“It’s the off-season. We just need to wait it out.”
That phrase usually comes to the business owner with a decision already made: less money is coming in, so the sales team can be left alone until a strong month.
The question is fair: if demand really has fallen, why put pressure on salespeople and demand the impossible? But this mixes up two different jobs. The team cannot make the market buy. But it must understand which deals have been lost, which have been postponed and what to do with them until demand returns.
Otherwise, “waiting it out” does not mean taking seasonality into account. It means stopping management along with sales.
The “later” status can hold three different deals
At a sales meeting, the head of sales opens the sales funnel. Several deals have been moved to the next month. The comments say “the customer is thinking”, “get back in touch later”, “not relevant right now”. The salespeople confirm that the market has gone quiet. The sales plan is reduced, and the forecast is pushed back.
It looks logical. Until you open the deals themselves.
In one, the customer named an event: get back in touch after the budget is approved. In the second, no one agreed on the next conversation after the proposal. In the third, the customer’s question went unanswered twice, and they stopped responding.
In the report, all three have the same status: “later”. In fact, only the first deal has been postponed for an external reason. In the second, the team lost track of the next step. In the third, it lost the conversation itself.
That is where the seasonal explanation breaks down. It uses one reason to explain deals that need different work.
Red revenue figures show the outcome, but not customer behaviour
Seasonality exists. Customers run out of budget, projects stop and purchasing periods change. There is no point arguing with that.
But a fall in revenue does not show what exactly has changed. Revenue may have fallen because there were fewer suitable enquiries. Because decisions took longer to approve. Because salespeople are slower to respond. Or because several large payments shifted from one month to another.
So I would go back to where the change first appeared, rather than to the overall chart.
If there are fewer enquiries from all comparable sources, while the way they are handled has not changed, an external downturn becomes more likely. If the number of incoming enquiries is the same, but there is more often no next step after the first conversation, the calendar has nothing to do with it. If postponements are concentrated around one salesperson or product, a general seasonal pattern cannot explain them either.
This is no longer a matter of opinion. Each explanation has a place where it should leave a trace: in incoming enquiries, in the conversation, in the deal record or in the timing of the customer’s decision.
You cannot treat this August as a repeat of last August
“It was the same last year” is a useful observation. But it is not a diagnosis in itself.
Over a year, the price, product, enquiry sources, make-up of the team and usual time it takes to complete a deal may have changed. Two similar dips on the chart do not necessarily mean the same cause.
You need to compare the behaviour of similar customers, rather than months. Are they starting conversations less often? Taking longer to approve the same decision? Giving the same external reason for postponing? Coming back after a clear event?
If so, the head of sales has an explanation to test. If the only matches are the month and the red bar, they have a calendar, but no cause yet.
You can “wait it out”. You cannot sit idle
Suppose the external downturn has been confirmed. Then it really may be sensible not to try to meet the sales plan at any cost.
But before that, the business owner needs to see the cost of waiting.
The head of sales divides the deals into three groups. Lost: the customer has declined, and the reason is recorded. Postponed: the customer has named an event after which to return, and the salesperson has agreed a date and the next action. Unclear: the team does not yet know what happened and needs to reconstruct the last conversation.
After this separation, there is work to do during the downturn. For postponed deals, the team prepares to resume contact. For unclear deals, it finds out the reason instead of hiding it in a status. For incoming enquiries, it checks which sources and customer groups have changed. The owner decides how much financial burden the company is prepared to bear and whether the product, price or marketing budget needs to change.
That is the dividing line. The market is responsible for whether there is demand. The head of sales is responsible for ensuring that no internal loss is blamed on the weather, holidays or the calendar.
One sales meeting that should change the action taken
Do not start with a large market study. At the next sales meeting, take the deals the team has called seasonal and ask the head of sales to divide them into three groups: lost, postponed, cause not established.
A lost deal must have a reason drawn from a conversation or correspondence. A postponed deal must have an event after which to return, a date, a next step and someone responsible. An unclear deal must have a specific action that will establish a fact.
Then look at where the change repeats. Is it the same across different salespeople, products and customer groups? Did it begin before contact with the team? Do customers independently give the same reason?
After a short cycle, it is too early to judge the recovery in revenue. What you are checking is different: whether there are no longer any deals whose future is unclear, and whether the head of sales can show how much of the downturn came from the market and how much from the team’s work.
If they cannot, do not immediately blame the head of sales. The CRM system may not contain the necessary data, or salespeople may not be recording conversations. Then the first action is to make the reason and the next step visible. Without that, any conclusion about the season will remain an opinion.
Why RENTROP is relevant here
In RENTROP’s “turnkey sales management”, seasonality does not stop the daily work. The head of sales manages deals and the team, the business development director checks their decisions, and AI helps spot recurring changes in data and communications. A person makes the decision: what to treat as an external constraint and what action to assign to the team.
RENTROP is responsible for sales management within the agreed scope of work. The product, price, marketing budget and the acceptable cost of waiting for the business remain the owner’s decisions.
You can wait out a weak month. Deals without a reason, a date and a next step cannot wait.
If “off-season” has already appeared in the report, start with one question for the head of sales: which deals has the market really postponed, and which has the team simply stopped managing?