Welcome to Grind Season. This week, we enter the most pivotal period of your entire sales year. From now until mid-December, how you choose to invest your limited time will determine whether you end your year strong, hit your income goals, make it to the winner's circle at President's Club, and start next year with a full pipeline OR wallow in mediocrity, miss your number, and damage your career.
Write Your Sales Comeback Story
If you're ahead of your goals, this is your time to build an insurmountable lead and give yourself an unfair advantage as you enter next year. Do not rest on your laurels and coast. Grind it out and build a massive pipeline for next year.
If you're on track, this is your time to accelerate, finish strong, and propel yourself into the President's Club.
If you're behind, this is the time to shift from being defense to offense.
Most salespeople who are going to miss their annual quota already know it by now. They can feel it. See it in their pipeline. Sense it in their gut.
But what separates winners from losers is that winners use this moment as a wake-up call, not a death sentence.
Stop making excuses about market conditions, difficult prospects, or bad luck. Start taking complete ownership of your results and your future.
Stop thinking like someone who's behind. Start thinking like someone who's about to write their own sales comeback story.
Your energy and confidence level will directly impact your results during Grind Season. If you show up defeated and desperate, prospects will sense it. If you show up confident and focused, prospects will respond in kind, and you will sell more.
But whatever your situation, this is not the time to coast. This is the time to get serious about finishing the year strong.
The Grind Season Mindset
"Grind Season" is more than just a motivational catchphrase—it's a winning mindset grounded in the unglamorous, but essential, embrace of this crucial period with intense focus, hard work, discipline, and consistent, intentional activity.
It’s about ignoring distractions, drowning out the noise, being stingy with your time, and using every moment of your sales day to identify new opportunities and actively advance those deals through the pipeline.
This isn't about activity for the sake of activity. It’s about deliberately and proactively getting back to the basics and fundamentals of prospecting and sales at a time in the sales year when it matters.
Your Pipeline Reality Check
Here's the key gut-check question you must look into the mirror and answer right now: Where do you stand relative to your year-end number, and based on that answer, what will be your next move?
To fully answer that question, begin with a pipeline reality check. Your current quota attainment tells you where you've been. Your pipeline tells you where you're going.
Far too many sales professionals look at their pipeline and see what they want to see, not what's actually there. This is especially true at this time of year when we allow baggage from the first half of the year to remain in our pipeline, hoping that somehow we might close it. But here’s the deal, during Grind Season, hope is not a strategy.
The truth is, those deals have been dead for a long time. The stakeholders are ghosting you; they never commit to next steps, and most haven't returned your calls in months. In the words of Sales Gravy University trainer and author Kristie K. Jones, “stalled” is not a step in the sales process. So start by getting brutally honest and ruthless with your current pipeline.
First, clean house. Go through every opportunity and ask yourself: "If I had to bet my own money on whether this deal will close by the end of the year, would I take that bet?" If the answer is no, move it out of your active pipeline and replace it with something else. Stop lying to yourself and counting on it for this year's numbers.
Second,