With all the distractions available to you through the summer, it can be difficult to maintain focused on picking up the phone. Or take it up a notch.

Carrie Simpson, President

July 7, 2015

2 Min Read
It39s harder to work in the summer when everyone is out on vacation or golfing but summer prospecting can pay off if you do it right
It's harder to work in the summer when everyone is out on vacation or golfing, but summer prospecting can pay off if you do it right.

Every summer I write a post about working a little harder so that your pipeline stays full through to fall. Cold calling gets more difficult in the summer. People are on vacation, taking shorter days, golfing…it does prove difficult to make the same number of connections that you make through the rest of the year. With all the distractions available to you through the summer, it can be difficult to maintain focused on picking up the phone. Or take it up a notch.

You have three options in the summer.

  1.  Carry on as usual

Let’s assume for a minute your normal commitment to outbound prospecting is 200 dials per week. That should lead to one or two new meetings every week. This depends on some variables like the territory you’re prospecting in, your skill level, and the list you’re working. If you look at summer as eight weeks, you have the option of making 1600 dials through that time frame. If you connect half as many times, you’re still going to meet with eight new prospects this summer, just from outbound prospecting. What’s your closing ratio like? How does that impact your bottom line?

  1. Reduce your activity, or stop entirely.

Reducing your activity, while not ideal, at least keeps enough attention on your pipeline that warm leads get the attention they need, and you still will get a few opportunities to win new business.

We don’t recommend that you stop prospecting through the summer. If you stop entirely you’re going to lose the opportunity to sit the eight meetings we just discussed. You’ll have zero “action items” in your pipeline for fall. Prospecting requires you to continually stuff leads in to the top of the funnel in order for opportunities to come out at the bottom. No new activities?  No new business. As you get further and further away from new dials, your pipeline gets cold and stale. That means you’re starting over from zero again in September, and that will take you a full quarter to recover from. You don’t lose one quarter when you stop dialing, you always lose two.

  1. Step it up.

While your competitors are taking time off to golf, and lamenting about how summer is a waste of time to prospect, you can accelerate your prospecting. Commit to another 100 dials weekly. The law of numbers – even at a slower summer pace – says this will find you at least 4 new opportunities this summer. Closing one extra 50 seat managed deal this summer (Is your closing ratio one in four? Better?) would make missing a few golf games worth it, wouldn’t it?

Carrie Simpson is founder and CEO of Managed Sales Pros.

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About the Author(s)

Carrie Simpson

President, Managed Sales Pros

Carrie has 20 years of inside and field sales experience. She is the founder of Cold Calls Lead Generation, a business to business sales appointment setting firm. For fourteen years she has helped technology companies sell more, more efficiently. Carrie spent two years building the Managed Services lead generation program at The Eureka Project before founding Managed Sales Pros, a sales cycle acceleration firm that focuses exclusively on the managed services ecosystem. She was named by MSPMentor as one of the 250 most influential people in the technology channel for 2013.

Carrie still cold calls daily. She is responsible for client strategy at Managed Sales Pros and is available for consulting, training and speaking engagements. Carrie’s client list includes MSP industry guru Robin Robins, RMM vendors AVG Managed Workplace and Nable by Solar Winds, Network Security firm OpenDNS, the document management startup ITGlue and emerging and established MSPs from Seattle to New York City.

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