How to Transform Sales Peaks into a Smooth Flow

Discover how to break free from the chaotic sales cycle that leads to last-minute rushes and stress. This episode offers insights into understanding personality types, creating weekly sales targets, and aligning sales efforts with seasonal buying patterns for more consistent results.

• Analysis of the sawtooth sales cycle 
• Explanation of the DISC personality model and its relevance to sales 
• Insights into the high D personality traits that affect sales habits 
• Importance of establishing discipline in sales routines 
• Benefits of setting weekly sales targets over monthly targets 
• Strategies for maintaining consistent activities for increased sales 
• Understanding client buying patterns and seasonal fluctuations 
• The role of management in supporting consistent sales performance

Chapters

• 0:00 Sales Targeting and Urgency Strategies
• 7:41 Sales Consistency and Seasonal Strategies
• 18:53 Monthly Sales Goal Setting for Success

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

Okay, I have a question for you.

Speaker 1: 0:15

If you were to look at your sales figures over the course of a year, do you find you've got something that's sawtoothed?

Speaker 1: 0:23

And what I mean by that is do you find that, let's say, at the beginning of the month you're not booking very much at all and then it's all quite a rush to hit your number by the end of the month? And that pattern might repeat itself when you start looking at the quarterly and maybe even half-year figures as well. And I find with a lot of salespeople it depends often how they are targeted and how their commission is based. So if it's monthly-based, quite often with a certain group of salespeople you'll find that early in the month not much is booked at all. Then it's a bit of a rush towards the end of the month to hit that monthly target and it may feel a bit like just sort of sliding in at the end of the month to just hit that number and it can all be very dramatic, very exciting. But from a business perspective and really from a long-term perspective, unless you really get off on the adrenaline rush of just nailing it at the last minute every month, which some people do. But to be honest, it's probably not the best way to approach business. There are some reasons why that might be happening to you now, in some of the other podcasts and certainly in the course that I run Consultative Selling, one of the things I look at is personality profiling, and I look at that for several very good reasons, and one of them when you look at salespeople, a lot of salespeople often have a very high D aspect to their personality.

Speaker 1: 2:00

So if you're not familiar with DISC at this point, you're probably wondering what I'm talking about. So, just very, very briefly, disc breaks down people's personalities into four particular aspects, and one of those aspects will tend to be the one that is most significant for each person and we're all a mix of all four, but one of them will tend to stand out. So the one that I'm talking about and I think it applies to most salespeople, certainly to successful salespeople is that they are very high in the D aspect, the dominant aspect of the personality, and the dominant aspect is simply the part that we kind of push into to get things done. It's about hitting targets, it's about pushing through any resistance we might have just to get things done, but one of the characteristics of high D people is they do kind of like the drama. If they're not up against it, they'll tend to switch off a little bit.

Speaker 1: 2:57

And if you're one of those people, you may well find that at the beginning of the month you do take your foot off the gas, to use an expression, because you've got a whole month to hit the numbers. So there's no urgency about it. And this is one of the things that drives high D people it's a sense of urgency. So if you're not one of those people and if you have your own business, it's quite likely that that aspect of you may not be so strong. You may well be very good at putting aside every week, maybe every day, or certainly on certain days, to make your phone calls, to set up meetings to do whatever it is you have to do to make your business work, and you're meetings to do whatever it is you have to do to make your business work, and you're very good at getting into those kind of habits. If that isn't you, the chances are you are very high in the D aspect of your personality and what will tend to happen is and if you relate to this, it's probably quite true for you, but you'll find that if there isn't an urgency, if hitting that target is days, maybe even several weeks away, you won't feel compelled to do the work. You'll kind of slow down, back off a little bit and wait until things get a little bit more urgent. Now the other reason for sharing this with you is if you're in a management role where you have salespeople reporting to you, you might. Reason for sharing this with you is if you're in a management role where you have salespeople reporting to you. You might be the business owner with salespeople, or you might be a sales manager of some sort. You might well notice that pattern in some of your sales people. They will tend to be the ones who are high D in their personality, so that's something to recognize.

Speaker 1: 4:37

So what do you do about it? Well, it comes down to discipline, or maybe even changing the way that you view your targets. So the discipline thing is fairly straightforward. You get stuck in and you make it a habit. So you do get very self-disciplined, making sure that each day, or however many times during the week, you have to do it. You do make calls to make meetings with people, get visits set up, whatever it is that is important in your sales process to result in a sale, and you break that down into a weekly structure.

Speaker 1: 5:17

So structure is an interesting one. There are certain people who find structure is something that is very supportive, so the structure is sort of below them and helping them to get where they are. And that's probably not so much of the Ds. High D people tend to feel constrained by structure, they're kind of almost imprisoned in it, and this is really something that you have to make a conscious effort to change, if that's you, because if you do want to get those more consistent results happening, you have to work consistently on a daily basis really.

