Transcription
Here's the one thing that most VPs of sales get wrong about the summer season. Summer hits, conversion rates drop, your buyers go quiet, and what do you do? You keep the sales quotas exactly where they are. You add quota pressure. You push your sales team harder. And you're spending the next 3 months watching your sales team lose motivation, wondering why Q3 is always such a bad quarter.
The problem is not the summer. Summer is actually the biggest opportunity you have all year to build a high-erforming sales team. But unfortunately, most sales leaders waste that opportunity. My name is Christian Krauss and I help VPs of sales improve the sales performance of their team in order to scale revenue without overhiring. What I'm about to share you is insights I've gained speaking directly with VPs of sales in some of the fastest growing companies in Europe. And in this video, I'm going to give you three tips that you can implement this summer to finish Q3 and go into Q4 stronger than ever.
Tip number one, lower your sales quotas. This one is going to be uncomfortable for a lot of VPs of sales. It might feel like giving up, but it's actually the opposite. Here's what happens when a sales rep on your team sees their quota for August and they know they have no chance of hitting it. They stop trying at 40% attainment. They disconnect. They mentally quit. And by the time Q4 comes around and the lead flow picks back up, there's so much behind quota that they cannot make it. So what if you set a sales target during those summer months that your reps can actually hit 20 to 30% lower than your standard monthly number? Suddenly, the quota is within reach again. Your reps are closing more, making more commissions, and mentally staying in the game. The goal is not to lower your standards. The goal is to raise the team's morale, motivation, and to keep every sales rep engaged even when the market dynamics are working against you.
Tip number two, use the summer months for coaching and enablement. My second tip is to use the summer downtime to close the gap on critical skills that your team will need in Q4. Let me ask you this. When was the last time you had a real coaching conversation with your sales team? Not a pipeline review, not a forecast call, an actual coaching conversation about how they run a discovery call or how they handle objections or how they use a mutual action plan to close a deal. The reason these coaching conversations never happen in Q4 is there is no time. Your team is super busy with all the workloads. You actually cannot afford pulling your reps off the phone to do training sessions with them. And you also cannot redesign how they run their demos while deals are on the line. But in August, your reps have room to breathe. They have open space in their calendars. That is your window. One-on-one sessions, call reviews, live role plays on the two to three most critical skills that are costing you the most deals right now. Those sales reps who get properly coached in the summer are the ones that are crushing it in Q4.
Tip number three, use the summer months to refine your sales process. Any sales coaching or enablement will only work if the sales process that's running underneath actually incentivizes the right behavior. And if you have been running the same sales playbook for the last 12 months without questioning it, I can almost guarantee you there are going to be some gaps. Perhaps your discovery framework has drifted. Maybe the deal qualification criteria are inconsistent. Maybe the current outbound prospecting sequence is only generating half the meetings as it should. Or the deals that your team has lost over the last 12 months, they all have one thing in common, but you don't know what it is. Summer is actually the only time all year when you can do this. When you can take a look under the hood and make some changes to the engine without disrupting the flow. Audit the sales process. Redesign the sales frameworks. Fix the outbound sequences so that when your team undergoes the coaching process, they have a sales system running underneath that actually incentivizes the right behavior.
That's it. That's the summer playbook. Adjust sales quotas so that your sales reps stay motivated. Use the downtime and the slower business period to coach your sales reps on the skills they need most and rebuild your sales methodology so that the coaching actually lands and sticks. If you found this video helpful, I would love it if you can drop a like under this video and also make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel in order to not miss my next video. I put out content like this every week for VPs of sales who want to build a high-erforming sales team. Drop a comment below and let me know what is the number one challenge that you have going into the summer months. I personally respond to every single comment here on YouTube. And if you are interested in working together with me in order to build a high performing sales team, check out the links in the description to learn more and get in touch with me. I'll see you next week. Take care.