HOW TO PREVENT Q1 HANGOVER

The Q1 sales hangover: Just like a real hangover, it results from having “overdone” it just a bit—in this instance, during Q4. As sales professionals approached year-end, call volumes and emails increased. Some of this was due to prospects looking to use up their budget before year-end, but the majority of it was due to salespeople looking to make up an increasingly obvious shortfall in their numbers.
As December 31st inched closer and closer, desperation increased. The salesperson offered discounts and incentives to get customers to close now—offers he would never have made earlier in the year when he still had hope. He knows this behavior is self-defeating. Consistently offering discounts late in the year only encourages customers to wait. It becomes a vicious cycle that can’t seem to be broken.
There is still time to overcome the Q1 hangover in 2015 before you enter the vicious cycle again—it’s not too late to improve behaviors to ensure that the rest of Q1 will be better. As with a real hangover, your commitment to improving your behaviors is never stronger than when you're feeling the pain.

Everything in moderation

The key to avoiding the Q1 hangover is to spread everything out as evenly as possible.
The sales professional needs to understand the behaviors and activities that lead to success and then use that knowledge all year long. By having piled everything into Q4, he almost certainly resorted to cutting corners, such as offering discounts, working on low-probability opportunities, etc., as he became more desperate.
 The Q1 hangover cycle can be broken. As you work on opportunities throughout the year, ask yourself the following questions:

• Have you clearly defined the customer commitments needed to move the opportunity down the funnel?
• Are you working only on those opportunities that deserve your attention, or are you shortchanging your best prospects by working with less-committed customers?
• Are there critical phases in the process where you need to act with greater urgency?
• Do you need to collaborate more with your selling team?

Sales professionals need to ask themselves these hard questions even if their management team does not. By the end of this quarter, you may find yourself with a brighter outlook and a much clearer head.