Insights and Innovations: Your Resource for Industry Knowledge

OK, here we are, Q4. Time to get dirty. Pull out the stops. *Do what it takes to make your number for the year.* Get on airplanes! The pressure’s on, team. Q4 is the hardest quarter, full stop. The best sales reps do a few things differently in Q4. Let’s talk about why Q4 sucks, what the best reps do to prevail, and one *free, delightful antidote* you can use to close Q4.

VisualizeROI has served us well since we launched our solution on the Salesforce AppExchange in 2012 for two reasons. (a) clear problem and solution definition, and (b) optimization for search engines. Over time, we started to see that the desired use cases for our solution exceeded the calculation or presentation of ROI to a customer. We had customers using our solution to present price quotes. Customers used our solution to demonstrate the 5-year Total Cost of Ownership of moving to the cloud from an on-premise solution. Customers are now using us during discovery to help calculate and quantify and present a pain statement.

I just finished reading a book by Jia Jiang called Rejection Proof, How I beat fear and became invincible through 100 days of rejection. The basic premise was that Jia would put himself in situations where he would get rejected and then discuss what he learned. He did crazy things like borrowing $100 from a stranger or asking the Southwest Airlines flight attendant if he could make the announcements. Each time he got rejected, he learned something and shared his knowledge.

Misalignment between the buyer’s and sellers’ processes is a major issue for today’s sales professionals. Life has changed for both buyers and sellers due to COVID-19. Many organizations added several steps around the financial impact of a strategic buying decision. In addition, buyers have taken into consideration more risk mitigation steps and inserted a lot more time for due diligence. As a result, buyers are simply more careful and more apprehensive when it comes to making strategic buying decisions.

Your sales professionals continue to build their pipeline by following up on company-generated leads and contacting existing customers. However, they become frustrated by the limited access they have to decision-makers. Each day begins with a call list of potential prospects (targets) received from corporate marketing. With each call, they carefully enter the date, time, person they tried to contact, and the call’s outcome into the corporate SFA system. Too often, the sales professional gets a voice-activated system and/or voicemail. There are times when an administrative assistant will screen the calls.

Let’s say you are the world’s greatest sales professional – so good in fact, your company feels that you are the right person to expand the organization’s market share outside the USA, starting in France. This is all great until you arrive in Paris and discover that the language gap will be a bigger problem than anticipated.