At the beginning of the year, you and your team form one or a few main business objectives to reach by the end of the year and for each quarter. At the end of every quarter, you come together to review your sales plan and ensure everyone’s efforts are still aligned and working toward the business objective and revenue goal. Everyone is performing their assigned obligations with integrity, quality, and passion, but still you’re just shy of hitting your quarterly sales goals. Sometimes, this is just the way the cookie crumbles. By the end of the year, you may be feeling burnt out and disengaged, making it even more difficult to hit your Q4 sales goal. But there are five habits you can develop to help you inch closer to hitting your goals at the end of each quarter.
1. Show Up Every Day
It’s impossible to show up the same way every day. One day you may wake up feeling refreshed and full of energy, ready to take on the world and conquer your to-do list. The next, you may have a horrible headache that you just can’t kick to the curb, muting your focus and creativity. We are not just our jobs, so it’s only natural that external elements like our health and relationships can shift our energy and emotions.
However, this doesn’t mean you can’t show up consistently. On the good days, take advantage of your alertness and knock off the transformational, highest-priority items on your list, like following up with a client or creating a sales proposal. On your off days, prioritize transactional, smaller tasks, like cleaning up your inbox or pipeline software.
Showing up every day doesn’t mean you need to always execute work to perfection—it means you show up as the best version of yourself for that day and do the best work you can. Whether you do only one task one day and 10 the next, taking consistent action will keep your business’ momentum flowing, cultivating the energy you need to hit your quarterly sales goals.
2. Be Mindful About the Connections You're Making
Nearing the end of the quarter, your main focus is hitting your revenue goal. So, you may find yourself gravitating toward reaching out to more prospects and developing new connections. This is a fantastic practice to implement as it can keep a flowing sales pipeline. However, don’t just wait until the end of the quarter to reach out to 10 new people. Be consistent throughout the entire quarter and reach out to two-three new people per week. Not only will it put less work on your plate during the last month in a quarter, but practicing this habit on a weekly basis will soon become like breathing. It’ll be second nature to you and will become a part of your routine. The more people you connect with, the more awareness you generate for your business and offer.
On the flip side, don’t disregard your current clients either. By nurturing two-three of your current clients per week, you could get business referrals, which is a natural way to grow your business and see impactful results.
3. Create Tangible Wins
It can be easy to set grandiose goals and get excited about reaching them, daydreaming about what it will look like for your business when hitting these milestones.
But if it’s more realistic for your family to get vinyl flooring than installing real hardwood, struggling to keep it scratch- and smudge-free from pets and kids, then go with the durable, affordable vinyl. In this moment of being a busy parent with heavy, scrambling foot traffic in your home, you’ll end up disappointed if you install real hardwood, because not only is it more expensive (digging into your kids’ sport funds) but it will inevitably become damaged.
This same scenario can be applied to sales. If you have the choice between setting a realistic, small win that you can hit by the end of the quarter vs. a bigger, complicated win that you’re not guaranteed to hit, go with the smaller win.
Any win is growth, no matter how big or small. When you achieve the smaller win, you’ll feel accomplished that you were able to step closer to your business objective. If you fail at hitting the bigger win, you may feel disappointed in yourself, like the wind has been sucked from your sails. Sometimes it’s better to wrap up the sails and drop your anchor, settling for a goal you know you can reach by the end of your quarter, like making $10,000 instead of $20,000. If your original goal was making $20,000 this quarter and you were only at $8,000, at least that small win helped you make $2,000 more than you would have if you chose to aim for the bigger win instead.
4. Stay True to Your Promises
Do you ever find yourself saying you’ll do something and then two weeks later you’ve forgotten about it? If you answer yes, it’s okay. We’re all human. In an information-overloaded world, you only have so much room in your brain to absorb ideas. A way to stay true to your word for your sales goals and clients is writing them down. If you say you’ll send a client a helpful article surrounding tips to build better savings habits, then write it down and set a date to send them the article. If you say you want to connect with five new people per week, then create a task for it and login to your LinkedIn or attend a conference. Following through on your word for clients boosts your credibility and following through on your promises for your business can boost your revenue and audience awareness.
5. Focus on One Offer
Having multiple products and offers can feel overwhelming, making you unsure about how to build a strategy for each. To avoid this, you can map out your year to focus on one offer per quarter. Matching one offer to each quarter can give you a clearer picture of how to move forward to hit your quarterly goal, as you only have one theme to focus on. You know the saying “don’t put all your eggs in one basket?” Well, forget about this saying for this scenario. Putting all of your effort (eggs) into four baskets (offers) every single quarter can leave you feeling drained, burned out, and disengaged from the quarterly sales goal. By focusing your time and energy on one offer (basket), you can become more strategic about how you’ll generate revenue from it, making you feel more confident and capable of hitting your quarterly goal.
Finding Success for Every Quarter
While implementing these five habits in Q4 is especially important to overcome the year-end fatigue, you can apply them to every sales quarter to help you move closer to your sales goal! Remember:
- Show up every day as the best version of yourself.
- Balance making new connections and nurturing current client relationships.
- Aim for the small wins (they can generate a big win)!
- Keep your word!
- Pair one offer to each quarter.
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