The rush to the end of the year is almost here. You won’t find Labor Day to New Year’s Day on any fiscal calendar. It’s not an official reporting period; it is the unofficial window of opportunity for business to focus on closing deals and ending the year on a revenue high note.
Towards that end, here are some suggested tactics to close as many deals as possible before year end.
Start spreading the news
Toot your own horn; people like being with a winner. When a new client comes on board, tell people. When you expand your workforce, tell people. When a customer project produces significant results, tell people. Spreading the news does a couple of things. It lets customers and prospects know that you produce results for your customers and are successful. It also reduces anxiety on the part of the customer (more about this later).
Let history be the guide
The 80/20 rule says that 80 percent of the business comes from 20 percent of the customers. Figure out where you are winning (the 20 percent), and focus on more of those types of customers and prospects. Strategize with your sales team and identify the top 10, 20, 30 prospects who look like your current base of satisfied customers. Then reach out to them. Find warm introductions. Send them helpful ideas learned from current customers. By connecting with prospects with similar profiles to your current customers you have a higher probability of closing deals, and earning more return on the sales effort.
The self-help path to business
Provide prospects and customers self-help diagnostic tools related to their company’s products and services. Realtors could offer a simplified calculation worksheet so homeowners can estimate the value of their current property. Insurance agents could offer a worksheet so customers and prospects could calculate if their coverage is sufficient. At the end of each tool, add a “call me” sentence encouraging the recipient to call if there are problems, questions or issues. If the assessment tool is truly valuable and accurate, when someone calls they will be pre-screened as a viable prospect.
Focus on existing customers
Your current customers already like you and buy from you. They are your best source for new business. But don’t just call them up and say “you got anything for me?” That’s a quick path to “no” and a reduction in the trust you’ve built with that customer. Instead, research current customers and understand what they buy and have bought from you. That level of understanding helps you in positioning additional products and services.
Also, understand why they buy. What do your products and services do for them? By knowing why someone buys you learn where their anxieties lie.
Reduce anxiety
Buying decisions are emotional, not intellectual. Granted, intellectual analysis takes place to determine if something is worth buying. But the actual decision on whether to buy is an emotional one. The greatest emotional motivator is fear and/or anxiety. All of your marketing and relationship efforts should help you understand and reduce the customer’s anxiety. Reducing anxiety reduces barriers to saying yes.
These tactics should help focus the marketing and relationship efforts and make the last four months of the year more productive. However, these tactics work year round. Start in September and carry them on through the New Year. By next September you’ll already have made your year a great one.n
Ken Cook is the co-founder of How to Who and co-author of How to WHO: Selling Personified, a book and program on building business through relationships. Learn more at www.howtowho.com.
