BEAT Your Q4 Sales Goal: Sales Training Tips to Finish the Year Strong

Hey friends, welcome to another edition of the show. This month we're focusing in on closing down Q4 in a really strong way. What are strategies so we can close out the year really, really strong and hopefully over goal? Then we've got a couple of listener and viewer questions that have been sent in. We've got a question from Brian up in Michigan, and he's focusing really on— wants to know about some new AI prompts that we've been talking about. And then Tanya in Florida, is really wants to talk about, could we just get back to some phone meetings? She is tired of Zoom. And so we're going to dig in on that. All that and so much more coming up on this month's episode. Stick around and stay close. Here we go. Live from the BrainSwell Media Studios, this is the Ryan Dohrn Business Show. Hey friends, welcome to the show this month. So glad to have you joining us. And as always, thank you so much for all your support. To see some of these videos getting hundreds of thousands of views is really meaningful to me because that means it's helping all of you, and that really is important to me. All right, let's dig in on our topic today. You know, we're at that time of year where we're falling into the last quarter of the year, and it also is really a weird time because we also have so many things wrapping up at the end of the year, and then we also have Thanksgiving and we have Christmas, and then we have New Year's. Now, there's a pretty common misunderstanding this time of year that people tend to slow down a little bit, and that's absolutely not the case. Especially in the sales business. So there's 3 main things that I like to do to really make sure I end the year in a really strong way. First, I want to make sure that the meetings that I'm hosting with people, I'm bringing significant value to those meetings. So the meetings that I'm hosting, if the meeting is just for me, there's not a lot of value for the client. So I want to be asking myself, because this is a time of year when a lot of us are doing renewals and things like that, What value can I bring to this meeting? Let me give you an example. In the world where I live, in media marketing solutions, digital sales, things like that, if it's just me coming to a renewal meeting, that's not terribly valuable to a client. But when I bring a publisher to the meeting, or I bring a general manager or a sales director, people in leadership, I might have an IT person, a digital pro that's going to come to the meeting. Now all of a sudden I'm creating a meeting of value. When clients say to me— and I have the really unique opportunity, I coach about 80 different salespeople a month, so it's awesome, I absolutely love it— what I find though is that a lot of us kind of think that we're providing value to a client because we're giving them our time and we're hosting these meetings with them, right? But you've got to understand that people by nature are pretty darn selfish. They just are. And if you don't believe me, I don't know, go out and meet a few people, I guess, and just ask yourself, okay, what can I do to make sure that I'm super respectful of their time and I'm bringing something of value to that meeting. It could be new ideas, it could be competitive strategies, it could be budget considerations. I mean, there's all kinds of different things that you can do to bring value to these meetings. Valuable meetings are valued and are things that actually accomplish things. Okay, so that's the first thing— make sure you're bringing value to the meetings if you want people to host them. All right, the second thing is Unfortunately, as we roll towards the holidays, a lot of salespeople tend to get a little bit quiet, and I don't know why. Now, a lot of times I do hear from salespeople saying to me, well, you know, Ryan, when it gets closer to the holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, people are done making their decisions. Au contraire, my friend. If that's how you feel, it might just be the conversations that you're having, or maybe you're believing that philosophy that other old-school sales reps have told you. This is a time of year when I'm closing a lot of deals. I'm having a lot of really great conversations. This is a carpe diem moment kind of year or a kind of time of year. Always be asking yourself, when others go quiet, what can I do to be loud? Now, that week around Thanksgiving, great time of year to sell. That week around Christmas actually is a great time of year to sell because decision makers— like, it's not that they never go out of town, it's not that they don't honor holidays, but a lot of decision makers Over the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday, they're working. Like, not everybody is working, but I'm working because a lot of salespeople go quiet. Now, am I closing deals? I mean, yes and no. What I'm really doing though is using the times around the 4th quarter and the holidays when things tend to get a little quiet, I'm using that to amp up my relationships. I'm using it as times to cut through the clutter because a lot of sales organizations go just a little bit quiet. So I always want to be asking myself, what are times of year when other salespeople go quiet and what can I do to be as appropriate but as loud as possible during those periods of time? I'd also suggest to you though, friends, Memorial Day, Labor Day, major national holidays, that kind of thing. Like for example, on Columbus Day or whatever we're calling it now, you know, whatever the circumstances— don't mean to talk politics or get political or whatever— is that I did a bunch of work. Now, should I have taken the day off? Probably so. But I connected with a lot of people. So, I think it's very important, friends, for us to make sure we get loud when others go quiet. Okay? All right, so now let's talk about the third thing. Recognize times of year when people are all trying to renew or get something from clients. So, the third thing is recognize this is a crazy time of year. So, when you think about it, everybody's trying to get renewals done. We're in fourth quarter, we're at the end of the year. Most people's