Paul DiModica

Do You Suffer From Circadian Sales Rhythms?

Selling is an emotional, psychological thinking sport that requires salespeople to balance their sales goals, their professional motivation and their ability to work within a time management model as a coordinated equilibrium.

Circadian is Latin derived word meaning "around a day" and Circadian Rhythms are adjustments and changes in your physical and mental characteristics that happen to you throughout the day. Sometimes called your "Body Clock," circadian rhythms can be different for everyone based on their genetics, diet and life habits.

But do you suffer from Circadian sales rhythm problems?

• Is your sales success slow in the summer?
  
  
• Do you sell more at the end of the month or end of the sales quarter?

As salespeople, we have 12/12ths of our company's fiscal year to sell our assigned sales quota or target. Every month that we miss our assigned quota commitments, we often believe that we can "make it up" in future months.

But this is a fallacy.

As salespeople, you only have 261 days of selling time per year. Factor in vacations, holidays and weather days depending on where you live, you are now down to about 240 selling days a year, or about 20 business selling days or less a month.

And then there are the summer months when it is normally difficult to contact decision makers because they are on vacation, so your available selling days shrink even more.

To maintain equilibrium in your sales success, many salespeople must manage their circadian sales cycles and balance the up and down rhythms of their sales cycle.

Traditional circadian rhythms are affected by the quality of sunlight you are exposed to and the room temperature you sell from. Circadian sales rhythms are affected by the size of your sales pipeline, the sales step qualification model you use with prospects, and the sales process you use to sell.

Selling has also a circadian rhythm to it that depends on manageable external cues. Manage your selling cycle rhythms and you will increase your sales capture success. Attempt to sell your annual assigned sales target all in the fourth quarter of your fiscal year and statistically you will not succeed.

To manage your sales rhythm more successfully, introduce artificial changes in your sales rhythms.

7 Steps to Control Your Circadian Sales Rhythms

1. Try to close 75% of your forecasted deals by the 15th of each month.
   
   
2. Never forecast a deal to your management team to be closed in any month where the proposal has not been submitted to the prospect by 5th of the month or the contract has not been submitted by the 15th of the month. (If you are selling global 1000 companies, always have the contract in the prospect's hands by the 1st of the month or earlier in which you anticipate closing the deal).
   
   
3. Sales margins shrink as your prospect sales pipeline shrinks. This is due to sales team members negotiating less when their sales opportunities are less, so they give away more to book revenue. To increase your margin or sales profitability, expand your sales pipeline.
   
   
4. To increase your sales success, review the sales you have made during the last 24 months and identify common buyer characteristics by company annual sales, industry type, business title that bought from you and the business drivers that made them take an action step to buy. This is called prospect prototyping. By understanding your most likely prospect to buy, you can shorten your sales cycles by selling buyers, not lookers.
   
   
5. To manage your Circadian Sales Rhythms, identify your sales successes by the geography of each customer who bought from you during the last 24 months. There is a study out that discusses business success by buyer location which draws a conclusion that the further a customer (or potential customer) is away from your home traveling zone, the less successful you will be with them for new business or extended existing business. Part of this hypothesis stems from the observation that as you move physically further away from your normal business selling zone, you decrease your physical and emotional health stability and subsequently reduce your business alertness. In theory, selling closer to home should increase your sales success.
   
   
6. Salespeople often fall in an "auto-selling" zone of selling the same way they have always done. To change your sales rhythm success, change your sales model. All prospects are not the same - so don't use the same sales methods all of the time.
   
   
7. Often sales compensation has its own Circadian Sales Rhythms. If you get comfortable with your average annual income, you will never change your sales success. Often salespeople live on the base salary and play on their commission and their bonuses. To play more, strive for an annual increase of 20% or more in your annual income.

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."

George Bernard Shaw

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