Sales Director: Top 6 Tasks Not to Forget During Your Vacation

Because for Sales Directors, summer often means a slowdown in activity. Here are our tips to make the most of quiet days and avoid boredom.

The Top 6 Holiday Assignments for the Sales Director

1 – “To those who watch, all is revealed” (Sayings and Proverbs – 1892)

Use the summer season to research the latest sales innovations, prospecting techniques, and best practices to pass on to your sales team.

Similarly, stay active in your prospecting efforts, identify the prospects you’d like to acquire so you can contact them as soon as the new business season starts.

2- “To great souls, great challenges” (Anne Marquier)

Take advantage of the calm in July and August to prepare your second-half events, and especially your year-end sales challenge. Work on its theme, rules, animation plan, and prizes. 6 steps are enough to set up a sales challenge that will truly motivate your sales team.

3- “The past is past, but remember the lessons it taught you” (Henri-Frédérique Amiel – June 18, 1865)

Look back and take stock of the entire first half of the year: the number of opportunities in progress, the number of contracts signed… Learn from these figures. If they are good, identify the best practices implemented to achieve them. If they don’t meet your expectations, try to understand why and find solutions to remedy them.

Don’t hesitate to involve your sales team in this process so they keep their objectives in mind and align themselves with them.

4- “Strategy is to tactics what a top hat is to a cap” (Grégoire Lacroix – 2007)

Review your sales strategy and positioning. Take advantage of the summer lull to tidy up and clarify all your sales documents. It’s important to always have up-to-date sales proposals to provide to your prospects.

So, update your presentations, brochures, and pitch to start the new season on a fresh foot.

5- “Order is the wealth of the poor, and the future of children” (Alphonse Karr, The Shortest Path – 1836)

Throughout an entire semester, leads came in and prospecting was done by your sales team. All of this generated a good number of contacts that were entered into your database and CRM. But have they been sorted? Organized by category (e.g., cold, warm, or hot lead)? Use these few weeks to review these files and ask your sales team to clean them up if it hasn’t been done already. A well-maintained CRM is an efficiency gain for everyone.

6- “Don’t sell the bear’s skin before you’ve killed it”

You have ongoing opportunities, but the decision-makers are on vacation. Use this downtime to consolidate your approach with them by personalizing your offer.

For example, further adapt your pitch to the client and the benefits your solution can bring them. Adjust pricing based on previous discussions. In short, consolidate your sales approach to ensure closing.

A well-prepared return to business will lead to a peak in sales performance.

Suggestions? Ideas to fill your summer weeks? Feel free to leave us a comment.