661 | The Month-End Panic No One Talks About

Month-end desperation isn't just bad for morale, it's destroying your culture.

When reps fear missing quota and leaders react with pressure, everyone loses. There's a better way to lead. That is coming up next.

Welcome to the Chris LoCurto Show where we discuss leadership and life and discover that business is what you do, not who you are.

Welcome to the show, folks. I hope you're having a fabulous day wherever you are.

Today we are tackling one of the quiet killers in small business leadership and that is fear based selling. Especially when it comes to the end of the month or the end of month close, if you will.

Sales reps panic, owners double down, pressure rises, and even if numbers get hit, the damage to trust and culture is real. This episode will give you a clear strategy to replace fear with consistency and panic with confidence.

Now, I've got to tell you, we had a great moment, a behind the scenes context of what we're talking about today.

We had a great moment out of one of our persuasive servant selling trainings where a business owner shared how their sales manager was burning out the team every 30 days.

And the leader thought, you know, pressure drove performance. But what it really drove was burnout. It drove turnover, it definitely drove resentment, lack of trust, lack of loyalty.

So the thing I want you to understand is pressure might move a number today and oftentimes we see that happen.

We can see that if we put pressure on certain situations, we can get something to move, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do for tomorrow.

Most of the times you put pressure on something today, it's going to kill trust. Tomorrow it's going to kill a lot of stuff.

We're going to get into a bunch of that. I'm going to kind of talk about a situation that I saw that just devastated a sales team.

But today what we're going to talk about is we're diving into why fear based selling sabotages long term sales growth. Because it does. Fear based selling always affects every aspect of the sales process.

I mean, even to fulfillment. It's crazy how much it affects it.

We're going to talk about the ripple effect on confidence, culture and client experience. How leaders unintentionally create end of month panic and how to build a steady, sustainable sales culture.

Panic Sales Are Never Profitable (00:02:39)

So the first thing that we are going to start with is that panic sales are never profitable. It seems like it in the moment.

A lot of you out there going, yeah, they are, you just made a sale, you just got profit.

But that's not taking into consideration what happens afterwards. So yes, you may make profit on the individual sale that you made, or you make a few sales and you're making some profit there.

But the problem is, is that most people don't actually see the tangible impact, negative impact that happens to the business.

So let's say you have a sales rep who pushes a half ready client to sign and so just so that you hit the quota, two weeks later, that client cancels.

So many times you see buyer's remorse when a person is pushed, especially some of your biggest buyers are high Ss, high Cs, that's 65%, most likely, that's 65% of who's buying from you.

And in fact, if it's people buying for somebody else, and that number's probably even higher. One of the things I can promise you, if it's a S, an I, a C, a D, you're probably not going to push that hard to that kind of a sale.

They're probably going to feel the pressure and push back or walk away. But if it's an and I'm not saying you can't, you definitely can.

But if it's A is or C, then what happens when you push somebody to make a sale and they're not ready? You get buyer's remorse.

I could tell you in my early days of selling, decades ago, one of the things that I would discover is if somebody wasn't ready and I wasn't a pushy salesperson, I wasn't somebody, you know, I was selling my own stuff.

It wasn't something like I was trying to cram it. I can't stand selling my own stuff. That's why I have salespeople. But, but I wasn't somebody who crammed something down your throat.

But one of the things I discovered early on is the people that didn't seem ready on the phone because I'm paying attention to everything.

The people who didn't seem ready on the phone were the same people who called back a week, two weeks later with the craziest reason why they needed their money back.

I mean, I would hear, I would hear things that were just insane. My, you know, my aunt's third cousin's next door neighbor is having a crazy surgery and I told them I would pay for it, so I need the money back.

I mean, it would just be the most insane things. The point is it doesn't matter what their reason was for getting the money back. The problem is they were getting their money back.

And that taught me very quickly, oh my Gosh, I should not be closing anybody who's not ready because one thing I can't stand is regret.

And, and I can't stand somebody coming back and saying, hey, can I get my money back? Because I wasn't ready for that purchase. I want to make sure. And our team does a phenomenal job of making sure people understand completely before they sign.

Why? Because we can't stand somebody not being ready. Because it affects trust, it affects loyalty. If we have a client that we just pushed too hard, then guess what?

