The weather is getting warmer and warmer and many of you are already starting to plan your next summer vacation. Everyone is very excited that summer is around the corner, but when it comes to doing some sales during this season, many of you forget that it is already time to get prepared for this period.

It is no news that summer is known to be a season that discourages a lot of salespeople. Motivation is down, the pipelines are often almost empty, salespeople are not trying to engage with any prospects and there is not enough prospection.

It’s time to work on your action plan. To avoid all these different problems, you need to ensure that one of your priorities to make this season a success is to start preparing now to avoid losing sales.

Don’t be last minute! To prepare yourself efficiently for the coming season, here are four things you should prioritized while creating your summer game plan.

1. Keep in mind that people are reachable and available

Salespeople continue to believe that in the summer no one is reachable because of vacations. Well, that’s not true!

You must think that people are generally disposed to discuss with you. Indeed, it’s very rare for a person’s vacation to last longer than 2 weeks, so there’s always an opportunity to reach a potential client during this period.

It is a quieter period, but you need to understand that people are more available and receptive to receiving any calls. In the summer months, prospecting calls are generally well received, especially because people are often in a good mood when the weather is nice or when they know that their vacation is coming very soon. In fact, they feel less disturbed and they are more likely to answer the phone when you call them. That’s where some opportunities come in for you.

Usually, the majority of sales reps think they won’t be able to reach some prospects. So, if you decide not to act like the majority and decide to contact all your prospects, you’re seizing an opportunity that few people dare to take.

2. Schedule time in your agenda for prospecting

When preparing for the sunny season, make sure to reserve time for prospecting to meet your sales objectives for the summer trimester. Usually, the vacations of all employees of a company are booked in advance. It is consequently possible to schedule meetings with them quite in advance.

It’s essential to create time slots in your agenda to make sure that activities are actually taking place. By blocking periods allocated to prospecting only, you ensure that you maintain a well-filled pipeline and keep a good amount of sales activities going.

3. Develop healthy prospecting habits

During the rest of the year, it is common that salespeople have the bad habit of not prospecting on a very regular basis. Indeed, there are times when salespeople tend to give up prospecting depending on where they are in their sales cycle. However, prospecting should be done regularly to keep the pipeline constantly full.

Summertime must absolutely be a time to eliminate this bad behaviour in order to not lose some sales opportunities. When you work on your action plan, you should be prepared to be more constant in the way you are doing prospection.

Starting in spring, get into the good habit of never ceasing prospecting to be able to maintain activities that generate sales during summer.

4. Eliminate the biases you have against summertime

When we think about summer, we often think of very few good things regarding working during this season. Even if some things are a little bit slower, many salespeople are inclined to work less hard and they create several excuses to cover their decreased productivity. However, by having this misconception of summer, salespeople don’t realize that this season is not very different from the others and that several opportunities exist.

People often have a negative perception of this particular time of year because they believe that:

• Everybody’s on vacation
• No one wants to answer the phones
• All activities are at a slow pace.
• No big decisions are made during the summer

When you’re preparing for summer, you need to stop thinking about all those limiting beliefs. Usually, decision-makers are more available than we think and are receptive. Also, not everyone decides to take a vacation, and often it is a short one. Indeed, summer is a good moment to seize new opportunities, maintain activities and prospecting.

Have a positive outlook about summer to help you be more motivated than usual to make good sales.

Important

It’s now time to be effective when creating your action plan.

Start preparing now to be able to keep a pipeline full during the season that many fear. Don’t be influenced by negative perceptions about summer and see it as an opportunity to make more sales than your competitors.