{"id":7884,"date":"2011-08-23T17:48:07","date_gmt":"2011-08-23T17:48:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7884"},"modified":"2014-10-06T01:39:42","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T01:39:42","slug":"a-b2b-sales-leaders-fourth-quarter-must-do-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=7884","title":{"rendered":"A B2B Sales Leaders Fourth Quarter Must Do List"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3>Preparing Your Sales Team for 2012<\/h3>\n<p>Sales Leaders, now is a great time to get a head start on your year-end planning and wrap up. \u00a0\u00a0Starting now while the successes and setbacks of 2011 are fresh in your mind guarantees a far better sales plan for 2012.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sales Leader\u2019s Twenty-Five 4<sup>th<\/sup> Quarter \u201cMust-Dos\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Plan your 2012 Sales Kick Off meeting<\/li>\n<li>Remove the bottom ten percent from your sales team<\/li>\n<li>Pre-write a dozen Q1 blog posts<\/li>\n<li>Optimize your marketing automation program<\/li>\n<li>Make 75 new LinkedIn connections with prospects or clients<\/li>\n<li>Finalize your 2012 compensation plan changes<\/li>\n<li>Finalize and assign your 2012 team and rep quotas<\/li>\n<li>Finish your 2012 sales plan<\/li>\n<li>Purge your sales pipeline of dead, dormant and comatose deals<\/li>\n<li>Set your January 1 goal for total qualified pipeline value<\/li>\n<li>Determine how many <a href=\"http:\/\/3forward.com\/lead-lifecycle-management\/sales-leaders-whats-above-your-b2b-sales-funnel\/\">l<\/a>eads you need in your lead funnel<\/li>\n<li>Update your prospect sweet spot based on next year\u2019s plan<\/li>\n<li>Schedule your most promising accounts for December and January account plans reviews<\/li>\n<li>Complete your sales manager performance reviews<\/li>\n<li>Finalize your 2012 management objectives, goals and bonuses<\/li>\n<li>Finish all your client business reviews by mid December<\/li>\n<li>Review your client list and purge your dogs (declining revenues, no potential, low margin)<\/li>\n<li>Request an SEO and keyword research report on your current website<\/li>\n<li>Set your 2012 targeted win rate percentage<\/li>\n<li>Thank your proposal team in advance for their hard work during the fourth quarter<\/li>\n<li>Prepare your end-of-year revenue forecast for the CEO and CFO<\/li>\n<li>Ask your sales managers and reps to email you the five things they will do differently in 2012<\/li>\n<li>Share your 2012 revenue and new logo targets with marketing<\/li>\n<li>Evaluate an inside sales model for lead qualification<\/li>\n<li>Send everyone on your sales team a handwritten note thanking them for doing their best in 2011 and wishing them a happy, restful holidays<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>How to make sure you finish this list on time!<\/strong><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Copy this list into Word or Excel so you can edit, sort and assign target dates for each item.<\/li>\n<li>Schedule each activity individually into Outlook, blocking enough time to complete every task by its target date.<\/li>\n<li>Review your progress every Friday afternoon and make schedule adjustments as necessary.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><strong>Now, think how great you will feel when you email the leadership team your completed 2012 sales plan before everyone leaves for the December holidays!<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Preparing Your Sales Team for 2012 Sales Leaders, now is a great time to get a head start on your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7884"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8191,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7884\/revisions\/8191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}