2 months to sell?  Really 38 days!

time to sell-2When I returned from a couple of years in the Peace Corps, it was relatively easy for me to find a job...even given the fact that I had zippo experience in business and only an undergraduate degree from BC with a major in English.  No one really cared about the degree or my skills; they just wanted to hear about the Peace Corps.  One of my primary takeaways from those early years working first at Honeywell in their newly launched memory chip initiative and then at Becton Dickinson in their medtech division was the criticality of time management.   

 

Maybe, it was my inherent drive to make sure that I could stay ahead of the curve working with really bright manufacturing and engineering types, or maybe it's just the way I'm wired, but I've become highly focused and highly protective of my own time and that of the teams I work with both in my consulting role and at Tufts.

Welcome TO November: I still have 2 months to close deals!

As a salesperson, a consultant and as a professor, I've learned to measure everything in days and half-days, and nowhere is that more critical than in the world of sales:

  • Not two months! Not eight weeks!
  • Count the total workdays
  • Subtract 3 days in November for T Day
  • Subtract 3 days in December for the holidays
  • Subtract most probably 4 more days for the last week of December

At best there are 38 days starting Monday.  

  • Now think through your own calendar syncing into those 38 days 
  • Subtract and blank out right now those time blocks of personal commitments
  • Do the same for 2023 budget and planning meetings 
  • Now, you're at baseline, and it's time to protect those days just for selling time

The Timeline Close 

Not to go all salesy on you this morning, but I will anyhow, and there is a very effective deal closing tactic that we can use at this time of year.  Working with a prospect, and always using "The Assumptive Close Tactic", position yourself and the prospect into a specific time between now and the end of November or December.  

  • Let's assume we're working together and kicking off the install in January.
  • To get there, if we were to close at the end of November, what would we need to do?
  • Who would need to be additionally involved?
  • What would a convincing Business Use Case and ROI need to look like?

You get the idea.  It's very effective and prospect-friendly and uses the lack of time for both seller and buyer to come to a point of common success. 

The bottom line for today is to protect your time between now and the end of the year whether you're an engineer, a salesperson, a marketing tactician or a finance professional.  One thing that you can easily do today is to eliminate just one of the time wasters that surround all of us.  

CONNECT ANYTIME!

Jack and Tufts Entrepreneurship Center -2Just some thoughts for a beautiful Friday morning to think about as you gear up for a great day of executing on your sales process and, most importantly, closing deals!  

At any time, if you want to discuss your own sales or marketing planning for 2023 or even for the rest of this year, just connect with me for some quick ideas and feedback. There's no cost to a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about this new rapidly changing world of marketing, which is nothing like the old days of 2020!  In the meantime, take a look at our 2022 edition of our Writing the Winning 2022 Marketing Plan 
We also have a related book in our Writing the Winning 2022 Sales Plan.  Both of these will be updated during the December break. 

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts. 

 

 

 

 

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans