Particularly strategic for sales organizations, August can also prove counterproductive if poorly prepared. Often marked by many employees going on vacation, the summer months offer a necessary respite to conduct an end-of-year review, while preparing for the sales team’s back-to-work season.
Sales directors and managers, discover how to prepare for August to make it one of the most profitable periods of the year.
Identify Actions to Implement
Within a sales team, August primarily allows for a mid-term review. This strategic period, a few months before the close of the current fiscal year and just a few weeks before the back-to-work season, should allow you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your sales force.
Once this assessment is made, you can identify the actions to prepare or carry out during August:
- Training sessions, to support your sales representatives in acquiring new professional skills —and especially the mastery of new technological tools.
- Updates for customer databases and marketing automation tools.
- Working groups to focus on sales actions to be implemented from the back-to-work season.
- Individual interviews, to review the motivation and objectives of each employee in a calm environment.
Remember to involve all your employees when you draw up this “to-do list”, in order to get a real overview of your company’s sales department.
Prioritize Tasks
Once this list is established, you will need to classify and prioritize the actions to be carried out in August based on:
- Their importance: will this action contribute to improving prospecting and/or sales processes for the entire sales department?
- Their degree of urgency: should this action be carried out immediately, in the coming month, or in the next six months?
This initial classification will help you gain clarity. You can then refine it based on the status of your prospects (hot/cold), or customer feedback —which will indicate the points to address first.
Plan Tasks
Once August’s tasks and their priority level are defined, you will need to distribute them among your team members.
Some of these tasks, such as updating customer files for example, can be handled as individual work.
Others will benefit from being carried out in groups, both to strengthen team bonds and to increase its performance. The simplification of sales processes, the implementation of new methods such as lead scoring, or the implementation of a new CRM can therefore be the subject of workshops.
Plan, during August, to “break down silos” between the different departments of your company by notifying them in advance: your sales representatives will have a better overview by sharing work sessions with marketing managers and community managers, important suppliers, or members of management.
August represents a pivotal period for sales organizations: it must be carefully prepared to bear fruit. July should allow you to identify, prioritize, and plan the actions to be carried out until the back-to-work season: what are you waiting for?
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