They no longer want to be our client. It's not like they go, hey, can I get my money back and maybe I'll give it back to you here in a month or two. That's not what happens. You have to treat people with dignity.

And panic causes that short term thinking where reps push whatever closes fastest. You know, it doesn't even matter. It's not even necessarily what serves the client best.

And chances are it's probably not what serves the client's best. And what it does is it causes the client to feel it. They feel what you're doing. They feel some pressure. Yes. Should they be able to say no, I don't want to buy that right now?

Absolutely. But you may have pressured them in a way that they actually choose to make that purchase.

But I can tell you, not only are they probably going to come back and want their money back and what are you going to do? Tell them no?

Are you going to be, you know, mean, we sold you badly, but you can't have your money back. I mean, for the love, you have to think about this.

No matter what you do, there's no win win because you've now lost the client from that sale and probably any future sales as well because you didn't treat them with dignity.

So things to think about. Fear based selling might win in the moment, but I'm gonna tell you, it's gonna lose the mission along the way.

Owner Pressure Fuels the Wrong Fire (00:07:11)

Second thing you need to know, owner pressure fuels the wrong fire. Now let's talk about the leader's role in this dynamic.

And I'm gonna, you know, let just take an example of an owner who calls like a team huddle on the 29th and demands a miracle close.

What the team hears is they don't hear, hey, we've planned all month long we've planned, we've got goals and strategy and all this. What they hear is we don't plan, we panic. That's what the team hears. Oh my gosh, we got two days.

We Got to close stuff. We're feeling the pressure from the owner. I will tell you, I watched an owner decades ago decimate an entire sales team.

I'm talking about a large team because of pressure by pressuring that team because sales weren't going the way that they wanted the sales to go.

And they were fantastic in good times and leading well in good times. And when it didn't go the way they wanted to, you just saw this version of this person just decimate a whole entire team.

And it took forever to get that loyalty back and that trust back. I'm going to tell you, there's a probably a good number of salespeople on that team that never did get back to that place of trusting and being loyal. Right?

They just worked to get a paycheck at that point because the owners panic. You better sell, you better close stuff, you better get things done. That kind of pressure rips out anybody's desire to be selling.

It creates this fear based process and it creates this urgency that nobody wants on their team. Now there's an old analogy where a guy and his wife are about to get their house foreclosed and I mean, they're just out of money.

And he's on his way to the one last sale. If he can get this sale, it can keep the bank from foreclosing his house. And so he's just stressed out, he's fear based, he's got the wrong urgency.

Everything about this sale is a terrible concept. And then his wife calls and says, honey, you're never going to believe this.

An uncle that, you know, I haven't known for a long time died and he left us some money in our will. The bank's not going to foreclose on the house. And she says, you don't have to go to that sales call. You could come home. And he goes, no.

He says, that's fantastic, but I'm going to go ahead and go onto the sales call anyway. Now here's my question for you.

Do you think that guy was going to get the sale when he knew his house was about to be foreclosed and he had to have that sale? Compared to how would he feel, how would he do as a salesman after he found out all the pressure is off?

Business owners and leaders and sales team managers, you have got to get that concept. It is one thing to push a sales team.

And listen, we have times where our sales team is pushed, but it's pushed for goals, it's pushed for quality metrics. It's a, hey, let's see if we can't get this done. Not a you better. You have to. You need to. Right? There's a world of difference.

We have great sales that come along because the team is united in selling and going after the same goal. Not the pressure of you have to make this happen.

The last thing we want is a single client to feel pressured that they have to make a purchase with us. Why? Because if that happens, listen to me. You're probably not serving your client with what they need. You're telling them what you want them to hear.

You're selling them what you want to sell them.

Folks, we need to be in the business of serving people what we have that can help them with what they need, not telling them what they need to buy because we want to make a sale.

You got to get this. It creates a toxic loop of short term wins, but incredibly long term breakdown. So understand that your pressure sets the pace.

So be smart about this. Choose consistency over chaos. Chaos never wins out, it just never does. It creates the exact opposite of what you want.

You may find that you have sales that day and you may feel good that day, but a better plan is gonna do a heck of a lot more for your business and more for you in the long term.