Speaker 1: 5:51

So look at what you're doing and maybe even if again, if this is you look at what you're doing on a daily basis at the beginning of the month, when things tend to slow down, and what you're doing on a daily basis towards the end of the month, when you're probably much more active and you're certainly much more engaged in activities that will result in closing an order, and really the thing to do there is to make sure that you start doing things on a regular basis that result in orders, and you really want to have orders every week. So, again, one thing you can do is to just change the way you target yourself and make it weekly rather than monthly. So look, I don't know what you're selling. It might be a product, it might be a service, it could be a membership, whatever it is. But if let's, for the sake of argument, say that in order to meet your monthly target, you need to sell 40 items per month, and what typically happens is you might sell five or 10 in the first half of the month and then the rest the balance of those orders tend to come in the second half of the month, and then the rest the balance of those orders tend to come in the second half of the month. Just split it down. Target yourself so that you've now got 10 of whatever these things are to sell every week and I'm assuming a four week month, and it's also convenient for the numbers I've chosen.

Speaker 1: 7:15

But rather than looking at selling 40 items per month, target yourself on selling 10 items per week and then look at what you have to do per week to sell 10 items. So what does that mean in terms of conversations with clients? What does that mean in terms of phone calls? If you use the phone a lot, what does it mean in terms of phone calls? If you use the phone a lot. What does it mean in terms of emails or whatever the process is?

Speaker 1: 7:41

Whatever your sales process is, you need to get on top of your activities in every aspect that results in a sale, every aspect of that process, and just make sure that you do enough on a daily basis to hit that weekly target. And, as I say, you might really enjoy the drama of not making your monthly target until the very last day. I certainly know people who are like that and I can understand that aspect. But this is business. This is about building up a consistent order input, because that impacts cash flow. So, whether or not it's your business, these are things to start being mindful of because you want to get beyond being a kind of I refer to them as point and shoot salespeople. You kind of point them at their target.

Speaker 1: 8:36

So it might be sell 10 of these every week and then they go off and do it, but they have no real knowledge of what the implications are for the business of them making sales or not making sales. So they maybe don't know much about margins. If they're working off a price list that somebody else has set, they probably don't know what the margins are. They don't know what the costs are Stepping back, they're not looking at the cash flow of the business, so how that might vary from month to month and at different times of year. So in a lot of cases that's fair enough, because that's really the job of sales manager or a general manager or the business owner, whoever it might be to look at the business from that macro level and for the salesperson to be working at a much smaller and more focused level.

Speaker 1: 9:26

But the important thing is, if you're not servicing the business cash flow in the way it needs to be serviced and it's particularly important if your business is very seasonal then you're not going to have the cash flow and the resources within the business for it to be successful. So, while I am not proposing that salespeople are that engaged in the business to that level, I think it is important they have a knowledge that it is important for them to hit their targets regularly and consistently in order for the business to be successful. Certainly, if you're a business owner, this is going to be something that you're very aware of and you will be much more aware of the seasonality of what you do and therefore, how you need to adjust your targets throughout the year. So if you are working on monthly targets, which is probably the sensible way to go, you'll know what you need to hit and when in order to, at the end of the year, not only hit your target but have a good cash flow throughout the year, because obviously without cash flow in the business you have real trouble. So, pulling it back down to consistency in sales, if you do find that you're very much running the kind of monthly sales business where you get periods where there are no orders and then there's kind of rush of orders at the end of the month, the question really is to ask yourself what can you do to make that less dramatic? What can you do to bring orders in earlier in the month? Now, again, depending on what you do, it might not be possible.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Certain businesses and I've worked in some where I've been working with government and they tend to do all of their spending let's say they've got a fiscal year and I'm going to talk about the end of June fiscal year, because that's one that I work with in Australia Quite often what would happen was that the major orders would happen in Q3, so from January to March and what would drive them would be delivery times, and the driver there was that people wanted to make sure they received delivery and were invoiced before the end of June, or it might have even been May, because that way their budget, they spent their budget and they could then justify a similar budget the following year. So, again, is this something that some of your clients at least are thinking about? Are they working on an annual budget and that might be awarded some months before the end of the year? So what do you need to do to help them to justify the same budget next year? If you work that, if some of your clients work that way, do you even know if that's how some of your clients work? And, in fact, as a general question, what is the kind of budgeting that your clients have?

Speaker 1: 12:30

Now, if you're selling to people in the street, let's say so. Let's say you're selling real estate or cars or whatever it might be, then they may well not be running to that kind of constraint other than you might find at certain times of year so maybe at Christmas time or summer holidays whenever they might be for you that you have a bit of a lull because people are focused on other things. So in those particular times, at those times of year, you might expect to get fewer orders in. So what does that mean for your targets for the rest of the year? How seasonal is your business? And so, coming back to what I started with and I've gone slightly off topic, which wasn't planned, if I'm honest, but I think it's very relevant what do you need to do to not only have consistent orders coming in, but also make sure that, if your business is seasonal, that you know what level of sales you need to get, particularly at the peak times of year, in order to keep the business successful, maybe even to keep the business growing, and ideally we all like to see our businesses growing.

