With 50 days (which is being generous, so do your own math) left in the quarter, there's not much time for changing out teams, re-planning key account plans or totally new game plans. This is 50 days of classic blocking and tackling as you move down the field toward the goal line.  Having said that, these last 50 days left in the season are also going to need to be played more like soccer than football.  There’s no bye time like the Patriots have this week. There’s no ability to swap out teams and bring in other players.  Clearly no time for time outs.  This is just constant forward motion activity, yard by yard if not inch by inch, and all of that activity absolutely needs to be at full speed.

With a maximum of 50 days left in the season, a few ideas...

1. Focus on You

Obviously, you have competitors and you’re very aware of who they are, their products and their strengths, real and perceived.   Forget about the competitors at this time of year.  Other than drilling down into their weaknesses, if, at this time of year, you’re just pushing against the other team, you could find yourself being steamrolled over by the end of the game.   Focus on your own personal value as a trusted partner and what you can bring to your prospect’s success.  Get inside their head and align yourself perfectly with their 2012 objectives.  You solve their problems, they’ll solve yours!

2. Focus on Value
The issue at this time in the season is an intricate balance between the time it takes you to define “What It Is”, and the time it takes you to define “What the Value It Brings to Your Prospect”.   On every major opportunity now, you absolutely need to sit yourself mentally in the chair of the buyer.  What are their personal objectives?  What’s in this for them?  How does your product or service directly provide the prospect with specific value that is a direct link to filling their objectives? 
Might be time to tune up your Value Proposition  

3.  Focus on 90/10 or...focus on Focus
At this time in the season, all potential orders sometimes look the same especially if your numbers of wins and losses up to this time in the season have been on the wrong side of the equation. The point here is that being behind the curve obviously provides stress, and stress results in ineffective selling processes or focusing on the wrong prospects. 

Very specifically right now, define those "key" (whatever that means in your own language) 10 prospects where you need to maximize your time and resources over the next 30 days.  Why 30 and not 50?  Because in reality, you don’t have 50 selling days.  50 just happens to be the literal number of potential work days between now and December 31. 

Just a few things to think about…

Good Selling!

Jack
Head Coach



One more thing-I could use your help.
As most of your know, I’m a professor of marketing at Tufts.  To make the content more impactful for these juniors and seniors, they get embedded into real companies in six teams of five students to solve complex marketing projects.  These are semester-long projects often resulting in marketing plans, market research, segmentation and detailed recommendations.  If you are at all interested in having a team of bright marketing students do a project for you, please just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com , and I will send you an outline of what's involved for the spring semester.