Sales Blog for Sales and Sales Management

Sales have a tendency to sink in the summer.  This is either by design or by default.  The reason doesn't matter, the root cause does.  Professional sales people either decide to take the summer off (design), or they decide that summer isn't a good time to sell (default).

Our family keeps a houseboat in Lake Cumberland, Kentucky.  In the summer, we are on the boat a great deal of time - design.  In the late fall and winter months, we are there for two reasons:

1. Long weekend get-away
2. Make sure the boat stays afloat

What I've learned about boating and consistent results of any kind is that you have to do maintenance.  

• If you fail to maintain your sales activity, your future sales will slump. If you fail to maintain proper fluid in your on-boat inverter batteries, then you will fail to have electrical power when you turn off your generator.  Not a good thing.  
• If you fail to check your pipeline and maintain a free flowing stream of prospects, then sooner or later all the good ones will have been sold and you will be left with dead prospects that will give you a false sense of security about your future sales.  If you fail to check your intake pipe on your generator, then when you use your thrusters to turn into your slip and your generator cuts out because there is a fish in the pipe, then you will lose power and you will have a false sense of security about entering your slip without mishap.

It's August and summer is at a close.  If your sales have slumped and your prospecting is slumped, you can count on continued poor sales.  The good news is that, if you take action now, you can have an impact on the 4th quarter of the year and certainly put yourself in a great position to start out the 1st quarter of 2011. But that isn't the message here.

The message is consistency.  You are much better off staying the course throughout the year, no matter what is going on around you. The same thing holds true for the boat and me.  If I stay on top of the cleaning and the maintenance, then any problem that comes up is usually easier to address, correct and move on.  If I fail to execute the fundamentals of maintenance, then when something major happens, I can normally count on a disaster. Like maybe a water leak that causes a boat to sink because the bilge pumps haven't been checked regularly.  Oops.