Speaker 1: 13:43

It may well be that that will happen, but there are kind of macro things going outside even the 12-month view. Some of us may have gone through the global financial crisis. Covid was obviously a very big thing that I'm sure many of the people listening to this many of you listening will be familiar with and have gone through, and that created all sorts of difficulties. So, looking from a more you know, backing up even further and looking at the business across period of maybe five years rather than just annually. Are there things that we can see coming up that we need to be aware of? Do we need to plan for periods where there's no growth and even a reduction in the business that we can expect to get? So what are those factors and what can we do? As a business owner I guess I'm really talking more to business owners or people who are setting budgets and planning the business out what are the things you need to think about? And then how does that translate into, let's say, the monthly targets for salespeople, the people involved in actually making those deals happen? So this is all important stuff to think about.

Speaker 1: 14:52

But coming back to what I was talking about at the beginning of this podcast, and that is what can you do if you are one of those people who tends to have that pattern where not much happens at the beginning of the month and it all kind of happens dramatically at the end of the month. And even if you enjoy that, you may well find that you're superiors if you are in that kind of an organization. While they might recognize that that's pattern for you, it probably doesn't make them feel that great if they get to mid-month and you're well below your month-to-date target or your monthly target, your target for the month. If you're well below 50% at the halfway point, then that can raise eyebrows for people who are above you and there may well be a concern of your ability to hit the monthly target. Now if you've got a track record of doing it, that's fine, but if you're quite new to sales and you don't have that kind of a track record, then that's certainly likely to raise some flags for management above you if you're in that situation.

Speaker 1: 15:56

So the solution that I propose is just to really ask those questions and the kind of things I was talking about. The macro view, I think they are. Even if you are a salesperson, what is the buying pattern of your clients typically? So look at the seasonal variations. Are there particular times of year where you're likely to make more sales? If that is very true for you whether it's because you're selling to people on the street or you're working with government or you're working in an industry where this is very typical that certain times of year where you need to make all your money then is that reflected in the monthly targets that you're running with? Because if it isn't, I think it should be. That's personal opinion, but I had to run in those kind of scenarios and certainly from a sales management perspective.

Speaker 1: 16:49

In order for salespeople to feel motivated, they need to feel that really they need to see a variation in their monthly target. It needs to reflect a pattern that they're familiar with in their customers, their customers buying pattern. Because if it isn't, if they just get a flat monthly target regardless and ignoring the spending patterns, spending habits of their clients, and that can be demotivating for salespeople. So this, I guess, is sort of partly a kind of leadership podcast, but I won't include it in the leadership series, but it is something to be aware of, the leadership series but it is something to be aware of. So understand your client's seasonal buying pattern and then look at what you need to understand your, your sales process, obviously.

Speaker 1: 17:40

So how do you get from somebody making an inquiry to them placing an order? Do you have to do demonstrations evaluations? How many times do you have to do demonstrations evaluations? How many times do you have to meet them? All those kinds of things? But you need to plan all of that in so that you know what your weekly activity needs to be and how you need to break down your week so you might have one day where you're on the phone, you're in the office, you're not visiting people, but you're doing your planning, you're setting up meetings, and then you need to have a strategy and a process for setting up meetings while you're with clients. So again, I've spoken about the consultative selling course. All of this I go through in a lot more detail and give you templates that you can work with, to give you an initial guide that you can then modify to suit your particular circumstances.

Speaker 1: 18:29

So that is it for this podcast.

Speaker 1: 18:32

That's really what I wanted to cover. So I hope you found that useful. I hope it's got you thinking a little bit. And maybe you're not one of these people the high D person who tends to go for the drama. It's not particularly going for the drama, it's just a way of a way. It's a way that we are wired because I'm very high D.

Speaker 1: 18:53

So I totally relate to people who kind of take the foot off a little bit at the beginning of the month because there's no urgency.

Speaker 1: 19:00

And in fact that was something I used to do when I started in sales and I very, very quickly when I started in sales and I very, very quickly changed my habits and got really focused on targeting myself weekly so that I had that a level of urgency, a constant level of urgency, throughout the month. And I found that that kept me on track and meant that I very rarely got into a situation where I was having to do a catch-up because I'd got halfway through the year and my year-to-date numbers were below where they needed to be. So it did happen occasionally and then I'd obviously really have to go at it to make up those numbers. But using that structure and recognizing the value of structure which I've said some people don't, they see it as a constraint. But if you value, if you can recognize the value of structure, then you can really use it to your advantage. So good luck with your selling and I will speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now.