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I love the holidays. The time between Thanksgiving and New Years Day is my favorite time of year. The familiar music, parties, seeing old friends, spending time with my family, and all of the amazing food make the holidays special. It seems like everything about the holidays is wonderful except – selling.

If I had my way I’d take the whole month off and just start over in January. And after years of working with Sales Professionals I know I’m not the only one. Unfortunately business doesn’t stop for the holidays and without those commission and bonus checks it is hard to pay the bills. And going into January behind the eight ball with your quota is a horrible way to start the New Year.

During the holidays salespeople struggle to maintain their activity targets, and prospects and customers routinely put off decisions until the New Year. In the midst of a joyous season the sales environment can be brutal.

The good news is that you can take control, maintain your focus, and close deals. The key is in staying true to the fundamentals of selling, and maintaining self-discipline combined with a sprinkle of creativity.

One of the hardest things about selling during the Holiday Season is getting customers to make buying decisions. For many salespeople is seems that all of their prospects have found the perfect excuse – they will wait until the New Year to make any decisions. If you’ve been around selling long enough you know, by the time you get to the New Year, most of these deals will never close.

The problem is it’s just too easy for customers to put off decisions during the holidays. To them it makes logical sense to wait until the New Year. And salespeople willingly accept this excuse as logical too. But to have any chance of closing these deals you have to strike when the iron is hot. You cannot allow emotions to wane. So during this time of year you have to give your prospects and customers a more compelling reason to make a decision now than to wait until later. This means getting creative with your offer, price, value added services, or signing bonuses. It means you may have to give up more to get the deal done than during other times of the year. However, if you don’t close now it is highly likely that you never will.

In sales, like it or not, activity is everything. If you are not prospecting, questioning, presenting, and closing you will fail – no matter what time of year it is. The problem many of us face during the holidays is that we slack-off and let our self-discipline slip. We also have a tendency to allow the holidays to move us out of our normal daily routine. The result is reduced activity.

This slip has two consequences. In the short-term it hurts our closing ratio during the month of December. In the long-term it impacts our sales pipeline during January, February, and March which can have a major impact on our stress level and future income.

To keep this from happening to you, it is critical that you sit down with your daily planner right now and ensure that you have your calendar blocked properly for daily prospecting and lead generation, as well as information gathering, presentations, demos, and closing meetings. Take into account all of your holiday activities and build them into your planner. You may have to do some work arounds, but the key here is to get everything planned out in advance. To stay on track set daily activity targets and commit to reviewing those targets each morning and afternoon. You will be amazed at how powerful this forward planning process is for keeping you on track and focused during the holidays.

Most importantly, by planning in advance and developing creative ways to close more business, you will find that you feel less stress, cash bigger commission checks, and have plenty of time to enjoy the holidays with the ones you care about the most.

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