Q4 Race: 70 Selling Days to the Finish Line

On the first day of October, sales teams everywhere hear the sound of a starting gun as the clock starts ticking toward December 31. With less than 90 days left in the year, and less than 70 selling days, the race for revenue becomes all-consuming as sales professionals search for ways to shift gears and speed up the process.

Speed comes with risk, however. Without knowing how to accelerate the process safely, you risk damaging long-term relationships with clients. The key to this process is to choose the right opportunities, spend your time on the right activities, and stay motivated.

The Right Opportunities
Selecting the right opportunities poses a quandary for many sales reps. You may want to go with your gut if it tells you the deal is solid and ready to close. The problem with this logic is the tendency to be overly optimistic. Without a realistic assessment of the opportunity's true position in the funnel, you could spend a great deal of time trying to close a deal that can't be closed early.

Consider the following when assessing your opportunities:

• Your knowledge of what the client wants and when they want it
• Availability of the key decision makers and their sense of urgency
• Client's buying process and implementation timeline

By using these criteria for determining which opportunities have the best potential for acceleration, you can then plan the actions that are most apt to bring them to close before the end of the year.

The Right Moves
After you have identified the right opportunities, it is critical that you spend your time on the right activities. You want to be sure that every move you make brings you a step forward. Think about the following when looking at each opportunity:

• What critical information am I missing?
• Who do I need to get it from?
• How accessible are these people?

Resist the urge to be make assumptions when evaluating these factors. If you don't have something concrete to substantiate your assessment of each factor, do more research. You are trying to spend your time on those accounts with the best potential for early close. To do this, you need realistic assessments and concrete evidence of your position. Remember, if it's not high value to the client for Q4, then you're focusing on your goals, not the client's.

Staying Motivated
When you're running at top speed, working diligently to get the deals closed, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture or to get discouraged when those deals you thought would be slam dunks end up pushing their schedule back.

As sales reps, the key to staying motivated is to take a step back from the micro view and look at the overall health of the account. You might be disappointed that a deal has slowed to what feels like a crawl when you need it to hit top speed, but the long-term health of your relationship with that client is part of the bigger picture. Resist the urge to pressure for a closing timeline they don't want or can't meet. In the long run, you are more likely to make the close and many others if your client sees you demonstrate a genuine joint-venture approach by making their success and needs paramount.

The race to the finish line will always be fraught with high pressure and hectic workload. Determining which accounts have highest priority and planning which actions will move those sales to early close will make the annual race an exhilarating and rewarding test of your mettle that catapults you to the winners' circle.