Don’t Make These 4 Outbound Sales Mistakes During the Holidays

Finding winning B2B sales strategies can be difficult at any point during the year, but no time is more challenging than the holiday season. Meeting your quarterly and yearly quotas can cause undue stress, but it’s important to achieve these goals to set you up for the following year. Because this time is so stressful, it’s easy for you or your team to make some mistakes. Here are 4 common mistakes many outbound sales teams make during the holidays.

Common Sales Mistakes to Avoid During the Holidays

Mistake #1: Failing to Maintain Lucrative Lead Sources

With parties, vacations, and everything else pulling our focus during the holidays, it’s easy to neglect even the most valued of our customer base. To avoid this mistake, make sure that reps are following up with lucrative leads, catering to the needs of consistent clients, and checking to see if established connections could lead to further conversions. You may find through an old client that another business needs help during the holidays, setting you up for extra sales and potentially doubling your sales output. Take the time to forge these new connections, but always remember to nurture those that have rewarded you in the past.

Mistake #2: Assuming Everyone is Out of the Office

A lot of team leads or management will assume that cold calling sales will naturally drop in December due to so many people being out of the office. While a certain percentage of calls are going to go to voicemail regardless, there is still a strong chance your reps could get through to a potential customer. This mistake is understandable, as many people do leave the office for the holidays. That being said, it’s still worthwhile to try to get through to B2B clients. Make sure your reps acknowledge it’s the holidays, asking if they have time to talk and approaching the sale with a certain level of tact. Clients will appreciate the self-awareness, and you may be surprised with your levels of success.

Mistake #3: Neglecting to Update Your Tool Suite

One of the most common and egregious mistakes that you can make is failing to update your tools. Without the right programs, your teams will have little chance of maintaining, or increasing, their sales volumes during the holidays. Aging equipment or subpar automation programs will only serve to slow down your reps at a time where they may already be feeling that end-of-year pressure. To solve this, you’ll want to give them the best possible B2B sales tools you can. These tools can facilitate newer strategies like SMS messaging, or help boost your call effectiveness.

Essential cold calling sales tools include:

Voicemail Drop: Part of the cost of doing business during the holidays is that many outbound calls will go to voicemail. This can be incredibly frustrating for your staff, who are naturally hoping for a connection where they can use techniques like active listening. Distracted reps will often be focusing on the next call they have to make, leading them to make a mistake during the voicemail process. With voicemail drop software, you can avoid these errors entirely. These programs will “drop” a perfect recorded copy of your sales script into a customer’s inbox, allowing your rep to move on to their next call with a clear head.
Local Presence Dialing: Of course, if you can avoid getting the voicemail all together, that is often the preferable outcome. Even without the distractions of the holiday season, your reps may be having trouble getting through to potential customers. One of the biggest causes of this is the lack of authority associated with some phone numbers. If the number appearing on a potential customers caller id is from out of state (or has the prefix 1-800) it isn’t likely they will pick up. With local presence dialing, you can use trusted local area codes to dramatically increase answer rates. With higher answer rates comes more active calls, more conversions, and far more chances for the creation of long-term customer connections.
Sales Dialers: Once a rep is connected to a customer and is nearing the end of a call, it’s common to fumble a sale at the last second. The cause for this, in many cases, is that a salesperson is always thinking ahead and focusing on the next call they need to make. With a sales dialer, you can take the pressure off of thinking about subsequent calls. These tools will automatically compile your leads and dial them the moment a call has ended, allowing your reps to use all of their focus on the call at hand.

Mistake #4: Failing to Motivate Your Teams

While it’s important to hit your quotas and maintain a high sales volume during the holiday season, you’ll also want to check in with your teams and see how they are doing. Burnout is a common issue as you reach Q4 of any year, and without praise or reward, it’s easy for even the best of your reps to start to lose steam. While it may seem like a strain on your budget, this is the time of year when you should go all out in showing your appreciation. Bring in coffee on a cold morning, put a bit of extra cash into the holiday party, offer rewards to your higher-performing staff members; whatever it takes, help restore the spirit of your employees. Once they feel rejuvenated, you’ll be surprised at how much they can achieve, even in a traditionally slow part of the year.

Don’t Make the Mistake of Choosing the Wrong Tools

Losing sales during the holidays is completely optional, but it will be nearly impossible to get a high sales volume without the right tools. If you want to get a full suite of programs in one easy-to-use platform, your best option is Kixie.

With Kixie, you’ll get proven conversion increasing programs like:

As a special treat for the holidays, Kixie is offering their complete suite of tools for seven days absolutely free; you don’t even need to enter a credit card number. Don’t let the potential sales of the season pass you by; start your free trial today!