How to Recover from a Q1 Sales Revenue Miss

You missed your Q1 sales number with pushed deals and a month into Q2 you are still hearing crickets on those pushed deals. You might be sitting in your office reading this right now. On a Sunday. Missing your son’s ballgame or your daughter’s swim meet.

Q2 is already well under way and you’re looking for answers. Perhaps it’s a hangover from a big Q4. Maybe your team drained the Q1 pipeline to make the number last year.  You can’t stop fuming that the number itself handed to you by the CEO and CFO is unrealistic, yet you’re left holding the bag now to make it happen.  

The miss is painful and you have to figure it out. You have a board meeting coming up. 3 months ago you strode in there with great confidence. Now, you have to explain the miss. Ugh.

Is anyone else having this problem right now?

Yes. Close to 50% of companies will miss their Q1 sales goal this year. You are not alone.

You need a recovery plan. You’ll need to explain the Q1 miss and be confident in making Q2.

Download the Q2 Sales Recovery Plan and get back on track to hit Q2.

What Happened?

Looking back at a bad Q1 is like revisiting a bad dream. Why bother?

There is wisdom to be gained from failure. There are endless examples of people turning failure into success. Business leaders, star athletes, actors, etc. It works.  

The Recovery Plan has 2 tabs. The first is the Q1 Audit. It’s a quick and simple exercise to learn from the failures of Q1. It has 3 Components to it:

1. Get a list of the top Q1 deals that missed from Sales Ops
2. Have your sales team explain why the deal missed forecast
3. Get direct feedback from the customer on what happened. See here how to do this quickly

The goal of this exercise is to use real-time learning for your Q2 deals.

Getting Healthy in Q2

You’re going to nail Q2. The second tab of the tool will help you. It has 4 components to it:

1. Top 10 deals and forecasted revenue
2. 10 specific ‘yes/no’ questions for your sales team to answer
3. A 1-10 score for each account
4. An action plan determined by you and the team

    

The questions are aligned to a common late-stage buying process map. Addressing these now gives you visibility into the legitimacy of the deal. 

For example, more than 40% of all deals are lost to “do nothing.” One of the 10 questions is: Have we eliminated “do nothing” as an option?

If the answer to this is “no,” your Q2 deal may be in big trouble. With 90 days left in Q2, the value of this information is critical. You can actually do something about it!

This is where the action plan comes into play. You’ve surfaced a gap. You and the team can develop a plan to eliminate this as a risk. From there, it’s basic blocking and tackling by your sales management:

• Pre-call preparation with the rep
• Call execution
• Post-call review and follow up

   

Have the sales manager close the loop with you. It allows you real-time feedback. You’re in control of your own destiny

A Win for You

Nobody likes missing the number. This is a problem that persists across almost 50% of sales organizations. 

The Q2 Sales Recovery Plan will help you accomplish all of these things. More importantly, it will set you on your way to making the Q2 number.

The quickest way to turn around Q2 is to visit me at The Studio, SBI’s executive briefing center in Dallas Texas. The immersive sessions accelerate everything, dramatically reducing the time it takes to diagnose a problem, develop a solution, and create an implementation plan.