How to Accelerate Sales Performance in Q4

In football, winning the fourth quarter is pivotal. Of course, the first three quarters count, but in many ways, they are setup for the final fifteen minutes. With time running down, teams with leads may play it safe and engineer long, slow drives that eat clock. While teams that are behind need to score fast, they too must be mindful of time or risk giving up a last-second, game-winning field goal. In sales, the fourth quarter is equally important. For one thing, buyers are willing to deal. They expect offers, and they know time is ticking on their available budgets. That’s why a strategic fourth-quarter strategy is essential. Here are a few tips to accelerate performance during this critical time:

1. Review Your Sales Pipeline

While periodic pipeline reviews are crucial, they are more important than ever in Q4. Here, managers can help reps analyze the deals in their pipeline to determine which have the best chance of closing. This allows reps to prioritize those and find new ways to move them, such as adding value. After all, some of these have been hanging in limbo since halftime. In the fourth quarter, both sellers and buyers have additional incentive to get deals done. Like a quarterback following a lineman for a short first down, this could be the push needed to maintain possession and score a touchdown.

When you began the year and even halfway through, you had a set of forecasts and projections. Now you need to look at your pipeline and determine your forecast and projections for the final quarter. It’s also important to be realistic – while many buyers might have funds left in the spend it or lose it budget, there’s also going to be a lot of competition.

Perhaps earlier in the year or even before that, you had prospects who were interested, but for any number of reasons, didn’t buy. This is an excellent stage to contact them again and restart the conversation – it’s quite possible their situation has changed and they’re ready to buy either now or in the fourth quarter. It takes some time to pick up where you left off – especially if circumstances are different – so now is when you should be reviving the discussion.

2. Incentivize Your Sales Team

As a football coach may pump up the team for the fourth quarter, sales managers can provide extra motivation. Here, managers can add incentives for increased activity, such as additional calls to close deals, and allow reps to be flexible with offers. Though goals and quotas are set at the beginning of the year, it’s a good idea to re-evaluate these in the fourth quarter. This is not to say change them. It’s a little late for that. However, with the game on the line, buyers want to buy. Sellers should use this to their advantage and tailor their play calls to the situation. Like a gift card to Starbucks, incentives can be the gesture that says it’s pumpkin spice season. Let’s stop dancing and do this already.

Sales leadership should consider the option of creating a short sales contest or bonus structure tailored to the fourth quarter. This can be especially morale-boosting for those B and C reps who have year-to-date failed to make quota or are so far back in the race to Presidents’ Club their motivation might be flaggin

3. Ramp Up Sales Coaching for Your Team

When companies find themselves missing sales projections during crunch time, we receive more inquiries. The request is, “Can you provide a sales training workshop to help our team improve their closing rate?” Closing is the result of a system. Keynote sales talks or single-day skills workshops rarely fix systemic sales problems.

For any sales training program to be effective, it should be customized, train specific behaviors, and re-enforce new skills. Quick-fix sales solutions are a very big deal because too many companies are misled to believe sales training can save their year.

Instead of searching for the sales guru to save the year, sales leaders can have outcomes-focused discussions with their teams. Sales reps need to know precisely what sales activities they should focus on to increase overall revenue. Pressure can cause reps to behave erratically. As sales leaders, we want to remove options and provide clarity, not add more to a process that is not working.

Day-to-day, coaching is one of the best ways to improve performance. During Q4, it’s a good idea to increase the frequency of these efforts. If your usual schedule is every few weeks, up this to weekly or bi-weekly. This ensures managers will keep tabs on their reps to push stagnated deals through the pipeline. Individual coaching allows managers to review a rep’s data and offer pointed tips and instruction for making the most of their activities. Maybe it’s more targeted prospecting, better use of collateral, or a late-game value offer, like an unexpected trick play, but coaching can motivate reps to push themselves.

4. Evaluate and Re-Evaluate Your Q4 Calendar

Once the holiday months hit, it can be quite difficult to secure meetings and appointments – people are either out of the office or have already made plans. That’s why you should be prospecting now as much as you possibly can and plot out your schedule well in advance.

For many sales organizations, time speeds up in the fourth quarter. With calendars set in advance, it can be difficult to keep up with projections set months earlier. Here, the best sales managers need great, late-game, time-management skills. This requires more frequent updates and revisions to your calendar. Like football coaches with special fourth quarter plays, these need to be communicated with your sales team, so they are all on board with the new goals. Remember, too, the fourth quarter is short. With the extended Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, sellers want to touch base with prospects and clients about availability during the holidays.       

5. Realign Sales and Marketing Priorities

Of course, increased activity from reps, such as more emails and phone calls, are never a bad idea. However, these alone will not be enough. In the fourth quarter, a sales team needs a targeted push from marketing to better support the sales effort as the clock continues to tick. Like the extra effort of exhausted and panting linemen, increasing the volume of content reps can share will help with their engagement, especially if this is tied to the deals in their pipeline. This type of coordinated effort to reach those on-the-fence prospects can be just what’s needed to jumpstart a sputtering deal and help reps guide buyers to the goal.

A consistent trend we see with top-performing companies is that they avoid drastic decisions in the fourth quarter. They make small incremental changes based on previous results and learn from their recent wins and losses. The best sales reps can teach themselves what adjustments they need to make. Underperforming reps won’t. In the fourth quarter, it’s about evolution, not revolution.

