Spectacular fall weather for selling and marketing stuff which also helped both my mind and body in completing the annual "Vermont Big Clean" last weekend.  Fueled by a small army of local high-school boys armed with rakes and a full array of mechanical things, we managed to clear out the summer gardens, rake up mountains of leaves and cut, split and stack a whole bunch of trees, bringing my theory of "a clean forest is a happy forest" to completion, once again. The picture above was taken up on the ridge in my woodlot after six trees were felled, sawed, hauled and split on Saturday morning.  Everything, neat and tidy-kind of the way that I think about a good end to a Sales quarter:

• Everything's done on schedule, and...
• key accounts are well organized, and...
• the sales pipeline has been cleaned up.  

Then on that one day, October 1st in this case, with the flip of a page in the calendar, it's a new month, a new quarter, and a new quota number to be accomplished. 
As salespeople, we live for that sense of self- accomplishment...and recognition by our peers and   bosses. Every study ever done on what drives successful salespeople always cites as Reason #1, the personal reward that we get when our  peers recognize our accomplishments.  Money is always #6 or #7 down the list.

Accomplishments for last weekend:

• The Big Clean:  Checked off
• Kindling stacked in the barn:  Checked off
• Tom the Wood Guy:  Delivering this week
• New roof:  "Sometime before it snows" says the roofer.

With these tasks out of the way, and this coming weekend as the perfect weekend for leaf peeping, it's just about time to wait for Vermont's "Tween Season"-Ain't summa', ain't fall, ain't winta', it's 'tween.

Accomplishments for Q4 Sales:

• Q3 sales quota accomplishment:  not perfect, but pretty good
• Q4 Key Account Plans:  done
• Q4 activity schedules:  done
• Q4 customer travel schedules:  done
• Head screwed on & ready for the next 50 days:  done

To a large degree, the next 50 days of focused selling is all about tactics, execution, organization and superb time management.  And, oh yeah, a bit of luck...which, in the reality of the world of sales never has anything to do with luck and everything to do deliberate sales processes, tools and our experience.  For us as sales managers, this unique time of the year is about our ability to be able to personally sell while, at the same time, balance our time and our individual skills to deliver hands-on coaching to the team. And the ability to do all of this in a very fixed period of time fenced in with no flexibility as to when orders need to be completed. Lights out on December 31st!    
 

No different than my wonderful Tufts   students:  "Work-Study-Exams" frame the semester with management presentations on December 4th  and 11th.  No flexibility in  the dates!