777. Beyond Black Friday: Unlock All 4 Q4 Sales Seasons for Your Product Business

Q4 is one of the busiest times of year for product-based businesses. And what's really interesting is people oftentimes think that this is one buying window, one time to sell to customers. But in this episode, we're gonna talk all about how I've divided up Q4 into 4 buying windows. So let's get into it. Hi, I'm Jacqueline Snyder, and this is the Product Boss Podcast. I've helped launch and grow thousands of product-based businesses. Even one of my own. And over the last 20 years, I've seen behind the scenes of businesses just like yours, whether they are makers, manufacturers, artists, or food and beverage businesses. I have spent so many hours studying it all. I've discovered what makes them successful, what mistakes they could have avoided, how did they turn their ideas into a successful business, and what are the strategies that they have used to make more sales and be discovered by more customers. And this is what this show is all about. Whether you're just starting out or you're looking to become a million-dollar product boss, I'm here to give you the permission to chase your No matter how big or small, all you need is the right mindset, a little courage, strategy, and support, and you too can be the next million-dollar product boss. Let's do this. Hey everyone, I'm Jacqueline Snyder. I am the host of the Product Boss Podcast. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you're not already following the show or subscribed on YouTube, make sure to hit that button so you can get updated every single week when we drop a new episode. Here at The Product Boss, we help you build your brand and the business behind it so it can run well. You can step out of being the bottleneck, and we could really scale your businesses to $1 million, $10 million. The sky's the limit. I'm not gonna put a limit on you. So let's get into it. All right, so it's Q4. Welcome to the busiest and best time of the year for physical product brands. Now, if you're listening and you're like, well, not my brand, that's okay, because some of you have brands that do better in different seasons, like the summer season, the spring season. But if it is a product that has to do with home, with giftable products, even if it's something that, you know, I was just coaching a student this morning and she has a pearl jewelry company, very like sea-inspired, you can still sell it during the season, especially as gifts. So we're gonna talk about Q4 and the buying windows that we're in. And now I've created a methodology for Q4 for product-based business owners that really talks about the 4 buying windows. So the first one we're going to get into is the early window. Now I like to say the early window lands somewhere between October 1st and right up until Black Friday. Okay. So this early window, we really want to consider this window as a time where we're able to sell a lot of things to customers. I love the season and let's talk about why I love it. There's so many opportunities to sell to your customers. So let's just think about a few of them. One, fall is rolling in. So what happens in the fall? People change up their homes. They change up the way that they dress. They're dressing their kids in a different way. They're decorating in a different way. So if you think about the seasons, this is a big transition season. And another thing is, is people are really loving different flavors and scents. I mean, pumpkin spice latte season. I'm not a pumpkin spice latte fan, but it's the turn of the season. So think about fall flavors, fall colors, fall scents, right? We really want to think about what are people using. So why is this such an awesome time? Well, we can introduce fall collections. We have more to sell, whether it's for home, whether it's early gift buyers, whether it's changing to the season, holidays like Halloween and Thanksgiving. All of this is here, and we've got so many opportunities to sell to people. So who's buying in this early window? Okay, the early window going from about October 1st through right up until Black Friday. Well, we've got the early planners— not me, but there are early planners out there, people who are early to buy their gifts, they're thinking out ahead. We also have people who are spreading out their holiday spending, people who love Halloween, people who want to decorate for Thanksgiving. People who are buying stuff for themselves, again, clothes because the season's changing, the way they want to decorate their home. This is a great time for furniture, for hosting, for just kind of shifting internal with the external. And also this year Hanukkah comes early. It's in the beginning of December. So in this earlier season, people are going to be buying for that holiday, um, for gift giving. And if you have anything that's really specific to Hanukkah. So this is what's happening. The other thing is it's for customers that are into seasonal products. Now, what you get to do is really think through everything that I just shared