Culture Cracks Start at the Close (00:11:58)

Next thing, culture cracks start at the close.

Culture cracks. Cracks in your culture start at the close. So you have to understand that month end panic doesn't just stay in sales. I think people just completely miss this part.

That month end panic spreads through the rest of your business, right? So think about it.

If every month, at the end of the month, your entire team is bracing for a flood of rushed contracts...

you know, your, your fulfillment realizes that the beginning of their next month is probably going to be a bigger pain in the butt because all of this stuff, they know that they're going to get these pushes instead of a consistency, then how do they plan?

How do they strategize? They just strategize for chaos at the end of the month, the beginning of the next month. That is a terrible way of operating.

It also means that none of the sales were probably properly qualified. I will tell you one of the biggest things we run into all the time is salespeople, especially in Strat Plan company after company after company.

What we see is salespeople who are not filling out quality sales processes because the push for the sale is more important.

So then they're passing on this sale to admin somewhere, some level of fulfillment somewhere. And they're missing addresses, they're missing the proper products, they're missing proper details for them to get the sale done.

There's all these things that are missing. And now we are spending a lot more time with going back and forth between admin and sales trying to get this information. Are we getting it? Not really.

Why is that? Because sales are on the phone. Salespeople, sales reps are trying to get to the next call. So now you have way more expense in payroll going out trying to solve these ridiculous problems that never should have existed in the first place.

Folks, that kind of stress, that undermines your culture. It undermines team collaboration. It really undermines client onboarding.

Trying to get your clients onboarded well, because they're not going to be onboarded well because nobody can onboard them well because we don't have the right information.

So if I buy from you out of a fear based panic mode situation and you don't get all the information that I'm left asking question after, hey, when is this going to happen?

Hey, I didn't get anything from this. Hey guys, you've got my wrong address. This isn't my address. Hey guys, what about that? You know, I'm the one who now has to handle and fix your sales process.

I have to deal with your sales process. Now do you think that's going to create loyalty with me now? Do you think that's going to create trust with me? Not at all.

Instead it's going to create this process where I can't wait to be done with you because I had to do so much of the heavy lifting as a client. But also take a look at your admin team.

They're now probably ticked off. They're trying to get sales to give them information. Sales is getting ticked off because admin won't leave them alone. And you've created this entire ridiculous process.

It undermines your entire culture. At least I hope it does.

I hope you have a better culture than this in mind that you don't want this chaos, you don't want these problems so that if this is happening, it very quickly shows you that it's eroding your culture process so that you can get in and fix it as fast as possible.

Understand, the message that you're sending is numbers matter more than people. Numbers matter more than people. Numbers matter more than the salesperson's fear based process.

Matters more than the admin's stress of not having all the information they're supposed to get. It undermines the client. We don't actually really care about you as a client. We care about your wallet, but not you.

And it also undermines vendors because I guarantee you, guarantee, I've worked with way too many businesses that have had this happen where vendors are having to turn off a job site and go somewhere else and leave that job site and leave that client because things weren't ready, things weren't prepared, the right information wasn't on all of the details that they needed to execute on that job.

So what starts as a quota problem? What starts as a we need more money.

What starts as a we need to lift this bottom line. That becomes a culture problem, not just in sales, folks, throughout the entire business. And everybody sees it.

And then everybody starts asking the question, why isn't the leader or owner doing something about this? Why are they allowing this to happen? Folks, there's better ways.

I can promise you, it's easy. I'm going to teach you some of this.

The Confident Sales Culture (00:17:01)

So next piece is the confident sales culture. So here's how great leaders break the cycle:

Now, in one of our Key Leader Programs, one of our key leaders shifted their review from monthly closes to weekly pipeline activity.

They saw a much calmer, much more confident set of sales reps. So instead of making this push, push, push, we've got to get these dollars in.

So think about this.

What's happening is, is when we are pushing for money by the end of the month, so we close higher on the end of the month, that means that we did not plan and prepare well with quality metrics, with quality accountability, with quality daily, even hourly goals for our salespeople.

Yes, you can set daily and even hourly goals for your salespeople, if you will. Just spend time focusing on creating weekly activity, not monthly.

