You’re in sales, and you’re looking at your mid-year sales performance and disappointment is setting in. The sales may be in HVAC equipment or it may be consulting services. The process is somewhat the same. The “good news” is that you created a month-by-month sales closing budget prior to the start of the year. The bad news is that you haven’t been hitting those monthly sales goals. June is a good time to “regroup and reorganize” your sales strategy, although this assessment would have been better served at the end of the first quarter.

The alternative sales scenario is you are on track with your sales efforts, but this doesn’t mean you can’t do better. An HVAC sales engineer who is exceeding his or her monthly sales quota shouldn’t sit back and relax because the monthly quotas are being met. Instead, the successful salesperson should be reshaping his or her mid-year to end-of-year quota to increase the closing sales. I’ve been told there are some who will do just the opposite and coast to year’s end so that the expectations for the following year isn’t significantly increased by upper management. The problem with this job satisfaction is that the economy will always have its ups and downs, and a salesperson should anticipate and plan for continuous improvement to get through the bad times as well as the good times.