“Let’s circle back after the holidays” season is coming!

If you’ve been in sales for a bit, you know that there are certain events throughout the year that royaly fuck your pipeline.

Even though you can literally mark these events on your calendar, they always seem to pop up out of nowhere leaving you to action on them just a bit late.

You have the end of the school year when families hit the road on vacation. If folks aren’t heading out on vacation, they’re adjusting to having their kids home all day and are having an “oh shit” moment of their own that pulls them away from work and pushes your deal out.

Then you have the end of summer vacation sprint in August where families are going offline to get that last glorious vacation in before the kids go back to school. The fun thing about this is that they knew they would be unavailable during that week the entire time you’ve been working with them, but because you didn’t ask, they didn’t mention it, and your deal gets pushed out.

Don’t get me started on EMEA summer holiday. They’re living right. We’re living wrong. If you’re trying to close anything in EMEA from June to September... I’m sorry but you are fucked.

Then, and I still can’t fathom why this is a thing, people use back-to-school as an excuse to push things out. Wut!?!?!

I have a kid. It’s not that hard. Get them a new pair of Nike’s and a couple new T-shirts, get the new binder and folders during your regular grocery trip, and boom! You’re ready. There’s of course back to school night, but it’s after hours, and takes like 30 minutes. This is by far the weakest buyer excuse, and is 100% just manufacturing time scarcity to get out of their work involved in helping you to close your deal. The nerve!

The granddaddy pipeline fucker of them all is the forthcoming “let’s circle back after the holidays” time of year.

As Khabib Nurmagomedov would say, “This is number one bullshit”.

It always goes the same...

You’re just doing your thing working deals, you have deals set to close at the end of November, and then boom! Everything get’s fucked.

Your champion didn’t know that your economic buyer was going out of town before Thanksgiving, and because they’re on PTO from Thanksgiving to December, your deal isn’t going to be approved in time.

OK, great... Let’s work on getting this in by end of year.

You’re cagey now, and you ask who’s going out on their team. You’re too late though. I guarantee you that in addition to all of the staggered PTO throughout the buying team, that someone is getting laid off and it’s going to impact your deal because they don’t have anyone for the technical/legal/user review/testing.

Then they lay it on you, “Let’s just circle back after the holidays”.

Now, if you’re new here, you may be thinking that January is going to be a record month for you. Oh you dear sweet child...

When you follow up after new years with all of those deals that pushed but promised that it’s go time after 1/1, you’re going to run into these excuses/situational truths...

And my favorite, they ghost you.

You’re left with nothing.

The time to get ahead of all this is RIGHT FUCKING NOW!

In each of your deals, you need to make sure that you do both of these things ASAP...

Why does this work?

For starters, this is a great pressure test. If they seem hesitant to do this work with you, you still have a lot of work to do in the deal and def should not have it in Commit.

If they are willing to play along, this is a great exercise to create urgency in a way that isn’t aggressive and off putting.

I created this form you can use when working with your Champion to map out everyone in the account and when they need to have their part finished. (Go to File → Make a Copy)

Last thing, if you like this and feel it’s valuable, there are two things I’ll ask of you...