Areas that may benefit from simple adjustments include:

• How you prioritize leads
• How you follow-up
• Your sales message

What must be avoided is allowing your team to start chasing huge opportunities with a low probability of success. This type of desperation will make bad sales numbers worse. It’s like the football team that is down by a score in the fourth quarter and throwing an interception on first down. Don’t chase whales in the fourth quarter unless the confidence is high that they will close.

Remember, your fourth quarter results are a cumulation of the first three quarters. Playing catchup for three quarters and trying to throw a hail mail in the fourth is not the solution. Instead, help your team avoid the vague discovery calls that create friction. Focus their time and attention on how you won your biggest deals this year. Reminding the sales team of the big wins creates a heightened sense of what works and re-focuses the sales team away from doom and gloom.

6. Shorten the Sales Cycle

At this late stage, in addition to adding value and coordinating your marketing efforts, reps should focus on shortening the sales cycle. In the sales equivalent of a no-huddle offense, reps need to be aware of both the play clock and the game clock and approach each down with a sense of urgency. If your team trails, sales pros can be a little assertive and take high-probability chances. Read the defense. Get creative. Find the “in” needed to sway a prospect to sign the deal. It’s now or never. While there’s no need for a Hail Mary or an ill-advised discount, that doesn’t mean you can’t sweeten the deal, like throwing in free customer support for the first year.

As a sales training company, we see a common mistake among companies missing their sales numbers. Often, there’s too much friction early in the sales process. When I say friction, I’m referring to anything that might hinder the buying experience. As an example, let’s analyze a typical B2B sales process:

1. Buyer wants to learn more and submits a contact form.
2. Buyer and SDR play phone tag to schedule the initial call.
3. Buyer is asked generic qualifying questions by SDR that could have been uncovered with basic research.
4. Buyer asks for pricing and is informed that requires another call.
5. Buyer no-shows on the Account Executive call, even though the SDR felt it was a strong opportunity.

If you want to figure out what is causing you to miss your sales numbers, the first place to look is your no-shows. A high no-show rate indicates an issue with the handoff. The good news is that Q4 is a great time to focus on no-shows and reschedules. However, simply calling prospects who missed your first appointment likely won’t dramatically change the outcome.

A better solution is to review your sales team’s numbers. They likely fall into three categories:

• The high achievers who already hit their numbers
• The middle performers who are close to hitting their number
• Finally, sales reps with no chance of hitting their numbers

Utilizing high achievers to help the remaining sales team hit their numbers is a strategy not levered enough. Pairing high-performers with the rest of the team can build confidence and help capture lost deals.

But having your best reps call the no-shows won’t fix the root issues that are causing the no-show problem to begin with. That is something that should be fixed this quarter. Unneeded friction and excessive qualification early in the sales process is an outdated sales strategy that needs to change. If a buyer requests a demo or asks for pricing, making them wait days is a deal killer.

Sales leaders, consider this from your buyer’s perspective: The buyer did their own research and shortlisted a few providers based on the information they found online. Buyers are saying to you, “Yes, I’m interested. Your website was informative and provided everything but pricing. Can you help with that?” At this point, you start your outdated follow-up process, add unnecessary friction, and wonder why the missed appointment rate is high.

Maybe the buyer didn’t just sit by the phone waiting for your team to follow-up. Instead, they contacted the next provider on their shortlist and had a better experience. Maybe the buyer is thinking, “I’m not trying to find the hardest company to work with for this solution,” and removed you from their shortlist. That may sound harsh, but the truth is time kills deals and fast beats free.

Removing friction is why auditing your wins and losses is critical. Failures teach you how to find friction. Wins teach you what drives urgency with buyers to buy now rather than later. When you figure out what is driving both, you can double down on strategies that improve outcomes. Selling in the fourth quarter during a downturn is less about the product your team sells and more about HOW your team sells.

7. Schedule Weekly Sales Meetings

Weekly sales meetings let reps share what they are doing to close deals, which can inspire the team to do more, try new things, or revive their enthusiasm. Also, these meetings allow reps to trade ideas about what’s working in the fourth quarter. This is a great way to have an experienced closer jump in on a call with a newer team member and offer tips for how to move the deal. Perhaps it’s generating a sense of urgency in a buyer, a reminder what they stand to gain and lose if they don’t act soon. These little tips can be the difference between a won deal and a lost opportunity.    

One of the great things about both fourth-quarter football and selling is the excitement. Whether it’s a close game in the final minutes or a sales team hitting quota, there’s a heightened sense of urgency that makes one’s pulse race. It’s when the highs are highest, the lows the lowest, and critical moments can be the difference between winning and losing. It reminds us how football and selling are team efforts, with the fourth quarter all-hands-on-deck time, and nothing beats a smart, well-played  fourth quarter that results in victory.

The fourth quarter is a natural point to conduct year-end reviews with current customers. Find out what’s going well with the relationship, what they’d like to see improved, and discover how their needs have changed – perhaps there’s an opportunity to expand the business due to clients’ growth, for example.

Appreciation activities can also be beneficial. Whether it’s simply calling customers to thank them for the relationship, hosting a holiday gathering for prospects and current clients (great networking opportunity and chance for prospects to talk to existing clients and learn what it’s like to work with you!), or sending out a small gift, letting your buyer network know you appreciate them can pay off long-term dividends. Especially since the holidays are a time of year when people are naturally seeking to strengthen or visit emotional connections.

Whether you decide to do one or both, the planning period for sorting out the logistics of these get-togethers or activities starts now.

Updated 9/17/2024