New year, same quota. 3 CREATIVE ways to book a meeting in January.

January in sales is a time to reflect.

• What's going to be my area of focus in 2025?
• What can I actively do to better myself as a seller this year?
• Why on earth did I get a job in sales?

It's a frustrating time of year for a lot of sellers.

Prospects that asked for a call in January aren't answering.

It's a frustrating time of year for buyers.

Sellers that were fobbed off in December won't stop calling.

It feels like everyone is trying to have a fresh start in 2025.

But here's what I know to be true:

Your sales quota isn't going anywhere. It's exactly the same as it was in 2024.

Or maybe it's increased. Happy New Year, am I right?

Building a strong pipeline is more important than it ever has been.

So here are 3 things that work for me when booking a meeting in January:

Send a video that stands out

I started sending personalised videos to prospects back in 2019.

My reply rate was about 50%.

I always use humour and I give the prospect a flavour of what a meeting with me could look/feel like.

It's all well and good me suggesting to send prospects videos... But what should the video actually be of?

Here's the script I would use for a prospecting video in January 2025:

[Hey Larry,

My New Year's resolution was to eat healthier and to connect with more sales leaders.

I had a Chinese takeaway last night so I hope you can help me hit at least one of my 2025 goals.

My name is Tom from MySalesCoach.

You don't need me to tell you how important coaching is but often leaders like yourself tell me either:

They struggle with finding the time to regularly coach their team individually

or

Their team have different strengths and weaknesses that if they were addressed could have a real impact on performance.

We offer 1:1 and group coaching from 60+ industry experts. If external coaching in 2025 is something you'd be open to, let me know and I'll send over a time to chat.]

Make some content (about the problem, not your solution)

I've been an advocate for building a personal brand now for over 5 years.

I believe that content creation is the single best way to get in front of a buyer.

At the start of the year your prospects are planning for the rest of the year so it's a great time to send them something interesting.

Here's what I would do

1. Create a LinkedIn post about the problem you solve (not your solution)
2. Invite your audience to give THEIR opinion on that problem in the comments
3. SEND the content as a DM to your prospect and ask for their insights

Salespeople aren't doing this in 2025.

If you do, you'll be ahead of the game.

The worst thing you can be in sales is a generic seller with a generic sales message.

Create content that sparks conversation and harness that content to prompt conversations in the DMs with your prospects.

Pick up the phone (oh my god, WAIT what? 😱)

Ok so I don't how creative this one is, but you know what...

Nobody is cold calling enough.

Some people will tell you that cold calling is dead.

That's not the way I see it, it's certainly not the way the MySalesCoach SDR team see it.

But I think what people struggling the most with, is cold calling can be a lonely activity.

Luckily for you, we're just about to relaunch our cold call powers.

Join Neil Bhuiyan every weekday at 2pm and make cold calls live with other sellers.

When you join you’ll get:

• Daily motivation to get you in the zone
• Expert advice from a MySalesCoach coach
• Realtime feedback from other sellers

It's free (for all) and you can add the sessions to your calendar now.

Every week for Surviving Sales, I sit down with one of our expert coaches.

This week, it's someone who's been selling for much longer than I have.

Fred Copestake is a sales coach and author of Ethical Selling.

His mantra is "Good people doing good things in a good way"

(Which might be the greatest mantra of all time.)

Here's how our chat went:

Tom Boston : You've been in the sales game for a while. What's the biggest shift you've seen and how can sales pros keep up without getting left behind?

Fred Copestake : I'd say the biggest shift is probably the speed of change. Change is constant. There's always going to be something, but I think that stuff is happening faster now.

During the pandemic changes that were going to come came very fast and now other things that are going to happen are also happening very quickly. So I think as a sales professional, we need to be aware of this.

Understand what they are and make a commitment to move with them.

It's a bit like the frog in water. If the water starts to boil gently, it doesn't realise and it boils to death. We don't want to do that. We want to be aware and to keep a commitment to learning and growth to make sure we are doing all the most up to date stuff. What I would say in the evolutions I've seen is that we kind of gone from consultative into value based into a more collaborative sales approach.

The shift I'm seeing now is people looking for a win-win-win scenario, which is why I wrote the book Ethical Selling. So by that, what I mean is that there's a win for the customer; win for the company and also win for your conscience.

So you know that what you're doing is right. You can look yourself in the mirror and you're doing a decent job at the end of the day. To do that, it's all about keeping up with those changes and what the market is demanding.

Tom Boston : We've all been there. Things get noisy. Priorities feel all over the place. What's your go to advice for clearing the fog and staying laser focused? Is there such a thing as laser focused? Is there such a thing as laser focused?

Fred Copestake : I like that. I guess we could define laser focused as:

Being very clear on what it is that you're here to achieve. When we know that we can start to prioritise on doing the things that make a difference.

So we're making better decisions about our activities, and then we can look at what those activities are and make sure that our processes, our procedures, our ways of working are consistent with what we're trying to achieve. Getting that done.

Really knowing what it is you're all about would be the kind of the main thing and then having all those ways of working set up to help us do that would be the way to stay on it.

Tom Boston : 2025 is here and everyone's looking for that fresh start. What's one simple actionable tip every sales team should take on board to crush it in this new year?

Fred Copestake :New year, new me. Except it's not, it's new year, same me or same you.

You're likely to have a lot of good stuff going on already. So the tip is to:

Look inward, work out what those are, keep on doing that stuff and make a commitment to making all those things a little bit better.

You know, the aggregated marginal gains thing where it's just easier to do 100 things 1 percent better than it is one thing 100 percent better. So look at all the good stuff, look at your successes, build on those.

I mean, the other thing I would say, and you would be upset if I didn't, would be to say, buy Ethical Selling, the new book I wrote, and then sign up to the Institute of Ethical Selling where a lot of this thinking is captured.

This is essentially pulling together all the, the shifts and the things we've just talked about and helping people to stay where it's at currently. That'd be my other tip, but really, the main one will be look inside because you're doing a lot of good stuff already. Build on that.

BECOME A MYSALESCOACH MEMBER: Join one of Fred's group coaching sessions and learn more about our memberships here.

ADD COLD CALL POWERS TO YOUR CALENDAR: Join our tribe of cold callers, weekdays 2pm GMT

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