fiscals follow the end of the year, just kind of depends upon your industry. But everybody's trying to get a renewal right now. Software companies looking for renewals, cable companies, utility companies, all the different providers, lawyers trying to close their billing down, accountants trying to get their billing done. It's a crazy, crazy kind of time of year. So you might say, well, then I shouldn't work that time of year. Oh yes, you should. You just need to make sure you recognize that everybody is hitting your customers. Everybody is beating them up for renewals. So you want to kind of be asking yourself, what can I do to sort of be non-salesman-like? During these times. Now, I don't want to contradict myself because you would think that polite salespeople will go quiet when others go quiet. I do want you to be aggressive to a certain degree, but I also really want you to recognize that everybody's trying to reach out. So what do we do about that? I might say, I know that every salesperson in the country is trying to reach out to you right now and get these meetings set up. Or in my case, I know every media company in the country is trying to get you to renew your marketing solutions for next year. What can I do to make this super painless? What can I do to make this super easy for you? What kind of meeting could I host for you? What information could I provide to you that would make working with us next year super, super easy? Guide me. Tell me what you need from me. And so, I find that a lot of times, if I do that, I get back good intel from folks. And when I get back that good intel and I pay attention to it, then I get good responses. But I'm also trying to be pretty organized in my sales approach. Now, the last thing that you might want to consider for Q4 is just to recognize that there is money still to be had because there's a lot of folks that have discretionary spending or they have budgeted spending. If the budgeted spending has to be used before the end of the year, it could be a use-it-or-lose-it scenario. So don't forget, there are people, whether you're selling software products or cybersecurity insurance or media marketing solutions like me, There are people that need to get their money spent before the end of the year. It's a use it or lose it kind of scenario. Now, if you don't know what I mean by that, if you ever have worked in a corporate office, you ask for a budget to be approved. Once the budget is approved, you typically are able to spend that money at the amount that you budgeted for without further approval. So, if the end of the year comes and you budgeted $50,000 for marketing, And you've only spent $35,000. If you don't use it before the end of the year, you'll then lose it. It's not like, well, most people don't get rewarded for saving money. I've had some jobs where I did, so I tried to save as much as I could. Most of the corporate jobs that I've been in though, it's a use it or lose it scenario. You need to use it before the end of the year. So I reach out to folks and say, hey, you might be in the same situation as me where you've got some dollars that need to be spent before the end of the year. I'd love to work with you and figure out what we can do to make sure we get the money allocated in a way. That's gonna make sense for all of you and make sense for your circumstances. Friends, do not give up. Don't look at the end of the year and say, I'll never meet that number. Recognize, friends, if you provide a lot of value. Number 1, provide a tremendous amount of value. Number 2, recognize that you need to be loud when others are getting quiet, especially as we get towards Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then the 3rd thing is really to recognize that right now everybody's trying to beat up these clients. So you want to try to be kind of non-sales-ish, be a lot more helpful. What can I do to help you as you're looking to make all of these decisions? Friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. They're not. I used to say we're crazy. We're not crazy. I mean, I guess we're a little bit crazy, but friends, you just got to be asking yourself, what can I do to stand out from the crowd and be different out there? And if you do some of these strategies and put them in place, I think, friends, you're going to be a raging sales machine. Success. All right, coming up next, we've got listener questions, viewer questions coming in. We got Brian up in Michigan wants to know some of the AI prompts that I'm using because that's changing every single day. And then we've got Tanya that is down in Florida and just trying to get away from Zoom calls. Tanya is just really tired of the Zoom and is asking me about some advice on phone meetings. So we'll answer those questions, so much more. That will all be coming up next. We'll be right back. All right, friends, one of my favorite times of the program, answering those questions you send in to me, ryan@ryandohrn.com. If you've sent in a question and I didn't reply to your email, send you a video, or record it here on the podcast and the TV show, then we did not receive the email. I take a lot of pride in answering all the emails that are sent to us. So make sure you keep your email questions coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right. First question comes from Brian up in Michigan. And Brian in Michigan asks this question. Ryan, I know you're a big fan of AI. Any new prompts you're using that you haven't talked about already? And so, yeah, there are, Brian, a couple of prompts that I don't talk about regularly that I'd love to share. One is I like to use ChatGPT and Perplexity for calculating my sales math. So what I just do is you load it up and you simply say, could you build for me? So it would be build for me. Build for me would be the prompt. Build for me colon, I need a sales calculator that will take my current goal, subtract out of it how much I've already got sold, and then be able to mathematically tell me how many prospects I need based upon my closing rate that varies. And I'd love to have some type of calculator to help me calculate that. Then when you click go, ChatGPT is gonna kick you back another prompt that says, would