and think, what can I promote to my customers? When I talk about promotions, it's not necessarily having to create a discounted offer, but it is about creating offers. So new fall collection drop, right? Seasonal scents are here. Just kind of like, think about Starbucks, how it had like the pumpkin spice latte. The pumpkin spice latte is back. It's pumpkin spice latte season. So while they have dropped that, they also have different flavors because it's the fall flavor changeover. And I think that also the cups start to change. Okay, so we've got new drops, seasonal products. This is a great time to put Halloween on sale, a great time that you've liquidated out of all of your summer inventory. If you sell custom products, if you have one of a kind, anything that's like a complicated order, this is the time to promote it to get their orders in early, right? Not In that time between Black Friday and Christmas, but really right now in the month of October and into early November. Okay, so this is what I really want you to think about when you're thinking about this early window. So now we're going to transition to window number two, which is the peak window. Now the peak window is that time that's really that Black Friday weekend. We call it the Cyber Five. I just taught a live holiday planning workshop today, plus. Last week we were in Phoenix and Tempe, Arizona at Saltbox with the Collective members and some of you who ended up snagging some tickets to our holiday planning event. And we were talking about what it means by Cyber Five and Black Friday. I'm just gonna clean it up for us really fast. Black Friday is now an event that lasts at least 5 days. It could start Thanksgiving evening, Friday, then Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Okay. And We used to call it Cyber Monday because if you remember back in my day, um, we would wait outside in front of places like Best Buy and, you know, wait for the DVDs to go on sale or get to the mall at like 5:00 AM. And so it was like, there was the days that in-person shopping was really popular and then they tried, because buying online was newer, they were trying to get people to, you know, go from being out in the stores to coming to shop online, which is why it was called Cyber Monday. Now we might call it the Cyber Five 'cause online they're gonna be promoting sales all weekend, or we can just call it Black Friday weekend. Okay, so this is the peak season because this is when savvy shoppers are shopping. People will start to slow down what they're buying leading up to this window, leading up to the peak season, because they know sales are gonna happen. This is why sometimes earlier promotions is required because we also have to look at the big stores, the big brands, and like how they're promoting. So the peak window is when people are buying and they're looking for good deals and good offers. Now we get to follow the breadcrumbs cuz we're gonna follow the billion-dollar brands, right? And see what they're doing this year. What's really interesting is Target and Amazon Prime are doing and have offered sales earlier, like in the very beginning of October. So if we follow this window, what they're doing is they're trying not to compete when everybody is, has their sales at Black Friday. But they're trying to move holiday shopping, buying for savvy shoppers, like in this peak window, those normal savvy shoppers, how do we get them to spend their money earlier and how do we get them to spend their money with them? So it's not fully competition with you guys and small brands, but it's just something to think about where the question, and when you're listening to this, is the question is, do I run an earlier Black Friday sale? You absolutely can. You could do one earlier and you could say it's an early Black Friday sale. Let's say 30% off sitewide, and then you could run the same sale again Black Friday weekend that doesn't go lower than your first sale. Okay, so that's just like a little quick tip, but Target Circle Day and Amazon Prime Day were both October 6th and 7th in 2026. All right, so they were moving it like early, early, early, like very early this year. So going back to the peak window, here's who's shopping at this time: people who set the weekend aside to shop, people who are looking for deals, savvy shoppers. So if you're thinking, I don't want to participate in Black Friday, Cyber Monday because I don't want to train my customers to think about promotions and sales or to only buy at sales, we've got to understand that culturally people are looking for the deals that weekend. So if your stuff's full price, they're just, it's not an incentive enough for them to shop from you full price when they're getting all this other marketing messaging. They're seeing all these other places with stuff on sale. So we've got Black Friday, we've got Small Business Saturday, Sunday is typical sales, Monday is Cyber Monday, and ultimately you'll see on Tuesday the sale has been extended. They're giving people more time to buy and still get the