How To Stay Focused and Motivated When Your Prospects Aren’t

Summer is approaching fast. While it is a great opportunity to step back from the grind and spend time with family, it is also important not to lose momentum on your plan for growth. This can be difficult when prospects seem to bury their heads in the sand (literally and figuratively) and sales emails turn into a ping pong match of “out of office” auto-replies. This may prove to be even more of a dramatic shift this year as the world opens up its doors again after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trying to generate leads and a meet a sales quota during this time is next to impossible and those who try might be wasting valuable time and resources. Instead of fighting against the current, why not use this time to refocus your efforts and put in work that has more long term benefits? Here are a few ways we found to survive the summer slump and prepare for the prosperous fall months ahead.

Establish Realistic Sales Expectations

The first and probably most important thing to understand when battling the summer slump is to understand that it actually exists. To confirm this theory, here is the Google trends report for 2020, showing the first week of June as the lowest point of interest for the topic of “Managed IT.” When we first covered this topic back in 2019, the trends looked quite similar, which debunked my initial thought that last year was an “off-year” and that the data would probably not reflect accurately.

Google Trends report for the topic “Managed IT” in 2020

Understanding that this is reality and it is simply a “phase” that you need to fight through is important for morale. Expectations during this time period should be lowered in order to avoid burnout and keep the “doubt” monsters from creeping in. If you overreact to poor results during the summer, it can cause you to make irrational decisions and put you in a poor position to capitalize on the upward swing of interest at the end of the season.

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Experiment With New Content Mediums

Have you ever found yourself envious of your competitors for their thoughtful blog articles, insightful podcast episodes or engaging events? You aren’t alone, but it’s not very likely that the refined concept you see was of equal quality to their first few attempts. The people (and companies) that win in the content game are those that are willing to take their lumps in the beginning and keep getting better over time, without wavering from their ultimate goal.

When your phones aren’t ringing off the hook and inboxes dry up, it is the perfect opportunity to refocus your time and try content medium that you’ve never done before. Since summer is often the time when B2B engagement is at its lowest, you can work out the kinks without the pressure of people critiquing your work. You will be glad you did when the busy fall season rolls back around and you have a stockpile of awesome content to push out to an audience that’s ready to invest time and money into their business.

Attend Industry Events & Conferences

In-person events are back and many are offering virtual ways to attend without travel. If you are tired of attending webinar after webinar over the last year and are craving in-person networking, then now is the time to ease back into it in whatever capacity you are comfortable with. These events have always been a great way to engage with your peers and get a good reading on where your company stands across the industry as a whole.

Summer is the perfect time to attend these type of events. The impact of you leaving the office for a week is minimal compared to other times of the year. The last thing you want is to be stuck in a room full of vendors and competitors when your prospect is ready to buy or when your lead generation campaigns are firing on all cylinders.

Schedule Time With Existing Customers

During the summer months, your return on ad spend tends to weaken. It can become more expensive to generate leads that often go unresponsive and uninterested after just a short amount of time. What if the leads were free and they were more likely to buy from you and anyone else? Enter existing customers.

When new leads are being generated and prospects are plentiful, it can be easy to forget about your existing customer base, even though their money is just as green (and frankly easier to acquire). Now is the time to double down your efforts on your existing customer base, get projects scheduled, and make conversation that may even lead to referrals.

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Increase Your Product & Service Knowledge

Marketing and selling IT & Cybersecurity services is not an easy task for industry outsiders (or even insiders for that matter). If you didn’t start your career as a Computer Science major working a Support Desk, then you likely don’t have a deep technical knowledge of the products and solutions you are trying to sell. This inexperience can bleed through on your sales calls and cause you to miss out on opportunities to provide value.

Making sure that sales and marketing personnel are up to speed on technology offerings is crucial and summer is the perfect time to do it. Vendors and technology partners have been investing heavily in online resources during the pandemic. Watching training videos, past events, and tutorials can equip you and your team to close more deals when opportunities eventually start to present themselves.

Give Away Your Time For Free

Not everyone might share the same philosophy, but I believe that good karma is a resource that you can never have too much of. Doing for others and expecting nothing in return is easier said than done. When you are busy and your time is at it’s most valuable point it can be increasingly difficult to give it away.

If you want to build up good karma and develop new relationships that can pay off in the future, summer is the time to do it. Local small businesses and non-profits are likely to accept whatever help they can get, so you should be able to lend your expertise without question. This can introduce you to new people and new ideas that can create value for you that surpasses the revenue you likely could have generated.

Once you learn to embrace the summer slump and use your time appropriately, you will find yourself in an overall better head space. Rather than getting frustrated and becoming complacent, look to build up resources and strategize for when things turn around. Prosperous times will come, just weather the storm…and take a vacation while you are at it.

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