A friend of mine that played professional baseball once told me that the worst day of the year for minor league ballplayers was August 1st. He explained that they had been playing virtually every day since April, traveling on an old bus between small cities and usually staying at the cheapest hotel in town. After 120 days of this brutal schedule, everyone was physically and emotionally exhausted … and August 1st meant there were still about four or five weeks remaining until they could go home.
Do you feel their pain a little bit? Are you wondering why the despair of a 1990s minor league ballplayer resonates with you, a 2019 sales professional? Maybe it’s because you’ve had a million phone calls and emails ignored since Memorial Day, half your opportunities that were “done deals” in June are still hanging out there, and none of your meetings end with any action items because no one can make a decision until everyone gets back from vacation. Guess what? You’ve got about five more weeks of this.
So, what can you do?
Between the time you read this and Friday, August 30th, I want you to make as many outbound touches to new prospective customers as you possibly can. Outbound touches can be phone calls, emails, personal visits, social media direct messages, etc. As you’ve hopefully read in some of our other posts, include valuable content with all your touches – it’s not about throwing as much mud against the wall and seeing what sticks. Email an intelligent article, drop off a relevant case study, or text a link to a white paper. Whatever it is, make sure you’re leaving something that doesn’t end up in the trash. Then, be ready to answer the phone after everyone returns after Labor Day.
Why does this work? Well, there is the obvious reason that positioning yourself as a subject matter expert attracts prospective customers. However, the perfect storm that makes August exponentially more successful than other months is caused by two dynamics:
- Your prospects are going to be in catch-up mode between Labor Day and the holidays. They’re going to take action on new and old projects, and your info and memory needs to be in the forefront.
- Your competition is relaxing all month. Most salespeople are much less intense during the summer because “no one ever answers the phone during the summer”. Guess what, that’s true. But customers make calls in September and October … and they’ll call you if you tried to get in front of them with intelligent content in August.
Just do it, and let me know how slammed you are by Halloween.
