Though the new year has just been begun, there are less than a hundred selling days until schools and universities end the academic year. Is your company optimized to take advantage of the school selling cycle?
In these crucial, limited selling days, your entire organization must be aligned with your sales team to help bring in business. Everyone should be laser-focused on driving your prospects to closure. This is a critical time to prioritize pipeline opportunities and build a plan and timeline to ensure you secure those top opportunities.
If you haven’t already done so, score and grade the leads in your pipeline. At Arc, we use the the Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) system to look for a proper balance between how active and engaged the contact needs to be and how closely they align with our target market. This helps us determine the optimal time for a sales rep to engage with a contact.
We also recommend frequent sales pipeline reviews. In this short sales window between now and the end of the school year, you should bring in anyone on the team who can help advance the sales process. Product and development teams should be prepared to help and reinforce your sales team with new feature releases if possible, and product support at a minimum, while customer service can help ensure strong implementations and renewals. At this time of the year, everyone in your organization should feel ownership in the sales process.
And remember, as Confucius observed, “when it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” If you are looking to adjust (or create) your action steps to reach your goals in 2019, reach out to us at rita@arccd.com.