deals, but the sooner you buy, there might be better deals and there also might be, they might be sold out of good product or bestsellers. So what I recommend for those of you who are still in the early stages of marketing and you're still figuring this out, I'd recommend one sale, like one offer promotion for the weekend. Okay? Like up to 30% off sitewide, up to 70% off sitewide. If you wanna have deals, like if you're doing an in-person market, so you wanna do buy one, get one 50% off, that's ultimately like 25% off each product. But this is a little bit of the work that we've been doing. Not a little bit, actually a lot of the work we've been doing inside the Collective. Live in inside of these planning events because we have to figure out what does the customer want, what does the customer want to buy, what makes sense as the offer to them, and what makes sense for you. And if you're doing an in-person market or you're doing something online, I would always make the incentive to the person in front of you really good because if they're in front of you in that moment, they are the most likely person to buy versus you trying to convert them online. Okay, so in this section you would have one offer. You can do an extended sale. This is going to take us through Black Friday weekend and possibly the week after. Okay, so this is the peak window, and remember, it's called Black Friday because it's to get you out of the red and into the black. It's to move inventory. One member today on the call, she's a member of the Collective, she asked this question. She said, okay, if I'm launching a new product in the fall, do I drop my new collection on Black Friday weekend? My answer was no. Black Friday, the intention behind it is to move product through, to sell through product, to get it out of there. That's why you've got the early window. You've got October, you've got the first half of November to drop new product. When you drop new product, meaning like dropping it to your new, your customers, your current customers or new customers, they're gonna buy because it's new. They're gonna buy because it's a new color, a new scent, a new variation, something that they want. Then when something goes on sale, that thing may or may not go on sale. And I'll give you a really good example. There was a brand I bought from and they had a big sale. It was like a big one. And I was like, oh my God, this never goes on sale. I'm gonna buy it. I'm gonna buy all the stuff 'cause it's such a good deal. So I did. I spent a couple thousand dollars buying all these like new clothes. I know it sounds crazy, but when it's a deal, I shop the deals, you guys. So I spent all this money shopping the deal. And then literally the sale ends, and the next day they drop a new color with some new styles. And I was like, oh my God, I love this color, I really want to have it. And I really love these new styles and some of the variations on their bestsellers. And I was like, do I need to go buy more stuff? I was like, I just bought it all on sale, but this is so cute, so good, so like I'm the ideal customer. I kind of want this, and I want to buy it full price. Because I know the brand and I know that they sell out of colors oftentimes. So if I don't buy it, it doesn't mean I can— I couldn't wait. I think that was like pre-Halloween was that sale. Then right around Halloween they dropped the new color and I was like, if I wait a month till Black Friday, this product will most likely not be there. So I as a customer was trained on scarcity of product. I as a customer was trained on wanting what's new. They knew exactly what I would want. And do you see how psychologically the whole plan was? Sale— let's move out of some old inventory, let's drop the new collection, let's get them excited whether they bought the sale stuff or didn't. I was like on board for both. Then scarcity of— I've seen their stuff sell out before, so if I want it, I need it now. I can't wait for Black Friday. And then when Black Friday came around, I looked again and was like, anything new? What's on sale? Is that new color on sale? What's going on, right? So As an ideal, ideal customer, I was very aware and still buying the whole way through. But typically people might wait up until Black Friday and then this peak window, you wanna think, how do I sell to them? We're not launching something new, we're getting rid of stuff, okay? So the early window is for that. Then after Black Friday, somewhere around the very beginning of December to Christmas, December 25th, this is the last-minute window, okay? Those last-minute shoppers. So what falls in this time? One, like I'm gonna remind you again, Hanukkah comes early, it's December 4th. So most likely you're either dealing with, and Hanukkah's 8 nights, so you're either dealing with people buying day to day, 'cause let me tell you guys, it's a lot of presents that we buy our kids, like 8 presents per kid. My mom had to buy 40 presents. It was insane. Okay, so we're either during the day, oh, I didn't get enough stuff, because let me