🗑️ Is 2026 The Year To Ditch Traditional Annual Sales Planning?

For years, annual sales planning has been treated as a ritual: lock in quotas, territories, and incentives in Q4, rally the team in January, and expect everything to hold for 12 months. But in today’s volatile market, that playbook collapses almost immediately...

Author

Sales Homie
October 31, 2025

📬 Friday, October 31, 2025

T-minus two months and counting on your 2025, folks! Happy Halloween 🎃 and welcome to Friday!

Here’s what you missed this week while you were out selling and growing your business:

1) 3 Strategies To Boost Year-End Revenue 🚀

Constant Contact just released its 2025 Small Business Holiday Outlook report, with statistic-backed tips on how to maximize your sales this season. The survey includes responses from over 1,800 small-business owners and around 2,500 consumers throughout the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. According to the survey, 60% of small businesses credit 50% of their annual sales to the end of the year. That might feel like a lot of pressure, but 77% of owners believe they’ll hit their revenue goals…Read more here. 👈🏼

📎 Sales Tip(s) of The Week:

SALES successes = Actions + Strategy

Actions include cold calls, follow-ups, attending networking events (and actually trying to meet new connections), going to discovery meetings, producing proposals and pricing, managing your CRM, and on and on.

Strategy? It can be as simple as updating your CRM at the same time each day, ensuring that you complete the task. Or having discipline to complete your proposals on non-selling days (Mondays or Fridays) when customers and prospects are less likely to want to meet with you. Strategy is having multiple ways to procure leads, such as attending networking events or cold calling 5-10 businesses in the surrounding area to set up a discovery meeting.

Actions don’t have to be world-class, nor does the strategy to complete them. Clarity sells, and simplicity wins.

🔥 Sales AI Workshops🔥

Do you need assistance writing AI prompts to aid your sales teams? 👩🏻‍💼👨🏼‍💼 Have you recently struggled with onboarding a new sales rep? Do you find your team wasting time searching for customer and prospect data? If you’re a Manager, wouldn’t it be nice to have a built-in tool to help you train your new sales reps?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, Sales Homie is hosting no-cost workshops to trial some of our sales AI workflow automation tools. Interested in volunteering your business as a use case? Send us a quick email.

CRM SUPPORTER

The CRM to get your sales organized. Pipedrive users close an average of 28% more deals after their first year. Learn more here. 👈🏼

2) Drive B2B Sales With Modern Industrial Website Design 🚘

A modern industrial website helps you compete—it transforms how a business sells, serves, and scales. The right design combines user experience with integrated B2B capabilities such as custom pricing, self-service portals, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) connectivity to streamline operations and drive measurable growth…Read more here. 👈🏼

📎 ForwardSelling

Have you navigated to ForwardSelling, Sales Homie’s digital asset brand’s website? If not, you can find it here.

ForwardSelling provides ‘Sales Tools to Power Your Business Development,’ including Sales Homie’s digital sales prospecting tools, strategic sales forecasting and process documents, and marketing-related publications, which are available for download.

🔑 Sales Stat of The Week:

“80% of successful sales require five or more follow-up calls after the initial meeting. In addition, 60% of customers say “no” four times before saying yes.” (Hubspot)

Anyone can run a singular sales meeting. But can you send a thank you note, plan a strategic follow-up two weeks later (think about offering something of value to the prospect), plan a way to see your prospect at an industry or networking event the month after, then find a way to introduce them to someone else from your team 5 or 6 weeks after the initial call. And then ask them to sit back down and reevaluate the prospect’s pain points, spelling out simple solutions that will pique their interest and encourage deeper engagement?

If not, you’re going to have trouble winning deals consistently. It’s all about how you follow up and engage after an initial meeting.

3) Is 2026 The Year To Ditch Traditional Annual Sales Planning? 🗑️

For years, annual sales planning has been treated as a ritual: lock in quotas, territories, and incentives in Q4, rally the team in January, and expect everything to hold for 12 months. But in today’s volatile market, that playbook collapses almost immediately...Read more here. 👈🏼

SPONSOR AD

Deliver A Better Buying Experience With Digital Sales Rooms!

Deliver a Better Buying Experience with Digital Sales Rooms. Learn more here. 👈🏼

Sales Squad Kick-Off Event: Did You Miss It?

Did you know that only 60% of sales reps actually hit their quotas? - Hubspot

Did you know that for every $1 invested in sales training, it returned $29 in incremental revenues. - Forbes

Sales Homie is launching the Sales Squad community, a monthly peer group for 10-12 sales pros focused on skill-building, networking, and mentorship. We’ve secured commitments for half of our first group, with the meeting being held on Wednesday, November 19th, from 1-4 p.m. in Edina, Minnesota. If you’re interested in learning more or attending the first meeting to check out the peer group platform, please check out our website.

📊 Weekly Financial Forecast:

Private sector employers added an average of 14,250 jobs per week over the past four weeks, according to new preliminary data being released by ADP, a turnaround from the negative September numbers.

This week’s number is the four-week average ended Oct. 11.

🦉 Who Is Sales Homie?

We scale your sales strategies to increase business revenues and profits, starting at $595/month.

Nate Zoellner, Chief Sales Homie

To do this, we focus on three areas :

Fractional Sales Leadership, placing a seasoned Sales Executive at any level (Manager, Director, Vice President, Chief Revenue Officer) into your department. Additionally, we have developed our Sales Leader Pro for Small Businesses program, which helps organizations conceptualize revenue and growth initiatives without the investment range typically associated with Fractional. For organizations seeking a consultant, Sales Homie offers Consulting Services tailored to meet your organization’s specific needs.

In need of targeted recruiting for your business development teams? Sales Homie Recruiting builds sales teams that drive results for their organizations. Our retained searches offer 180-day placement guarantees, detailed 30-, 60-, and 90-day onboarding plans, and additional benefits.

Coaching and Training programming includes membership in one of our Sales Squads, a sales peer group ecosystem, individual Sales and Business Owner Coaching, plus our quarterly sales education series, the Revenue Hangout.

For more information, please visit our website.

If you found this content relevant and helpful, please hit the subscribe button below to receive The Sales Report. You can also follow Sales Homie on LinkedIn or Nate Zoellner on Twitter and LinkedIn for more conversation and discovery!

Reply

or to participate.