We're not just looking at a monthly number. We need to hit this number every month or by the end of this month or whatever.

But instead, take a look at what it takes to create the number of sales that you need on a weekly and even daily basis. How many calls? How many advertisements, how many callbacks?

Which, by the way, you're not doing anywhere near enough. Your salespeople aren't even getting remotely close to the number of callbacks to get the sale.

80% of sales. 80% of successful sales happen after the fifth contact. If your team is making one to two contacts, you're missing out on an incredible amount of sales.

So these are things that you need to be planning. What does it look like to have goals daily, possibly hourly, weekly. Break those down. That helps you to see where we are ahead of time. So every month we start at zero, right?

And we're trucking along trying to accomplish what we need to accomplish at a consistent pace early on.

And if we're not hitting it, it helps us to know this so that we're not rushing at the end of the month, what changes do we need to make? How do we need to adjust things?

Did somebody take a week of vacation off and that's hurting our numbers? All of this stuff helps you to start setting consistency in place.

When you do that, when you put good quality metrics in place, then you de escalate the month end pressure. You de-escalate the culture issues, you de escalate the loyalty issues.

You just, you de escalate so much and create consistency. You create things that you can celebrate, celebrate consistency. Celebrate the consistency over the last minute saves.

The last minute saves are great, they're fantastic, they're fun, they're exciting when they're not pushed, when it's not fear based.

So create consistency and then continue to celebrate it. Consistent sales cultures outperform desperate ones every time. Every time.

Think of the desperate person going to that sales call thinking his house is going to be foreclosed on. How much better is he going to do when he's no longer desperate?

Reflection (00:20:22)

So things to think about. Fear based pressure might move a number, but it always breaks something else.

You can build a sales culture that's confident, client focused and consistent.

But it starts with leadership that values trust over panic. A leadership team, an owner, a sales team leader that values trust over panic.

Action Items (00:20:49)

So here's what I want you to do. Starting right, you can do these actions right now.

First thing is audit your last three months of sales activity for signs of last minute panic. Take a hard look and see. We may be thinking we're doing something positive.

And come to find out we're creating this last minute panic. No, it's exciting, Chris. It's been fun. The team gets excited.

Okay, once again, how is it affecting us and why can't we do that on a more consistent basis throughout the month instead of making it a big push towards the end of the month? Right?

So audit your last three months of activity and look for those signs.

Second thing I want you to do is clarify weekly activity benchmarks for your sales team. You should have metrics that they need to hit on a weekly basis.

And I'm gonna tell you, some of you guys need it on a daily basis and possibly even by hour, right? Here's how many calls you need to hit, here's how many outbound reaches, here's how many emails, here's how many, whatever it is right.

Take a look at that activity and put those benchmarks in place. Don't just wait till the end of the month. Third thing you can do is schedule a team meeting to reset expectations around how you measure success.

Help them to understand that their consistency of day after day after day pushing is something that is highly valuable to you and that you do appreciate some of the last minute sales.

But that's not going to be something that we're pushing. It's not going to be. We want this over a month long period. We don't want to try and force this into just a small period of time.

Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event 2026 (00:22:27)

So fear based sales pressure isn't leadership. It's a breakdown in strategy or it's a complete lack of strategy, if you will. So if your business is stuck in the same cycle and listen, no judgment.

We have been taught this by business after business and leader after leader. Many of us have been taught this from people from before. We're just changing that.

We're trying to help you change that. So if this is something that you're finding in your team, no judgment, recognize it, be aware and let's do something about it.

It's time for a breakthrough at the Next-Level Leadership LIVE Event. We'll equip you with the tools to build confidence, build based sales systems and a team culture that you can be proud of.

So get your seat with an early bird discount right now. Go to chrislocurto.com/liveevents. That's chrislocurto.com/liveevents.

All one word folks. That's all the time we have for today. I hope this is helping you immensely. This can literally just this small piece and this is what we do.

We teach this stuff and at a very high level that helps client after client, team after team.

This piece right here can help you change the way you operate your sales team and increase your sales and keep loyal customers and keep folks wanting to continue to give you money because they appreciate what you're delivering, not feeling forced.

As always, take this information. Change your leadership, change your business, change your life. And join us on the next episode.