The end of the quarter is stressful for everyone, and when that quarter is also the end of the year, the stress level increases. Everyone is trying to close those last opportunities and get contracts signed to meet their annual goals.
If you’re determined to close out your Q4 strong, you’ll need to be strategic. With the proper planning and effective execution, you’ll not only end the year on a high note, but set your sales team up for success in the new year.
We’ve put together the following tips to help you make the most of these last few months of the year.
1. Prioritize your call times
With so little time left, you need to be sure you’re taking full advantage of every hour of each day. One of the simplest ways to do this? Determine which time zones your prospects belong to, and stack your calls to handle the later time zones first, and the ones that are an hour or two behind you last.
When you have a lot of calls to make and not much time left in the quarter to make them, it’s easy to run out of time and miss some prospects. But when you develop a plan of attack based on location, you can ensure you’ve squeezed every possible call into each day with a little bit of planning.
This process is made easy with geoanalytics software, like Geopointe, which allows you to display color-coded time zone boundaries. You’ll quickly recognize what time zone your different prospects are located in, and plan calls accordingly.
2. Narrow your list of targets
When you look at your list of target accounts and all the different prospects you have to parse through, it can feel overwhelming. While a long list of potential sales may sound nice, your time is best spent chasing the leads that are most likely to result in revenue.
Filtering your lead or prospect lists will help you avoid wasting time on unlikely targets so you can start with the low hanging fruit. For example, try filtering your data by date of last activity. Find the prospects and accounts that haven’t been reached out to in the last quarter, and start by reconnecting with those contacts.
You can also use geoanalytics solutions like Geopointe to achieve more complex filtering of your CRM data. Cross-object filters are useful for mapping Salesforce records based on their relationship with other objects – such as Accounts with Opportunities. With this enhanced filtering capability, you can choose to only see Accounts that have Opportunities associated with them.
Further, you can use this complex filtering to check on the health of your team’s pipeline. With Geopointe, for example, it’s easy to filter to show only open opportunities of a certain forecast and close date window, so that only the most relevant data can be analyzed.
3. Focus on the high-value areas
Another method that helps you prioritize your time is to identify your most high-value areas and target the prospects and accounts in those locations.
Easily find concentrations of viable prospects based on record count, opportunity size, or any other numeric value that you use to judge potential value. Geoanalytics software allows you to map out your contacts by type, accounts by company size, and opportunities by revenue. This allows you to filter to targets that fit your ideal customer profile.
Use these advanced analysis techniques to prioritize your outbound calls so you can be sure you’ve gotten to your biggest targets first. With limited time to close out the quarter, it may not be feasible to reach out to everyone on your target list.
Choosing to focus on high-value concentrations of targets in this way is an alternative to planning out your calls by time zone, meaning you should consider which strategy is a better fit for your organization.
4. Align your sales and marketing teams
Sometimes outbound calls or site visits aren’t the most efficient way to reach your targets. For large volumes of prospects, emails can be much more efficient and allow you to reach an even broader group of targets. This is where the marketing team comes in.
It is important to align your sales and marketing teams for many reasons, including this opportunity to strategize your outreach. Marketing can help you touch more prospects and accounts than you could on your own, so teamwork is key here.
Whether it is an email campaign or event planning, coordinate with your marketing team to ensure you’re on the same page about highest priority targets. There are multiple ways marketing can utilize geoanalytics solutions, such as layering heat maps with other data to identify where to host your next event based on the highest concentration of prospects.
You can also lean on marketing to warm up some of your cold leads with email campaigns that use thematic maps to target specific demographics that align with your ideal customer. Specifically with Geopointe, the process is made even more efficient with an add to campaign button that adds contacts to a Salesforce campaign right from the map.
Success in Q4
As the end of the fiscal year approaches and everyone is striving to close those final deals and meet their goals, time is short and prioritization is critical. Developing a plan of attack for your efforts is the best way to ensure success.
Luckily, you don’t have to do it alone – there are plenty of solutions out there that can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend planning. A geoanalytics solution like Geopointe helps you prioritize your time and efforts to ensure you’re targeting the right prospects for maximum impact.
If you have this data-driven plan of attack for Q4, you’ll be unstoppable.
