My title may have just conjured up images of piling into the car and being adventurous (er or brave??) enough to embark on a road trip with the entire brood in tow…five minutes into the trip, inevitably someone will ask the question “are we there yet?” for what is sure to be the first of what will likely feel like the millionth time before the trip’s end.
However, there’s another way to look at that question. It’s mid-point in the year. Are we there yet – are we on track to hit our sales goals? Are we positioned to ride that momentum straight into 2014? If you are like many of MarketLauncher’s service industry clients, now is the mission critical time. If you haven’t generated a robust and full pipeline and don’t have plans to continue to grow that pipeline, sales may not be robust come year end or in early 2014.
Generating Sales Leads in the Dog Days of Summer
Clients always ask us: “what happens in summer? Do you stop calling? Is it a bad time of year to be prospecting and looking for opportunities in the market?”
And our response is always the same: No. Plain and simple – no.
Now is the time to keep up your communications cycle – now is the time to be laying all of the groundwork for a strong September positioning you for an even stronger Q4 and then an extremely strong start to the next year.
Here at MarketLauncher, we call this July/August timeframe a time of “laying the groundwork.” We keep our communications up at full throttle making sure that we’re getting out active touches to the right target market companies on an even-keeled and consistent cycle. It can be thankless work in these dog days of summer. Lots of people out of the office. Lots of voice mail and messages.
Keep on Truckin’ to Hit Year-End Sales Goals
However, the payoff is more than worth it. It’s because of this consistency that we can typically generate a strong flurry of activity near the end of Q3. Come mid-August and right into September, the responses come rolling in. And we’re in place to leverage all that prior activity and set up clients up for a fruitful – and busy – September.
From there, we keep our communications going right into Q4, which then sets up Q1 and so on and so on. If we don’t lay that groundwork now, the pipeline will be smaller over the ensuing months. And a smaller pipeline can lead to missed sales targets. For our clients, our methodology works to ensure that doesn’t happen. At MarketLauncher, we believe now is always the time. We keep up the pursuit and don’t let up. In our opinion, if you want to get there, you’ve got to always be driving.
