[Sales] Give up prospecting in the summer

All right, Nick, it's summertime. And so what does that mean for prospecting?

Means we're all going to stop, right? There's no point in it. Everyone's away from the desk.

Nope, Complete waste of time. Any sort of prospecting outbound is dead in the summer. Absolutely dead. No chance.

End of episode. See you in the next one.

All right, bye. Gonna slack a bar. For real, though, because this is a non trivial topic and it's something that I think people ask us about all the time, which is like, well, what should we be doing during the holidays? What should we do during summer? Like, should we be pausing our campaigns? Like, what should we be thinking about? How would you sort of share your experiences and thoughts around it?

So my first thing is I'm going to share my experiences. A sales leader, and this is directed at no one, independently if I'm talking, because there's been people listening that I've reported to me and most of these guys, it's all their fault. Yeah, all their fault. But everyone loves to say, well, it's summer, of course we're pipelines drying up. Of course, top of funnels. Less. It's summer, you know.

Right.

Well, yeah, but is it drying up less because of it's summer and actually you're not getting responses or have you slowed down because you think you're not going to get responses? And I think often it's the latter because we're gearing up for our holiday and psychologically. Or who wants meetings when they're on holiday? Right. So you're sort of slowing down yourself and then you've got to run back up. But I don't. Yes. I think there's a, a percentage of truth in the fact that you're going to get less responses because less people are at their desks. But even if you just think about this mathematically, right. The UK get a lot of holiday. We get like 20 days. Right. So even if you decide to take all of those in one go, there's four weeks, everyone slows down for the whole quarter. Pretty much we go, oh, yeah. Sort of end of June through to end of August. Right. That means even that person that theoretically took off four whole weeks in one lump sum.

Which isn't realistic.

Which isn't realistic. Right. They've got another four weeks where you could have been reaching out to them.

Yeah. But more realistically, they're taking a week off and they're on one week. You can't just take three months off of your job. You're still around. Will you get more out of office replies. Absolutely. Right.

Yeah.

But like just like recognize that and then respond to them when I get back to the office. How often like every out of office response is like hey I'll be back, you know, whatever, June 15th. And so then why don't you reach out on June 15th, set a little reminder and follow up with them then.

Exactly that. So and then sort of.

And you can even welcome them back from their vacation. Hey, how was your holiday? What a great way to like you know, respond back to somebody when you know they're getting back into the office.

Yeah. Saw you're out of office, hope you did something nice. Where did you get to like and if they reply like I'm going to want to talk about my holiday, I'm going to start work. Yeah.

Right.

You know what I mean? So maybe that's a great reach out. I think we put, we over estimate the level of out of office in summer because we see a drop in activity, we assign that drop for those like two, three months to each individual when reality is a couple of weeks of inactiveness per person. Right. Yeah. It's not everybody stopping. Some people will also say well they're going to do less experiments. Yep. So maybe run up to their holiday, they slow their experiments down but then probably they've got more time to read emails and content that you're sending them because now they're not in the lab.

Yeah. And people have their email on their phone. So even if they're not around like they're probably still seeing your email and they're probably still getting on their phone. So especially if you're talking, if you're messaging executives, so you're messaging people that are, you know, higher up within organizations. I guarantee you, matter of fact they will 100% be using their phone, their personal phone for work related things and checking email even while on holiday. Guarantee you it happens.

Yeah. Listen to our other episode about Automations and you can even connect it to your inbox to check when someone says out of office, add them to a list ready to reach out to when they come back. But that's a different topic we can cover.

You could do that. You can even analyze the sentiment of that reply and say when did they say they were going to get back? You can also see if they put somebody else that they should contact in their absence. And now you got a new lead at that company that you could target. So if you think about how can you weaponize out of office replies? These are the types of things weaponize is the wrong term. How can you leverage out of office replies to your benefit? Yeah, exactly. How can you leverage out of office replies to your advantage? One, you can find new people that you potentially didn't know at that company and two, you can figure out when they're going to be back and reach out to them at the appropriate time.

So.

So yeah, lots of things that people I think underestimate when it comes to prospecting in the summer. And also business doesn't just shut down in the summer. Right. You still have goals that you've got to hit. Your prospects, your customers, they all have deadlines that they ultimately have to hit too. Like they still have to get stuff done. And so by you not reaching out and you not prospecting, you're limiting your, I think, chances of reaching these people.

Agreed, definitely. And I think two things I'd say is one is the executive piece. They often take that time when things slow down to when they review things, when they look at papers, when they look at new technologies because they've got a bit less going on because they've got less one to ones, et cetera, because people are on holiday. And the other thing is the noise. If you are one of the reps that keeps doing this, you can give your quote in a second. Harrison, if we were talking about earlier, if you are one of the reps that keeps doing this when everybody else slows down, how much easier is it to stand out in their inbox?

Right? Yeah, yeah, I'll. Since you alluded to this war, Yaka has a famous quote where he says be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful. Now granted, this has to do with investing, right? The idea is that if everybody is selling, that's a great time to buy because you're going to get everything at a discount. If everybody is buying markets going up through the roof, then it's a better time to probably sell because it's be closer to the top. Right? But the same thing can be applied for prospecting in the summer is that everybody else is fearful and so they're all stopping, they're all slowing down. So that gives you potentially a better chance to stand out, to actually break through. Less noise in the inbox, less noise on LinkedIn, all that kind of good stuff. So what's the moral of the story, Ning?

Don't stop, don't stop. Keep on keeping on.

Keep on keeping on. Yeah, you got a number to hit. Keep prospecting. If anything, double down and leverage those out of offices to your advantage.

And if it works, Q3 is probably the easiest number to hit. Right. It's normally, if you've got a nice manager, it might be your lowest number of the year, depending on how your company structured. Right. So a few more deals will make bigger impact in Q3 than they would in any other.

There you go. Love it. All right, so that's the moral of the story. Go out there, keep prospecting. Don't let the summer blues take you away.

Get off the sunbed, you lazy reps. Yeah, that's it.

Or prospect from the sunbed. That also works. Do that. Or go to the park and do some prospecting from the park. Nice. All right, see you all in the next one.