561-429-2585
Email Us
Map Location

5 Ways To Get Your Company Ready For The 4th Quarter

Business Development

For many business owners, the last three months of the year could be the best sales season ever!

Are you prepared to end the year with a bang?

If so, this article is for you.

Digital Resource, the leading digital agency in Miami, will discuss five practical strategies you can use to reach your annual goals and get off to a good start in the new year.

1. Create Simple Structures

structuring company organization

If you want a strong fourth-quarter finish, consider creating simple structures to improve efficiency. By streamlining internal processes, you will improve the efficiency of your workflows, resulting in a more productive team.

And the more productive your team members are, the more projects they can take on, giving you a competitive advantage as the year closes.

Start by taking a look at how your employees spend their days. It helps them figure out how many hours they spend on billable tasks, like projects, and how many hours they spend on non-billable tasks, like administrative work. This number is called the "employee utilization rate" or EUR.

The ideal EUR for a professional service company is around 85%. For instance, if your team members work 40 hours a week, they should spend at least 34 hours on client work.

Tracking your EUR will also show you where you can improve your efficiency. If you are not already keeping track of it, you will probably have some work to do. Start spending more time on billable activities in the fourth quarter.

Adding just one hour per team member daily will save you 20 hours per month. How many more projects could your team work on if each employee had an "extra" 20 hours per month?

Those big, juicy quarter-four targets will look a lot less scary now.

2. Purge Your Contact List

There is only so much space to store data, especially customer and client contact information. In fact, if your fourth quarter involves active engagement with customers or clients, like email marketing campaigns, now is a good time to look over your lists and clean them up.

Why?

Having wrong information can cost you money and make it harder to reach your goals during the fourth quarter campaign.

If you have not yet implemented a strategy to segment your email list, now is the time to do so. Alternatively, review your client profile if you have one.

RELATED: 12 Best Email List Cleaning Service For 0% Bounce

Make sure your client or customer profiles and contact information are as accurate as possible by eliminating any that are wrong or haven't been used in a while.

3. Invest in People

hiring a new employee

Because worker and independent contractor compensation accounts for up to 50% of total costs, your employees are your company's most valuable resource. If you want a successful fourth quarter, you should consider investing in your team right now.

"People buy from people," as the saying goes. Investing in your team members gives them the tools they need to succeed, benefiting your clients.

There are many ways to invest in talent, depending on where your business is in its growth.

If you want to grow in the next fiscal year, you should think about hiring more people. Q4 is a great time to bring new people onto a team.

For professional services companies, the first 6–8 weeks are usually hectic. This gives your new employees time to get to know your clients and learn how you work. Then, as the holidays get closer, your new hire will have the perfect chance to find new customers and build their pipeline for the next quarter.

By adding more people to your team, you increase your capacity and can finish more projects before the end of the quarter.

4. Remarket To Old Customers

The fourth quarter is critical for businesses to close deals and make sales. This is the time of the year when companies are working hard to keep their customers going into the new year. Doing so helps ensure that business usually continues and everything goes as planned.

If you want to bring in some new business in the new year without losing any of your current customers, you might want to think about old retargeting customers. They will help your business by giving you sales at a time when you need them the most.

Remarketing can be implemented in a variety of ways. To accomplish this, you can create:

To learn more about these remarketing strategies, you can read this article: Remarketing 101: How to Bring Existing Customers Back To Your Business.

5. Prepare Holiday Bonuses and Gifts

Santa Claus giving a bonus to an employee

Depending on the culture of your business, now may be an excellent time to plan not only for employee bonuses but also for gifts for clients and customers (if that's possible).

Why do this now?

If you don't start planning now, you might end up scratching your head and spending more money on poorly planned gifts or bonuses. If you do not plan ahead of time, you may end up confused and spending more money.

Make a list of possible gifts if you give them to your customers. This will relieve your or your employees' stress during the busy season and allow you to find the best prices or take advantage of sales and special offers.

Alternatively, if you're sending gift cards and packages to offshore employees, prepare them for the post office now. When the time comes, preparing and sending them won't keep you from working when you need to focus.

Get Ready, Finish Strong!

With careful planning and innovative ideas, the fourth quarter has the potential to be your most profitable period yet. With the end of the year fast approaching, now is the time for professional services firms to devise a strategy for getting ready and finishing strong.

Creating simple structures, purging your contact list, and remarketing to old customers should be your top priorities as the year closes. Furthermore, you should invest in your company's people over the next three months by improving their skills and working conditions and rewarding them for a job well done.

Consider collaborating with us at Digital Resource, the best digital marketing agency in Miami, if you want to learn more about reputation management, employer branding, and public relations.

Contact us today to find out what else you can do to prepare your company for the fourth quarter.

Back to blogs

Related Blogs

Want to work for us?

Think you've got what it takes to hang with the pros at Digital Resource? Check out our Careers page to browse current job openings!

apply Today
Digital Resource Awards