‘Haiya! Imagine the year is over.” (sic) That’s a statement that’s currently trending and likely one you have uttered. It is true that 2019 has only a few weeks to go and with half of November gone and December perceived as a holiday month, the “year is over”. The problem is that such admission cripples the average seller. Such admission triggers debilitating emotions, thoughts and therefore actions.
The mind shifts. With the end of the year quickly approaching, average sellers shift focus away from their goals (assuming they had any in the first place) and move it towards holiday countdowns, family time and party planning.
And there is nothing wrong with any of these activities; the problem is that focusing on them stalls these sellers’ motivation to sell. And it is easy to fall prey to this shift because everything and everyone around you has fallen in lockstep with it.
The office is abuzz with speculation of where the end-of-year party will be, desk-job staff themselves already slowing down on their roles; prospective buyers are asking questions like, “When are you breaking for Christmas?”; your favourite mall is getting adorned with “Christmassy” decorations; the radio occasionally belts out Boney M’s Christmas carols, and messages of hotel bookings and the “SGR” seats to Mombasa being full, rent the air. It takes mental strength to buck that trend. And yet you must. You are held to a different standard from the desk-job. When organisations say quarter four is short, it is usually in reference to a month from now, not November’s full month of no holiday. So, like Lizzie, stay the course. You are yet to do your best job. (Lizzie is a client’s seller who consistently meets her sales targets-even in December!)
One of the ways to do this is to focus on near closes. These are the low- hanging sales fruits that are ripe, just begging to be plucked. For instance, you sold the solar installation and left it to the technical team to complete the installation. Nothing wrong with that; after all, the weekly project meetings exist to progress the sale, and you and the technical teams both attend. But you also know that you’ve really been more focused on the next sale and have a half-hearted interest in this one. You also know that if you put your mind to it you can accelerate this sale to a close this year and have the 60 per cent balance paid up by the client.
Simpler sales like a bank account could just mean getting that pending ID card or copy of payslip. You can also, depending on your range of products, focus on the ones that have a higher demand during this quarter. For instance, travel insurance, and loans. Or, you can ride the holiday mood to your advantage to close: “Let’s get work out of the way of play first; sign here and help me break for Christmas.”
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Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
