- The Days are now only 17 real selling days left in the year.
- The Road is a choice to focus on either new logos or upsell/crossell.
- The Rubber is getting to Quota & President's Club
Unless I'm deep in the lower half of my sales funnel with deals I've been working on since late September and October, right now, I'm totally focused on upselling existing customers with additional solutions.
For me, it's a simple equation built around having only 17 available days and being a trusted partner or strategic advisor to our existing customers.
A fun example of upselling occurred with me on TDay morning when I showed up exactly at 10:30 at the country club as instructed to pick up the mostly cooked bird and the 6 sides of vegetables, potatoes, and everything else down to the butter and the cranberry sauce. Greeting me was the club manager, the chef and two other smiling employees who were there to load everything into my car, which I thought was "very nice" of them to do. Then the manager asked me: "We also have a very nice wine selection to go with your wonderful dinner", as he pointed to a table of various wines grouped by price at $20, $30, $40 and $50 a bottle.
So, there I am: 10:30AM, Dinner@2:00, Cooking time:1.5 hours
- Management, the chef, two employees all smiling while nicely loading boxes into my car.
- "The Close": "This particular wine ($40) is what your friend George picked out earlier today"
- The Deal: One bottle at $40, one at $20.
- Time Elapsed: 2 minutes
So where do you want to spend your focus and your very precious time over the next 17 days? Try to identify, market to and sell to new possible buyers of fully cooked turkey dinners at a reasonable price with a good margin or upsell wine with a 250% margin in two minutes?
No right or wrong answers here, but just don't use the lame excuse of "It depends". Today, with only 17 days left in the selling calendar, it's time to make specific decisions on how much time you're going to allocate to closing those 1 or 2 new deals that are deep in your sales funnel with high probabilities, and how much time you will commit to making quick connection calls to solid existing customers to "just check-in" and ask about any current challenges or plans which you could solve for them.
2024 SALES PLANNING
Check out our updated sales productivity site page. Just page down to get our 2023 edition of
Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023.
Or you can just email me, and I'll send you a free copy. I'm now into four weekends of updating this for 2024, so if you have ideas or just want to write content, let me know.
www.derbymanagement.com
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.
