What is the deal with selling IT in the summer time?

August 2, 2006 at 9:32 pm Leave a comment

I read an article recently about selling in the summer time. It indicated that most people do not think this is the best time to sell because of vacations, people’s minds being elsewhere, etc…The article, and I disagree whole-heartily with this.

The summer is great, I love the summer, I mean I love selling in the summer. Why? Because most people are thinking about vacation or are on vacation…hmmm. I mean most of my competition is on vacation or thinking about vacation! Companies that I and many of us sell to also have people on vacation, but that does not change the fact that they have project schedules, commitments to their end user community, etc. I have found that a lot (maybee not most) companies plan for large deployment during the summer. Why? Well because people are on vacation and are more tolerant of things like outages, disruptions, etc. So while all of these other sales people are day dreaming and travelling…I am making calls, prospecting, and moving things up the scale. I find the summer to be great for selling, particularly IT selling and I find that most sales people just use the summer thing as an excuse to not do what they should be doing.

So far this summer (since June) I have moved 3 prospects to qualified targets to opportunities. So I find it hard to believe that the summer time is slow. I think our prospects are using this time to plan for the fall. So get out there and get some business closed, let your competitors slug along in the summer time. Summer is wonderful….