Acorns, Sales Management & September

At the NH office, there's a huge oak tree directly in front of my office window. Probably measures 18' feet in circumference and maybe 200' in height. 

Beginning about two weeks ago, as I started my daily dawn beach run down at the end of the road, my sneakers started crunching acorns, which have moved from ..."what's that?" and "Fall's coming!" to now being a daily annoyance with hundreds of irritating acorns littering the road every morning. 

But then this the rhythm of the seasons in New England.  In Vermont, the leaves are already starting to turn while here in NH, acorns do what acorns are supposed to do reminding us of course that that same autumnal rhythm applies in the same seasonal way to our work as sales leaders.  It's time to push!

What do we know about the rhythm of September?

-Leaves change, acorns fall, and it gets colder.  Just the rhythm of living in New England.
-In just 1 week, we accelerated from 50mph vacation mode to 85mph work mode. 
-Every end-of-year KPI is being questioned, recast and scrutinized again and again.
-There's total focus on what it takes for every rep to make their monthly quotas.
-And, of course, we now need to find "extra" time to start developing our 2025 plans.

September's Sales Challenges:

• Increased Difficulty: 54% of sales professionals we work with find selling is harder this year than last.
• Productivity Issues: There continues to be opportunities for significant improvements in productivity.  The primary opportunities continue to be much better use of formalizing sales processes and major improvements in tech fluency both in the basics of CRM and in the initial forays into AI.  90% of salespeople are "doing something" with AI, but we are still at the very early cycles of initiating major productivity gains and increased customer impact. 
• Prospect Behavior: 96% of prospects do their own research before engaging with a rep, and 71% of those prefer self-research over interacting with a sales rep due to their time constraints and a desire for wanting more value and less "selling".

Lots to do this fall, but then we knew that when we signed up for this sales management job!  Keep in mind as we launch ourselves into the next critical 70 workdays that we don't actually have 70 days since that count also includes major holidays.  Plan to lose 5 to 8 of those days as a result,  

Bottom line, as sales managers, we can be a lot more disciplined and much productive in how we approach both these next 65-70 days, and also as we begin to think through our approach to our own business planning for 2025.

Actionable Strategies:

1. Absolute Alignment with your CEO and Board's expectations!

Every primary sales initiative and tactic needs to be totally in line with end-of-year operating expectations. In this environment of the next 65-70 days, it's critically important that that alignment needs to be based on clear expectations and transparent execution up and down the management org structure while at the same time there's going to be...just because of the compressed time, the potential of conflicting departmental objectives, which is why, there also needs to be...

2. Total alignment  with both your CFO and CMO.
In today's complex and easily distracted world of elections, wars and what the Jobs Report today is or is not going to do, the three primary department leaders of any business-Sales, Marketing & Finance-need to be totally on the same page regarding the most critical KPIs in everything from the details of the number of leads and the math of sales conversion rates to the overarching numbers of achieving monthly revenue, margins and bottom line performance. This is the time to forge true partnerships and not conflicting (hidden or otherwise) conflicts.  An actionable item would be to schedule a pre-planning strategy meeting for next week to talk through what it will take. 

Just a few ideas as you kick off one more of those remaining 65-70 days! 
Have a great day selling today!

Executing on your Sales Plan in 2024!

For a few ideas on your own sales planning for these four months and for your 2025 sales plan, , you can click here for our new  "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024", for a few ideas on structure, sales models, process funnels and a number of productivity tools and how to recruit and hire the best. 

Or, just give me a call, and we can kick around a few ideas, talk about game plans and a few specific ideas. I drive a ton of miles and there's nothing like a quick call as I challenge the end of day commute out of Boston back to the beach. 

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.