Maintaining Midyear Sales Momentum

At the midpoint of the year, sales organizations face a critical juncture. In the transition from Q2 to Q3, sales leaders have a good idea of their progress. They have collected enough first-half data to gauge year-end projections, presenting an opportunity to revisit forecasts.

However, if your spring brought increased opportunity, summer often brings a decrease in activity. It can be difficult to sustain the momentum gained in the first half of the year, critical to achieving annual targets. Here, we will explore strategies to maintain midyear sales momentum and ensure continued success.

Evaluate and Adjust Goals

The first step to maintaining midyear sales momentum is to evaluate your goals. By Q3, much has changed from the beginning of the year. Now, it’s time to examine which of these goals are still relevant and attainable. The right adjustments can keep goals as achievable as they are ambitious. For example, consider the following:

• Current Market Conditions: At the outset of the year, sales goals are based on projected market conditions, but these change. This can include customer needs and preferences as well as the competitive landscape. At midyear, ensure your goals are aligned with the changes that have occurred.
• Current Resources: Some organizational changes can be anticipated, like a realignment of resources or an increase in your sales force. However, unplanned events, such as shortages or a reduction of your team, can leave you unprepared. This requires reevaluating goals.
• Internal Capabilities: As goals and objectives have changed, you must adapt the actions/activities required to achieve those objectives. This includes determining if your team has the skills, processes, and capabilities needed. Consider targeted sales training and coaching to boost the specific skills to meet your goals.

Review Performance Metrics

Performance metrics from the first half of the year can identify areas of strength and weakness.  Conduct a review to understand what contributed to your success and where improvements are needed. Important metrics include:

• Revenue: This is the total amount of money generated by regular business operations, including sales. It’s also known as gross sales or “the top line” from its placement on an income statement. Revenue is calculated by subtracting expenses, cost of sales, and taxes from total revenue.
• Conversion Rates: Conversion rates come up frequently during the sales cycle. One of the most basic but critical is deals won compared to the total number of opportunities. It measures the effectiveness of your sales team’s ability to convert leads into customers. If this number is lagging, consider personalized sales collateral to close more deals.
• Average Deal Size: This is the amount of money customers spend on your products or services. It is the monthly, quarterly, or yearly revenue earned divided by the number of won deals. If this is lagging, it could indicate a need to cross-sell or upsell.
• Customer Acquisition Costs: This is the total cost of acquiring new customers. It is calculated by dividing new customers by sales and marketing expenses. This shows the value of the customer in relation to their cost, essential to determine which deals should close.

For more, see our blog How to Conduct a Midyear Pipeline Review.

Empower Your Sales Team

A motivated and well-equipped sales team achieves more. To maintain midyear momentum, provide your team with the tools, resources, and training they need to succeed. Today, this includes leveraging AI for data-driven insights, automation, and personalization in the following areas:

• Product Knowledge: Data from the first half of the year can reveal which products are selling and why. But you must understand the factors driving these sales. For example, is an uptick related to market or economic conditions? Predictive analytics can better match products to customers. And hyper-personalization helps team members differentiate and explain your unique value.
• Sales Collateral: Ensure sales collateral, such as blogs, white papers, and case studies, are personalized. These should be targeted to specific clients in their respective stages of the sales process. And they should do more than merely inform. They should educate, stimulate a buyer’s interest, and inspire a readiness to act.
• Training and Coaching: Sales training and coaching are great ways to motivate and invest in your sales team. And at the midyear point, you should have a good idea of how likely deals are to close. Training and coaching can refresh the skills to jumpstart stalled deals, generate urgency, and inspire buyers to buy.

For more on leveraging AI, see our blog Integrating Technology and AI Into Business Development.

Refine Your Target Audience

Refining your target audience can help optimize your sales efforts. This can match the right products with the right buyers. Start by segmenting your audience and personalizing marketing campaigns to boost engagement and conversion rates. To better tailor messaging and offerings at the midyear point, reevaluate the following:

• Customer Demographics: This can reveal if you are reaching the customers you wanted to reach. If not, there’s time enough to revamp marketing efforts to better engage customers before the year’s end.
• Behaviors: Have buyer behaviors shifted in the first half of the year? What external factors are influencing these behaviors? Consider the economic, political, legal, and social environments. For example, inflation or gas prices can reduce demand as can a rise in interest rates.
• Preferences: Gartner research reveals 33% of all buyers want a seller-free sales experience. Further, they note that, by 2025, 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in digital channels. Plus, UpLead notes B2B e-commerce expanded by 17% in 2023. If your digital game is lagging, reconsider your offerings for the remainder of the year.

Monitor Competitors

Stay updated on market trends and shifts in customer preferences. This includes keeping a close watch on your competition. You know they’re out there. More importantly, your customers also know. And even your most loyal customers can be susceptible to a good deal at the right time. Therefore, at the midpoint of the year, analyze your competition. This includes:

• Strategies: What are your competitors doing to attract new customers? Be aware of their sales collateral, press releases, and social media posts. These can provide insight into what’s new so you can better compete.
• Pricing: Know your competition’s prices. But more than meeting, exceeding, or undercutting their prices, know their value contrasted with your own. This matters most to your customers.
• Differentiation: Differentiation is key to sales success. Today’s better educated buyers may or may not be looking elsewhere. But they are still exposed. That makes it essential sellers stay informed to consistently contrast their value with the competition.

Celebrate Success

To boost morale and maintain motivation, celebrate achievements with your team. A winning culture fosters camaraderie, adaptability, and resilience. This starts with recognizing individual and collective efforts that contribute to success. For example, consider the following:

• Call Outs: Whenever possible, leaders should highlight team member achievement. This shouldn’t be limited to closed deals. Whether it’s a birthday, anniversary, or other milestone, give them a shout out in meetings, calls, or chats. Let them know they are seen, appreciated, and valued.
• Friendly Competition: Friendly competition could include sales-related activities, such as most calls in July. But don’t limit yourself to work. The point is to foster camaraderie for naturally competitive sales teams, especially during the slower summer months.
• Regular Outings: Getting your team out of the office is a great way to keep them motivated. This is especially true for remote workers, who can feel isolated. Consider meeting with your team for informal dinners, drinks, and other fun, team-building activities.
• Spiffs and Bonuses: Incentivize your team with spiffs or bonuses to encourage outstanding performance and maintain motivation. Rewarding employees financially for exceeding targets or achieving short-term goals not only recognizes their hard work. It also underscores the value of their contributions. For example, a bonus for the highest sales in a quarter or a spiff for bringing in a new client. These can inspire extra effort and foster a culture of excellence and achievement.

Conclusion

Summer has long been associated with a decline in sales. The proliferation of summer sales events and celebrations in advertising is a great example. Companies need to do more in the summer to get buyers to buy. And this is as true in B2B as it is in B2C. Whether it’s a cause or an effect of decreased motivation can be debated. But we can’t deny a definite shift in sales momentum.   

Therefore, maintaining midyear sales momentum is essential to sales success. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. And it’s certainly not a question of keeping reps busy until the weather cools. Instead, it requires a specific strategy that combines sales evaluation and empowerment to achieve customer-centric results. With the right strategy, sales organizations will not only meet year-end goals. They can build on their midyear momentum to exceed them.

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