"Sales Time"

There’s something I talk about with my clients that often causes them confusion. It’s the idea of “Sales Time.” 

We’ll be talking in May about forecasting, or hiring, or client implementations, and I’ll say “Yeah, but to me, it’s already October.” 

What does this mean? How can it be October in May? 

The reason for this is that sales thinkers know to bake their sales timeline into their calculations. 

Today might be May first, but with a six-month sales cycle, this deal won’t be ready and closed until October. 

That means that the last day this year when we could realistically win new business for this fiscal year is not December 30th, but June 30th. 

See how that works? 

A great sales thinker will always be way out ahead of his or her team—scouting the FUTURE of the business, while everyone else is back at camp. It’s critical when it comes to forecasting what’s going to come in. 

But it’s just as critical for calculating what you need to be putting out. 

Imagine we signed a new client today. Whoopee! 

I know that it will take 3 months to get them fully onboarded. 

When they’re onboarded, we’ll need to have the headcount on our customer support team to take all their incoming calls. 

If we miss their incoming calls, they’ll have a bad time, and they’ll cancel the contract. 

I know it takes me 3 months to hire and onboard one Customer Support Agent. 

So “Sales Time” dictates that, even though we have the right number of headcount today, in my mind it’s already 3 months from now. I need to hire NOW so that I’m prepped and ready for what’s coming. 

Unfortunately, it’s really hard to train somebody in how to think this way. I wish I had concrete advice and exercises for you to do.

Perhaps it just requires one too many instances of that sinking feeling in your gut when you realize that all the time you were planning in May, it was really October…