Hey, Toni from Growblocks here! Welcome to another Revenue Letter!
This weekly email is my way to share knowledge and build a community of people who love to learn more about growing revenue in a data-driven and scientific way.
Anything in particular you want to hear my thoughts on? Drop me an email, and I might use it in my next article.
For my American friends, Thanksgiving is over.
And that means time is quickly wrapping up for this year's newbiz numbers.
Between now and the holiday break, you really only have so many chances to get deals across the line and signed.
Because let’s face it, prospects have enough to think about this time of year. Your quota is not high on their list of priorities.
And realistically, once we hit December 15, the rest of the year is just about getting the last of your late-stage prospects over the line.
But if you’re like a lot of companies I speak to, it’s still going to be a mad rush to get to your target.
So Mr./Ms. CRO, what can you do?
The truth is, not much.
Other than a few Hail Mary plays, that is.
This is usually the time when I would preach focusing on next quarter instead.
And while that’s still best practice, there’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re worried about your quota now.
So let’s talk about it.
Unsustainable plays that could work now
If you are in this position, you need to focus on all of the things that you have in place today.
Because you simply don’t have enough time to do anything sustainable or systematic.
You can’t hire someone now (or at least you won’t see value from them until they’re ramped).
You can’t start a new campaign.
And you can’t just get more MQLs in the door (unless you magically find a way to drastically cut your sales cycle).
So you need to figure out what’s working now.
And through unsustainable ways, squeeze more money out of it.
You know that another $10,000 in ad spend is not actually going to be efficient for you.
But you can still do it, and it might still result in something.
Or you can do a SPIFF or a sprint with your SDR and AE team to create more opportunities.
But you basically need to take existing resources that are in there and try to come up with creative ways to squeeze more out of them.
Same for the CS team: pull in renewals from next year and try to upsell people
None of these things are super smart.
And you bet they’re not sustainable.
But those are the tactics you can deploy this year.
Move the end of the fiscal year
How’s this of an out-of-the-box solution?
Move the end of the year by a month.
Easy peasy. Target hit. High five. Mic drop…
Stay with me now.
What if, instead of constantly fighting your end-of-year quotas with the holidays, you end your fiscal year on January 31?
First, this solves the Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years destroying mad dash to the year's end.
But it also means you can dip into two fiscal budgets of your customers.
One “use it or lose it” budget and one “we just reset, and we put your name into it” budget.
Salesforce has been doing this for years… or decades by now.
Your CFO won’t love you, but hey… who needs that?
A change in focus
But at the end of the day, it’s really important to be clear what every part of your organization is focussing on today.
Because frankly, not everyone should be worried about this quarter.
Especially the closer you get to the end.
So be aware of all of the kilojoules your folks are burning unnecessarily at the end of December.
P.S. Our podcast The Revenue Formula has seen huge milestones in 2023. According to Spotify, 90% of our listeners discovered our podcast this year. If you're one of our new listeners, how about a review? The first 5 people who drop a review and send me a screenshot, I'll send you some new TRF merch - yes, we have TRF merch. And it's awesome.