Virtual Sales Introduction – Selling in December
This guide and outline is to help you maximize your Virtual Sales Reps impact they can make for your company while you quickly finish out this calendar year. Although every top performing sales rep wants to finish the year strong, the reality is that December can be a slower month when it comes to booking new appointments, getting leads and solidifying new deals with the crazy holiday season in full swing.
This simple guide will help you maximize your Virtual Sales Reps impact for your company in other ways so you can finish out this year STRONG.
Strategic Planning
December is a great month to set some time aside with your SDR and have a 90 minute strategic planning session for the upcoming year.
Both you and your SDR should come prepared to this meeting with sales data from this past year. That data should include the following; overall company growth, new closed sales from your SDR, current pipeline of leads, proposals both won and lost. Doing this virtual sales planning will help your impact.
In this 90 minute strategic meeting you should focus on three main points.
- First 30 minutes – Review this past year’s performance. Highlight where your SDR found their wins and success, review where your SDR struggled and areas of improvement. Use the data both you and your SDR come prepared with to discuss.
- The next 30 minutes should focus on improvements: Improvement of processes, outline ways to elevate performance in terms of outbound activity and get feedback from them on how you can improve while leading them from a leadership standpoint.
- The last 30 minutes should be a creative discussion and brainstorming session. This is where you discuss next year goals, outline a high level game plan for your SDR and have fun discussing ways on how you’re going to achieve your goals next year as a TEAM!
Some strategic planning sessions can last much longer than 90 minutes for obvious reasons. If that’s the case, use this time to put the preparation in now, so you can hit the ground running in 2024!
To recap, the main bullet points you need to go over in your year end strategy review are the following:
- Conduct a year-end review of sales performance
- Identify areas for improvement and set goals for the upcoming year
- Acknowledge the slower sales months in December
- Emphasize the opportunity to prepare for a strong start in 2024
Client Engagement
Although we always want our “sellers selling”, a great customer service experience can add a lot of fuel to your next year’s sales strategy. Having your SDR call and check in on some of your best customers and simply asking if there’s anything “they can do to support” and learning if there’s any current challenges or successes the company should know about is a great way to build strong relationships, and even uncover some areas of potential upsells and future opportunities
The two focal points of these call should achieve the following:
- Connect with existing clients for relationship-building
- Conduct surveys or feedback sessions to gather insights
Content Creation, Sales Collateral & LinkedIn
Although you might not view your SDR as a “content creator”, the truth is, if they’re in sales, they need to have a grasp on content creation, especially when it comes to LinkedIn. If you look at every top performing SDR, in any industry, they have an active and engaged audience on LinkedIn.
December is a great time to plan out content your SDR can create on their behalf that’s valuable to the prospect audience they have on LinkedIn. If your SDR is already doing this, and has some skill level in content creation, think of creative ways you can utilize them to ALSO create and post content on your company’s behalf.
The other main thing you should do is have your SDR start creating content for sales assets they can utilize and leverage in 2024. Some sales assets could be new case-studies, one-pagers and helpful checklists that would be relevant to your prospect. They can leverage these time and time again with their cold outreach and should be a key asset in their outbound sales process moving into 2024!
To recap, you should leverage your SDR to complete the following in 2024:
- Develop compelling content for upcoming marketing campaigns
- Update sales collateral and presentations for a fresh start in 2024
Database & Pipeline Cleanup
December is a great month to have your virtual SDR utilize their time manually going through their pipeline and cleaning it up. Over the course of a year, a ton of activity happens through an SDR pipeline and the data can be outdated, overwhelming and frankly a little messy.
We recommend you have your SDR go through their current pipeline and CRM and get rid of old leads that are not relevant, bad data and update current opportunities. Having them report on exactly what they did and WHY is a good way for both of you to understand the current pipeline and where real opportunities can be found.
Follow these steps for best pipeline clean up and organization:
- Update and organize client databases for efficiency
- Remove outdated or irrelevant information
- Update and add tasks to older leads that COULD be potential good leads if conversations started back up.
- Revisit and update old proposals and leads and try to get a conversation on the books for early 2024.
Our Conclusion
As much as we want to “end the year strong”, and that should ALWAYS remain the focus, we also have to be honest about the type of response rates we see in December. Times are slower, people are out of office and it’s more difficult to get qualified sales meetings on the calendar.
We should all be focused on not just finishing the year strong and closing out warm and current sales opportunities, but also preparing to start the new year with focused and prepared action, which will lead to early success heading into 2024.
- Recap the importance of utilizing December for strategic preparation
- Emphasize the long-term benefits of investing time wisely during slower months
If you have questions, need support or help on how to best prepare for 2024 with your Virtual Sales Representatives, please schedule a time to meet with us here.
Learn more about our virtual team, setup and culture here.
