In 25 years of running and advising sales teams, I’ve spent a lot of time in the final quarter watching people I thought I knew well do things I didn’t expect.
There were the steady ones who went quiet, and the confident ones who started discounting deals that didn’t need discounting. And then there were the ones I’d had half an eye on for months, who picked the hardest opportunity in their pipeline and went and won it.
For a long time I attributed all of this to effort. Some people wanted it more when it counted and some didn’t, and I managed teams accordingly. But, that’s not what was happening, and it took me far too long to work out what was.
The last quarter is a different environment, and everybody can feel it
The job description doesn’t change in the final few months of a sales year but almost everything else does.
The target stops being a target and becomes a gap. Everyone sees the gap and counts off the weeks until the year closes. The sums are calculated regularly and privately by every person on the team, whether they talk about it or not. The forecast call moves from monthly to weekly, then to Monday and Thursday mornings. Deals in the forecast that nobody questioned halfway through the year now have tight justification attached to them, and the reasons for inclusion are asked for in front of your colleagues.
Customers do their bit too. Buying can slow down at the worst possible moment as budgets get held back until the new year to improve year-end margins. The person whose signature you need to close this off unexpectedly takes two weeks off in the final month.
All this means that the pipeline gets harder and the scrutiny gets tighter. The pressure you’re under applies to the team as well. You’re getting the same questions from above, more often and with less patience. Most sales leaders will pass this urgency down faster and more bluntly than they receive it. I have to admit, there were times when I certainly did.
What’s really gone is the safety net. For nine months there’s been another quarter in which to put it right. In the last one there isn’t, and everybody knows it.
What that environment actually does to a person
The pressure of the final quarter doesn’t make them try harder or care more. It takes away the room they had to think, to prepare, to weigh two options and choose the better one.
Most of this job is done on purpose. You decide to qualify properly, you decide to have the awkward conversation about budget, you decide to ring the person you’ve been putting off. All of that needs space in the week, and the last quarter is when the space disappears. What’s left is whatever somebody does without choosing to do it.
That’s why the same environment produces such different behaviour from people sitting next to each other. It isn’t the pressure that varies, it’s what each of them falls back on when the deliberate part of the job gets squeezed out.
Four things impact how somebody reacts to pressure
Four different things will impact a person’s performance in high-pressure situations like the final quarter. Deeper than effort and even commitment.
What they do without thinking.
Everyone has a version of this job they can run on autopilot, and under time pressure that’s the version you get. Someone genuinely good at qualifying will still qualify at speed, because it’s built in by now. Someone who’s been getting by on a decent manner and a full diary will stop qualifying altogether. For them qualifying was always the deliberate bit, and the deliberate bit goes first. This is the same two people and the same end-of-year deadline, but eight weeks out, one is working on two deals that are real and the other on eleven that might happen.
What they believe is true.
This one does the most damage and gets the least attention. Most sellers carry at least one belief about themselves or about buyers that isn’t true and has never been properly tested. It’s easy enough to carry in a quiet quarter, because there’s time to work around it. Under pressure it stops being a belief and becomes a decision.
- Someone who believes underneath it all that price is why they lose will discount even when nobody has asked them to.
- Someone who believes senior people are too busy or too hard to reach won’t try to engage at this level, even when it is needed to prevent the deal from slipping.
- Someone who believes this market is unusually hard right now will have their reasons ready for every forecast that slips, and their reasons will always sit outside their control.
None of those look like beliefs when they happen in front of you. They look like judgement calls, they get discussed as judgement calls, and that’s why they’re still there the following year.
What makes the effort feel worth it.
Broadly, some people are driven by what the work gives them directly, being good at it, being trusted with the difficult thing, the job itself. Others are driven by what it gives them: the money, the recognition or the promotion. Neither source of motivation is better than the other and, in a good year, both can achieve their targets.
But it does matter in the final weeks of the year, when the bonus stops being reachable. For extrinsically driven people the reason to keep pushing has just been removed, and some of them will give up on the year quite deliberately. The clearest version of it is sandbagging, where a seller works out that a deal closing now adds nothing to a bonus they can no longer reach, so they hold it over and start next year in front. That isn’t a lack of commitment, it’s the incentive plan working exactly as designed and then running out. The intrinsically driven person tends to carry on regardless, and your incentive plan makes very little difference to their drive.
How they engage when their usual approach stops working.
Under pressure most people don’t try something new. They double down and push harder on the things they rely on, and this can be the exact point where a strength turns into a problem. The fast, energetic one spreads themselves thinly across more opportunities instead of fewer. The one who relies on relationships avoids the tough conversation where they’d have to push back, because pushing puts the relationship at risk. The careful, thorough one wants more information before committing and the direct, decisive one pushes too hard, and customers stop returning calls.
Every one of these issues is a different aspect of performance: motivation, style, limiting beliefs and core capabilities. People are complex and this is what makes it so hard to spot.
This isn’t a binary exercise
There aren’t only two kinds of people, though, and it is too simplistic to say that there are ones who grow under this pressure and ones who shrink into the background.
Everybody is impacted by pressure. The seller who had a brilliant last quarter has a direction too, and it’s just as predictable as anyone else’s. So the question isn’t who holds up, it’s which way each individual goes, how much it affects them, and how you can predict and manage this in advance, person by person.
So do you know how your team will react to pressure?
Here’s the test, and it takes about ten minutes.
Write your team down the side of a page. Next to each name, write what that person will do first when their biggest opportunity slips into the new year. This is not what you’d want them to do, but what they’ll actually do, and why.
Most leaders I’ve put this to can fill in two or three names without hesitating, but after that it gets vague. Sadly, vague is the honest answer for the majority of the team.
The blanks are the same people you’re about to put through the hardest ten weeks of the year. You’ll find out at the end of the year how they responded either way. Your choice today is whether you try to find this out now, while there’s still time to do something with it, or after the year has been missed with everybody else.
If you’d rather not guess, that’s what the MyAcumen Team Diagnostic is for. It looks at what someone can genuinely do, what drives them, how they build trust, and what they believe about themselves. You get all angles answered to show which way a person goes when it gets hard: https://myacumen.online
Or if you want a quick and free place to start, the Team Scorecard takes about four minutes and points you at where the gaps most likely are.