tell you, that's what a lot of the conversation is like. Oh my gosh, I didn't get enough. I don't have the big enough gift. I only got her this one little thing. So we are buying kind of in that window as well. But the last minute window is for people who are last minute gift givers. They've ran out of time. New things pop up. They've got holiday parties. They've got teachers' gifts to buy from. They just didn't pre-plan, and now we're in that window. We're in like the 20-ish days before Christmas. So in this window, do you have to keep running sales? Not necessarily. You can go back to full price, but you can create offers they want. Free gifts with purchase. How do you raise the average order value? You could have a new drop if you wanted in this time. Typically, I will say, if you were buying, wholesale buyers don't buy in December, 'cause June and December is when they're actually getting inventory out of the shop versus buying new. So it's not the best time for you to drop something new, but depending on your business, maybe you do, and, or like a restock of something. And this is the time that we're counting down to the cutoff for shipping. I believe USPS's last day to guarantee shipping by Christmas is December 17th of this year. Make sure that you're checking in on cutoffs, because you to be promoting, get your orders in on time. You also want to be like being available to people if there's in-person markets, if there's porch pickup, if there's last chance like local pickup. The other thing that we have is the Saturday before Christmas is called Super Saturday. It is one of the biggest and busiest shopping days of the year in real life, out in the stores. It's the last Saturday where people are not at work, they're scrambling before the holiday week, And they're running around and they're trying to get last-minute gifts. They're getting last-minute things for the— what they're hosting, last-minute food, all of it. So it is a big day, which is why it's called Super Saturday. This is a great time again for last minute to make easy yeses for people to say, yes, I need that. Yes, I want that. And then another big thing that I like to train my clients on is it's a great time to sell gift cards. Gift cards are for the last-minute gift. I've even sent and seen Gift card emails Christmas Eve, the morning of Christmas being like, you forgot, did you forget a gift? Buy a gift card, right? Like how helpful would that be to show up in someone's inbox and be like, hey, if you forgot last minute because your cousin's boyfriend came and you didn't know they were coming and you need a stocking stuffer, we've got gift cards for you. This is genius marketing. This is how you stand out. Okay, so that's a last minute window. We're taking it all the way from shipping cutoffs, last chance, Super Saturday gift card giving. This is in that last chance window, and then boom, it's Christmas. Everyone's unpacking, everyone's unwrapping, and this is the period that a lot of you don't realize exists, but I'm gonna get into it. And we've taught this for years here at the Product Boss. It's the holiday to halo period. This is the day after Christmas, the 26th, could be Boxing Day, all the way through mid-January, around January 17th, which also happens to be the most reported day that everyone lets go of their New Year's resolutions. Okay? Mm-hmm. So they haven't eaten sugar, they've been working out, all the things until January 17th, and then boom, they're back to their old ways. So this is that window, day after Christmas all the way, I'm gonna just say for your easy remembering, mid-January, and this is the holiday halo period. So what do we do in this time? In this time, if you're selling stuff that has to do with new year, new you, anything that has to do with a resolution, it could be fitness apparel, it could be CPG goods, it can like, nutrition journals, calendars, anything that has to do with that beginning of the year, New Year's resolution, great time, great time to be selling. It could be a very busy season for you. When I had clients in activewear, especially when I was doing my one-on-one consulting, activewear, this is like we blew it up in January. The other thing people are using in this time is they're using the gift cards, so keep promoting, keep showing up in inboxes. They've got gift cards, they've got returns to make. They saw something that they wanted, but they were too busy buying gifts, and now they're coming in and buying again for themselves. There's also after-Christmas sales. Again, now we're really liquidating the inventory. You do have permission to make this better than Black Friday, especially when it's seasonal product. We do not need to hold on to ornaments for the next year. We get to sell through Christmas. We get to sell through holiday, okay? This is like turn your product back into cash time, okay? So that's right after Christmas. Some of you might have time to be doing stuff for New Year's, but they might have been shopping for that already as they were leading up to the holiday season. So