Each of the three CEOs I met with on Monday used the same term, “crunch time” to describe the end of the quarter this Friday.   A software company, a financial services firm and a retail product manufacturer-the industry didn’t make any difference; it was the same phrase, “crunch time”.  Every month, every quarter, in almost every industry we work in, it always comes down to this last week.  It is what it is, and it’s what we deal with as managers every year, which, of course, doesn’t make it right or wrong, it just brings too many decisions down to too little time leaving no room for errors.  The bottom line of which, in any crunch situation, is that unfortunately something somewhere gets squeezed out and falls through the cracks.  I guess I could paint an analogy to the Red Sox here, but that crunch time story is just too depressing and painful.

And then, in an instant, around 6:00 PM on Friday, it’s over, and with the turn of a digital page in the online calendar, there a new quarter staring us in the face.   So, here are just a couple of ideas as to how you might want to think about approaching this last and most critical of the quarters a bit differently.  

Cleanup

I’m in Vermont this coming weekend with my crew of hired high school boys to begin the annual two weekend fall cleanup.  This is the time of year that the gardens are cut back, the wood tent is erected close by the front door, the screens get put away and a long list of chores hung on the refrigerator is ticked off day by day so that we can approach the winter with somewhat of a clean (or cleaner, at least) slate. 

Think about doing the same thing this weekend in cleaning up your sales files, refining your notes in the various stages of your CRM, and refining your pipeline.  What you want to do is clear up all of the loose ends now while they’re fresh in your mind, and you’re not wasting time planning for the new quarter come Monday morning.  My attitude is that you want to do whatever you can in advance planning immediately so that you can get ahead of the pack and make every day count the new quarter.

  Count The Days

In terms of making every day count, during Q4, don’t fall into the ugly habit of talking about months or even weeks.  Try focusing on the actual number of days between next Monday and December 30^th.  Theoretically, that’s 68 work days, but before you breathe a sigh of relief, build your own daily countdown calendar and make decisions about your own productivity and the availability of your prospects on day such as the day after Thanksgiving and the 23^rd and 30^th of December.  Then color code (green would be a winning color to define success) those days that you can totally focus on working your accounts and your sales team.  Make sure that you also color code (yellow would define caution) away those big chunks of days you're going to need to work with your various bosses in planning meetings for 2012-obviously a necessary requirement, but definitely time taken away from the phones and the offices of your prospects.   Compute what you have left, focus on the individual days, work in your travel schedules and make sure that that color coded calendar stares you in the face every day.  Hang it on your wall, use it as your screen saver, but do something so that you’re focusing on the actual days left in the quarter.

A very simple tool, I realize, but I find that it works just because of its simplicity with the lesson being to make time work for you rather than slap you upside the head when there’s no time left.  Once again, it comes down to crunch time, since in this particular quarter, there simply is no more time.

Plan It Out
You might find our 30-60-90 day planning guide helpful.  Click HERE to get to our Sales Solution Center and then click on "Creating Your Tactical Sales Plan"

Good Selling the rest of this week!

Jack
Head Coach