The holiday "dead period" was , in each of the
past three years, our busiest season. We are on track for this year to bring in
even better sales numbers for our clients. The number one revenue day for our
firm in 2010 was December 29.
We keep year-by-year data on which companies, contacts,
and projects within companies have a year-end spend-down habit. During the
holiday season we focus more than our usual efforts on making sure that those
targets have great opportunities to do their year-end buying with our clients.
We also track which client companies use year-end to bring on new employees and
make sure that those clients have all of the tools and services they’ll need to
bring new hires into full productivity quickly.
The conventional wisdom that fall or spring is the best time
to sell B to B services and solutions has not been borne out in recent years. The wisdom goes that by November and
December, most companies have given up on fourth quarter sales and moved on to
planning a more successful next year. However, we've noticed a trend against that CW. Client solutions and services are moving, these
last two months of the year, because buyers are pushing to implement, or at
least purchase, new services and technology solutions before the end of the
year.
Why?
- So they can qualify for current-year tax deductions and make certain that they don’t lose funding to some other department or initiative while they are out for the holidays.
- Many corporations, from huge to very small, try to have new employees in place for the first of the year. Managers want those new employees productive, quick. We motivate lots of sales by reminding our customers that new employees are the last people on earth you want finagling with out-dated systems or overwhelmed servers, or backed up service providers.
- In our era of economic uncertainty, many companies hold back on purchasing until their own year-end numbers are nearly locked before deciding which project and technology investments to fund.
In addition to our data-driven approach to recent year-end
sales cycles, we also encourage our clients to put a full sales press into the
field during the holidays because that effort, even when it does not result in
November and December sales creates a critical mass of conversational
invitations to close sales on January and February rather than starting the
conversation in first quarter.
The holidays tend to feature two kinds of conversations,
"Call me after the first of the year," and in-depth discussions with
people who are not overwhelmed with their own work flow because "it's the
holidays." Those conversations and access to key people who are ordinarily
pretty tough to reach, keep us working through the season. Our clients start
each year well ahead of competitors who are starting from a near blank slate
when they return to the office after New Years.
