Going into the holidays in sales, I'd always see it go one of two ways for my reps.
You either close your deals before Christmas break or you ruin your holidays with anxiety trying hit your quota on December 31st.
As a VP of Sales, it would kill me when I would see my team scrambling to hit their quota in-between the Christmas and New Year's break.
The key to closing your all of your end of year deals is getting ahead now. And that's why this newsletter is coming well before the break so you can get ahead today.
These are the 3 steps to close all of your end of year deals before the holiday break:
- Pretend the year ends on December 20th
- Create work-back plans for each deal
- Create multiple lock-down incentives to stick to the plan
Let's roll.
1: Pretend the year ends on December 20th
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Let me make this very clear. If you think the end of the year is...
- December 23rd (the Monday before Xmas)
- December 27th (the last week before NYE)
- December 30th (the day before NYE)
- December 31st (NYE, aka a literal federal holiday)
YOU ARE GOING TO CHOKE ON YOUR EGG NOG WAITING FOR A DOCUSIGN.
I want you to assume Xmas week is a dead week that your prospects will take off entirely.
This means the last day before Xmas week is Friday, December 20th.
Now that you know the real end of year, it's time to build a plan to make sure every deal closes by the 20th at the very, very latest.
2: Create work-back plans for each deal
Create a work-back plan for every single end of year deal to sign... WITH BUFFER.
For example:
- Mon 12/2: Approval from CMO
- Weds 12/4: Commercial Approval from Finance
- Mon 12/9: First cuts on redlines (use redline deadlines!)
- Weds 12/11: Second cuts on redlines
- Thurs 12/12: Legal-to-Legal Call
- Fri 12/13: Contract execution
- 12/13-12-20: BUFFER
Doing this for every EoY deal will be a forcing function for you to figure out which deals are actually real and start getting ahead now.
At Pave, I knew that any deal that didn't have a green light from power with 2 weeks left in the month was almost certain to slip into the next.
From here, this close plan cannot just live in your brain...you have to share the close plan with your prospects NOW.
It's on you to teach your prospects how to buy on-time. You cannot assume that they're thinking about how long procurement, legal, and security will take.
Bullet it all out or use a mutual action plan. Get them to agree to a buying process.
How do you make sure they stick to that process? Oh, I'm glad you asked :)
3: Create multiple lock-down incentives to stick to the plan
There are 4 ways to drive timeline in sales, ranked in order:
- Hard deadlines (a contract expiring)
- Commercial terms (discounts or favorable contract terms with an expiration date)
- Cost of inaction (losing $5k every day)
- Soft deadlines (a big company announcement)
Make sure every commit deal either has a hard deadline or a commercial incentive. Or ideally both, which creates multiple high integrity lock-downs to protect your deal.
Some of you might cringe because this might sound like I'm telling you to proactively volunteer a discount.
But let's be honest... you know your prospects are going to ask for a discount.
When you walk your champion through the work-back plan above, you might ask them something like this:
Jane, knowing your team is going to go through a full procurement process, I have to believe they're going to want certain commercial terms.
I can't promise anything, but what I can say is that if your finance team is going to ask me for stuff, the best way you can make sure they get what they want is if you and I can create a plan to close this by the end of year now.
If you really think a deal is going to close by EoY because there's a super strong hard deadline (like a contract expiring) and you really think they're not gonna ask for a discount... fine. Let it close naturally.
But if you think "they wanna solve the problem ASAP!" is gonna get your deal closed while they're enjoying gingerbread cookies...
(And you think they're not gonna ask for a discount anyway...)
Good luck.
Closing Note: My proudest moment as a VP of Sales
I know this one was a bit intense folks, but I've personally had to jump on procurement calls on December 31st instead of hanging out with my mom... and that sucks.
But one of the proudest moments I ever had as a VP of Sales was in December 2021.
The annual goal was $4M. We forecasted $6M on the year.
Every single deal (no joke) closed before the Christmas break and we all played white elephant together on the last day before everyone flew home.
It doesn't always happen this way. It was a lean team where we could see every single deal. But we blew out the number and sent our team off to their families the right way.
Go have the hard conversations with your prospects now folks. Enjoy your holidays ❤️
-Mondo
The Mutual Action Template to Drive Your EoY Deals
If you wanna close your deals by the end of the year, the easiest way to map out every step in your sales cycle is with a mutual action plan template like this one:
And you can literally download the mutual action plan template above for free courtesy of our friends over at Aligned. It's available in both spreadsheet and in-app inside of Aligned as long as you take two seconds to sign up for an account here:
