If your organization is on a calendar year-end, 64 working days are left.
If you’re sweating about achieving your goals, you might wish for a Q5.
In my experience, if you are sweating Q4, the highest percentage option is to focus on a defined list of deals that will make a material difference in results – and that can and must close by the end of the quarter – typically deals over a threshold dollar amount.
Here’s the Rationale for Focusing on a Defined List of Deals:
-
-
- Your sales support resources may be “peanut butter spread” over tens, hundreds, or thousands of deals. Deals you could close may not be getting the resources needed. If support resources aren’t clear on the priority deals, they typically support “the squeakiest wheel.
- Salespeople often divide their time between must-close and smaller deals. They don’t want to put all their “eggs in one basket,” so they allocate time to less desirable deals. If one of their deals is a must-close for the company, not just for them, they must prioritize their efforts accordingly.
- Sales math is simple. If you can win some or most of your must-win deals, you may have a solid chance of achieving your goals. If you don’t, you may have no chance.
-
Teams that align behind a defined list of must-close deals achieve more than a battle cry to “close everything you can before the end of the quarter!”
With 64 working days left in the year, you have only 256 working hours left. Read this post on the actual number of working hours in a week.
If you wait until next Tuesday to align everyone, you’ll be down to 57 working days and 228 working hours.
Planning and prescribing how your sales and sales support teams allocate their working hours for the balance of Q4 may make the difference in achieving your goals.
Good luck!
“Anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.” — Steven Covey