Every July, I watch the same thing happen. Sales floors go quiet. Reps start treating the summer like a permission slip. Calendars empty out, follow-ups slip, and everybody tells themselves the same story – “Nobody’s buying right now, so why bother?”
I get it. Vacations stack up. Decision makers go dark. The phone rings less. But here’s what 30 years of doing this has taught me: the slow season doesn’t happen to your pipeline, it happens to your discipline. Those are two very different problems with two very different fixes.
When I was building the sales team at Datastream, summer was when we did our best planning, not our least planning. We didn’t slow down because the market did. We used the quiet to get ahead of the noise that was coming in September. That’s the move. Every year. Without exception.
So, here’s what I tell my clients to do with this stretch between now and Labor Day.
Plan your fourth quarter now, while you still have room to think. Most reps wait until October to figure out what they need to hit their number, and by then they’re scrambling instead of selling. Sit down this week with your annual goal and what you’ve closed so far. Subtract one from the other and you have the real number, that’s what is left to sell between now and December 31. Break that into a monthly target. Look at your average deal size and figure out how many new opportunities you need in the pipeline to get there, given your close rate. That math takes 20 minutes and it should be driving your calendar starting today, not in eight weeks when the pressure is already on.
Keep prospecting like the season hasn’t changed, because your pipeline doesn’t take a vacation even if your prospects do. The reps who stay quiet in July and August are the same reps scrambling for deals in October. The ones who keep dialing, keep emailing, and keep showing up are the ones who walk into Q4 with a full pipeline instead of an empty one. Activity compounds. Silence compounds too, just in the wrong direction.
Go back through the deals that went cold. Every sales team has a graveyard of opportunities that almost closed and then went quiet. I had a rep a few years back who had a deal stall out in March. Budget freeze, timing was wrong, the usual story. He wrote it off and moved on to fresher leads, which felt productive but wasn’t. I told him to call back in July, just to check in, no pitch. Turns out the company had just landed new funding and the project was back on the table. That one call closed in August. It would have closed for whoever called first, and he almost wasn’t that person because he assumed a stalled deal meant a dead deal.
Budgets shift over the summer. Priorities change. The person who said no in March might be a completely different conversation in July. A short, honest check-in costs you nothing, and it’s surprising how often it opens the door back up. Pull your list of stalled opportunities from the last six months and work through it like it’s a fresh batch of leads, because in a lot of cases it actually is.
None of this is complicated. It’s just uncomfortable, because it means working while everyone around you has decided not to. That’s exactly why it works. The season doesn’t slow down your competition’s results – it separates the reps who treat sales like a profession from the ones who treat it like a job.
Use this slow season to build the fast finish you want in Q4. Plan now, prospect now and go reopen what you thought was closed. Your future self in December will thank you for it.
John Sterling is the Amazon bestselling author of “Sales for Noobs“ and CEO of NOOB School, an online resource for new salespeople. Previously, he helped build and sell Datastream for over $200 million. He has trained and hired hundreds of sales reps globally. Subscribe to his YouTube channel for new sales content every week. noobschool.org.