you like me to write a program for you to calculate this? And you say, yeah, that would be awesome. And then what it'll do, it'll take 5 or 6 minutes. It'll build you a little calculator that you can save inside of ChatGPT. So I love that sales calculator piece. Now, if you can't quite figure it out, I have a blog that I wrote about sales math. So for some reason, ChatGPT is struggling with this. You could put in the prompt, I'd like to create a sales calculator the way that Ryan Dohrn talked about in this blog, and then you can copy and paste the URL from the blog, and then Brian, that will help you as well. So sales math, that's something we haven't talked about, and I love using ChatGPT for that. Okay, the second thing is every industry is different. So what I've noticed is that email send times are different based upon different industries. So one of the things that Brian and everybody that I do is I will actually use ChatGPT and I'll say, strategize this. That's the prompt, colon. I work in the automotive industry and I'm dealing with general managers of car dealerships. What's the best time of day and why to email them at those certain times? What's interesting is it'll go out and pull competitive information and really be able to tell you what's the best time of day for you to email certain individuals inside of certain industries. So I think that's an important one as well. And then the third thing that I do regularly new, Brian, that I've never done before is conversation points. So that's the prompt, conversation points colon, and then I just talk into ChatGPT. So I'll say, I'm looking to create some conversations with a couple of different individuals in this particular industry. Could you please give me some trends, topics, and ideas, some conversation points? Now, this is new. One of the things I can also do is I will go and take their information or their URL from LinkedIn. I'll pop that into ChatGPT. I'll have it look and say— I'll say things like, look online, look at blogs that have been posted, tell me a little bit more about the personality profile of this person, and I'll include their name. Now, the more they do online, the more accurate it's going to be. But Brian, those are kind of the 3 that I love to use on a real regular basis. And so thanks for asking, and I'll be sure to come to the podcast and the YouTube channel with more prompts like that. But I would encourage all of you pay for Perplexity or play pay for ChatGPT Plus, and then really, really dig in deep on that. And you can also find some AI tools over at RyanDorn.ai as well. All right, next question then comes from Tanya. I hope I'm saying it right. Tanya up in down in Florida. All right, Ryan. I'm actually really getting sick of Zoom meetings. I think my clients are sick of Zoom meetings as well. Anything wrong with just hosting good old-fashioned phone meetings? I'm not an old salesperson, but I feel like it seems like a good idea. What are your thoughts? So Tanya, I love the phone. I know I love Zoom, don't get me wrong, and I love video 'cause I can show you things just like we're talking face-to-face here today. But for me, what I have found is that a lot of people just don't like Zoom meetings anymore because you have to like put on your makeup, do your hair, put on a nice shirt, make sure your background looks good, your light's on, your mic works. I mean, it's like quite a, like a production, right? Whereas the phone is like, hello, ring ring. Hey, how you doing? Now, what's interesting is, I, you know, know a lot of people that do FaceTime. They'll do a lot of meetings on FaceTime, and that seems to work pretty well. But I have noticed that picking up the phone and engaging in just a general conversation where I don't have to show a lot of things, I love using the phone. Absolutely love using the phone. As a matter of fact, sometimes, Tanya, What I will say is, would you prefer phone or Zoom? You'd be amazed, like 75% of the time it's like, oh, let's just grab a quick phone call. And I'm like, yeah, absolutely, because I can take a phone call basically anywhere. I could pretty much be on a plane, on a train, wherever, and take a phone call. I mean, maybe I shouldn't be taking phone calls on planes. I guess that'd be against the law, so don't do that. But you want to be thinking how easy it is to take a call. I actually could take a call on the plane. It's happened before. Don't take away my PreCheck because of that, please. Recognize, friends, that the phone's just easy. So I don't think it's an old school thing at all. I think it's the ability to connect with people in a way that they want to be connected with. And I think it's super important for us to connect with people in the ways that are most easy for them or easiest for them. I think it's a very important piece of the puzzle, friends. So Tanya, I would not be worried at all. I love the idea of getting people on the phone. And I do it a lot more now than I ever did before because I'm with you, Tanya. I think a lot of people are just Zoomed out. So asking for a quick 5-minute phone call, a lot of times, friends, that really, really works to your advantage. So Brian, Tanya, everybody that sent in your questions, I hope that is helpful. Keep those questions coming to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, friends. Well, that is our show for this month. We try to keep them Short and sweet and to the point, and we're so thrilled that you join us each and every month. So be sure if you would give us a subscribe, give us a like, let YouTube and Google know that we're doing good things for all of you. Sign up for the newsletters over at RyanDorn.com, and don't forget friends, if sales was easy, everybody be doing it, and they're not. We're not crazy. This is a great career. It'll feed your family for a lifetime. Hey friends, if you're looking for some motivation, I'd love to come to your office, love to train your team. teams, coach your teams, come to your sales meetings and motivate your team, I would love to make that happen. Reach out to me, ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, God bless you. Get out there and sell something. Make us all proud. We will see you next month.