this is that time, and then in January you have to think, how do I make myself relevant to customers who've bought? How do I get them to come back in and buy again? What am I doing in terms of marketing to be able to contact them? So it's actually this really great time to create New Year's campaigns to reengage with your customers, to give them that. Now what we've talked about this over and over and over on the show is the J months are slow months, January, June, and July. So January could be notoriously slow as we're kicking off those first 2 weeks. So you have to think, how do I become relevant to my customers? And that's why, again, after Christmas sales, New Year sales, those are really good. And this is a great time to introduce the next collection, right? To introduce, not, you know, we're done with Christmas scents, we're done with fall scents. Like now we're at the turn of the year. What do people want as they're moving into this fresh brand new year? And then blessed that we have Hallmark. But if you think about all these other dates that are coming up, you guys, what comes after January? What do we start selling mid-January? Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is there to save the day. I love it because we kind of take red from Christmas and just kind of trickle it into mid-January into February, adding pink instead of green, right? So there's like colors that you can keep going. We take things and we turn them into hearts. Um, and then basically mid-January, if you're on time or early with your promotions, this is the time now that you get to start promoting in January after the New Year's push, like that first 2 weeks. Now it's Valentine's Day gift giving time again. That's why Valentine's Day exists. And guess what? It's an, it's a, it's a concept that was created where you buy your loved ones really nice bougie gifts. So it actually kicks up the spending again and actually gets people spending on more expensive items, which is great. So then we go into Valentine's Day, which then starts to lead us into the spring holidays and Mother's Day, and we're back in the game. We're back in the cycle. So there's just a couple gaps here, but if you're listening to what I'm sharing with you, we've just mapped out October, November, December, and most if not all of January. So I've just given you 4 months of concepts and ideas of like, okay, this makes sense. How am I marketing to people? How am I meeting the customer where they are? What do I sell and when do I sell it? And I hope that this is really helpful how we're dividing up Q4. Now the next question, the thing that you're going to ask yourself when you're done listening to this episode is, all right, I heard you, I know what's going on, but do you know how to implement? Do you have the strategy? Do you have the follow-through? Do you know I'm going to send emails, I'm going to do these markets, I'm going to set these revenue goals? So this is the next step while you're listening to the show, or maybe you're watching it on YouTube, which is awesome. Now you have to think, what is it gonna take for me to stay accountable to my goals? What is it gonna take for me to actually hit those goals? And when I hit up against a rough spot, who do I turn to to ask? Okay, so I'm so glad that you're here. Every single week we do live sessions, so I'm gonna drop some links in if you wanna come to a live workshop. It's theproductbossworkshops.com. Or if you're like, all right, I've heard you talk about this forever. I really want support cuz your busy season is actually when you get support. Your slow season is when we're like implementing and getting things done. But right now, how are we going to hit all these goals? I just want to offer you a free call. We've worked with people all the way from $50,000 to $25 million a year inside of my programs, like the Collective and my masterminds. And you're like, oh, I need some help. Just go to theproductboss.com/bookacall. It's theproductboss.com/bookacall. We're here to help you. I just want to offer that because I know what comes with the season. I know that It's overwhelming, but there's also this like FOMO of like, well, what's possible? What am I missing out on? What could I be implementing? And so I just don't want you to be alone in a busy time. I want you to be supported and I want you to enjoy your family and the season as well. All right, I hope that this was helpful. Come on over to Instagram, let me know, um, what you thought about it and what you're most excited about for Q4. All right, my friends, I'll see you on the next one. Thank you for being here and listening all the way through the Product Boss Podcast. If you love our show and it has helped you in any way in your business, would you mind doing 2 things for us? Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode and leave us a review. Reviews help other product entrepreneurs know that this is the place to be to grow their businesses and realize that they're not alone. 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