key sales process
categories:
• Identifying and creating opportunities
• Pursuing existing opportunities
• Managing important relationships
At one time or another, everyone on the sales team should get experience with all those
processes. Rather than risk having people become stagnant or too specialized, let them spread their
wings: Mixing up those activities from time to time will create freshness and prompt some creative
new thinking.
7. Rekindle the passion. Contests, bonuses and other incentives are time-honored
traditions for motivating salespeople. However, all too often, such activities fall under the
heading of “hygiene factors”—that is, they’re nice to have and may even work to some extent. But
such short-term initiatives aren’t the most effective way to generate longterm momentum and drive
results.
Instead, tap into salespeople’s core values to remind them what about the profession excites
them: helping customers solve problems and achieve, even exceed, their goals. Salespeople need to
get back the passion for what they do, and for understanding what their clients are trying to do
and how they can help them. I’m meeting with my own sales vice presidents this week. The only thing
on the agenda, all we’ll be talking about, is their customers. I want to know everything about
their customers: What are they using us for? Why are they excited about doing business with us? Who
else like them might want to do business with us, too?
Such discussions should go a long way toward firing up any good sales team: After all, if
you can’t get excited about answering those kinds of questions, you’re probably in the wrong
business.
About Miller Heiman
Miller Heiman has been a thought leader and innovator in the sales arena for almost thirty years, helping clients worldwide win high-value complex deals, grow key accounts and build winning sales organizations. The company is headquartered in Reno, Nevada and has offices around the world. More information can be obtained by visiting the company’s website at: www.millerheiman.com.
©2008 Miller Heiman, Inc. All rights reserved. Use of these materials is by permission of Miller Heiman, Inc.
