Stop Waiting: Build A 2026 Sales Plan That Wins | SOS Ep. 380

We challenge the myth of perfect timing and lay out a clear plan to build momentum, set aggressive goals, and win in a crowded market. We share how to plan at night, become a market expert, and turn systems and habits into a repeatable edge.

• striking while the iron is hot
• prioritizing primary tasks over busywork
• planning nights and Sundays to own the week
• building systems and processes for predictability
• setting SMART goals and reverse engineering targets
• navigating the holiday hangover and market timing
• positioning as an expert to avoid price wars
• networking with intent to open future doors
• joining the SKOOL community for resources and coaching

Join us over at skool.com/survivingoutsidesales. You can sign up for free. Monthly webinars are free for the SKOOL community. If you want to take action and go to the next level, sign up for one of the membership levels.

Chapters

• 0:00 Year-End Reality Check
• 1:10 Stop Waiting And Attack Priorities
• 3:00 No One Is Coming To Save You
• 6:50 Plan At Night To Win The Day
• 9:30 Systems Over Chaos
• 12:20 Join The SKOOL Community
• 15:20 Aim For 50 Percent Growth
• 18:30 Turn Goals Into Weekly Habits

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The Surviving Outside Tales podcast, hosted by Mike O'Kelly, presented by SalesBuilder Academy. The goal is to survive and thrive on all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating, or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now let's go.

SPEAKER_01: 0:30

Welcome to the Surviving Outside Sales podcast. I'm your host, Mike O'Kelly. We are steamrolling sports 2026. We have less than a week left. Uh New Year's is in a couple days. And this is a great time of the year to start thinking about next year. Hopefully, the hay is in the barn. You still do have, I guess, three days to try to pull some deals in for Q4 and for 2025. But let's be honest, the hay is in the barn. Okay. All of your work should be done. Again, if you listen to the podcast, your quota, you should have hit that probably a couple weeks before Christmas. Like that's what you should shoot for. You should never try to squeeze the entire month of December out because you have no idea what's going to be happening. You have no idea if people are going to be taking vacation, if uh budgets are going to change, if people are just going to punt to the next year. So you have to strike while the iron's hot. And that really is the key of today's episode is striking while the iron is hot. It is not waiting and for the best timing. It's not waiting for next month. It's not waiting for next year. It's not waiting for next quarter. You have to stop thinking about waiting. I hear this all the time. Well, I'm just going to wait to do X until next month. I'm going to wait. I'm going to hold off Y. The most important tasks that you should be focused on. You have to attack them aggressively as soon as possible. When I've had some students and I've had some clients that have struggled, what they get caught doing is they get caught doing the secondary and tertiary tasks first, and they don't do their primary tasks first. So they wait because it's easy. Oh, I'm going to respond to this email. So what happens is the day is filled with activity and not productivity. The best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. So when you've got that tall task, when you've got that thing that's staring at you and it's really big, your primary task, whether it be for a day, whether it be for the week, whether it be for the month, quarter, what have you, you've got to attack it. You've got to go after it. Sales is not a passive game. It is not a sit back and wait. And I do have news for you. If you haven't figured this out already, your company is not coming to save you. You're not, your company is not sitting around thinking to themselves, oh my gosh, I just I what can I do to make Mike's job easier? No. They hired you and they're paying you because they want you to figure it out. That is ultimately what they want. When employers are hiring you, when managers are looking at you, when they're interviewing you, when they're reviewing you, they're thinking to themselves, does this person make my job easier or does it make this person make my job harder? Does this candidate are they going to make my life easier or are they going to make my life harder for the first 90 to 120 days after they're hired? That's what they're thinking in their mind. All the questions they're asking, they're looking at your resume, they're they're listening for words, phrases, they're looking for things. They're comparing you to previous people that they have worked with or have worked for them. You're being analyzed the entire time. But your company is not there to provide you with everything. They just can't. Every market is different. You know, what works in Charlotte, North Carolina might not work in Los Angeles, California, and vice versa. But the company doesn't have the time nowadays. And let's be honest, I mean, a lot of the people in the corporate office don't have the time, they don't have the bandwidth, the energy to research. You know, the company's not sitting there researching your market for you. They're hiring you because you're supposed to be an expert in the market. You are supposed to be the one. You're the boots on the ground. So you're the one that's supposed to tell the corporate, hey, this is how my market responds to X, Y, and Z, not the other way around. And I hear it too often. Well, I'm just gonna wait till next quarter. Or, you know what? I'm gonna hold off on that until next year. Uh the timing isn't right. I'm here to tell you folks, the timing is never going to be right. The people that are the most successful in the sales world and just life in general, they create the timing. They create windows of opportunity. And that's what you have to think about in 2026. How do I create more windows of opportunity for myself? You have to create things that are not there. If not, your future and your success is going to be the exact same as the previous person that had your role and they're going to move on from you and they're going to hire somebody else. Because average is not good enough. And if you're listening to this right now, you're probably not average. Let's be honest, you're probably not average. So you just have to think about what you are trying to what you were trying to achieve in 2026. Do you want to have just another average year where you look back in a year from now, before 2027, and you think to yourself, oh man, I wish I should have done X, Y, and Z. Don't do that to yourself. I mean, help is out there. The ideas are out there. I just created an entire plat uh entire uh platform where you can access information on school. Some of it's free, some of it's paid. Invest in your future, but just realize your company is not coming to save you. So when you sit down and you do your goals, these next couple days I've been going through and doing my goals. I have a business goal, I have two business goals, and I have a health goal, a physical goal. Three goals. What you have to do is you have to you have to track it, you have to analyze it. The I also see too many sales professionals that I talk to, the moment that they get home, they're done. They're done. Or the moment they make their last call the day, they're done. They're they're out of work mode. I also hate to tell you this, okay? If you are not doing work at night, and if you are not preparing for the next day, and you are not working on Sundays, Sunday night, preparing for your week, planning, pre-planning, analyzing, reviewing, um, strategizing, if you're not doing that in your free time, you are not going to be successful. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Every single top performer that I have ever melt, ever melt, ever met, has done just that. I used to spend at least 10 to 15 hours per week in pre-planning, strategizing, organizing, routing, targeting, adjusting that did not count towards my 40 hours. And the reason why when you're in outside sales, I know every job is different, but when you're in outside sales, there's so much dead time throughout the day. You can't do everything during your day. So if you're stopping at 4:30, 5 o'clock, whatever it is on Friday, and you don't think, you don't work, you don't prepare, you're not looking at emails, you're not strategizing, and you wait till Monday morning, and then Monday morning you're like, okay, great, who am I going to go see this week? You're already behind. You're already behind. If you don't have a plan, you will have chaos. And you can't be successful with chaos. You can hustle your way maybe through a quarter, possibly two if you're really good. But that's not sustainable. And again, what you're trying to create is you're trying to create systems, processes that are consistent, that you can replicate over and over and over again. It's also more predictable. So you're not sitting there thinking to yourself, oh man, where are the sales coming from? You know exactly where they're coming from because you've planned, you've prepared, you know exactly who your clients are, you know exactly who your prospects are, you know exactly how much you should be getting from them. You're allocating the right amount of time to them. As I've mentioned before, your biggest asset in the sales world is time. How are you spending your time? So all of these things you have to think about for 2026. And if you are sick and tired of being sick and tired with your results, join us over at school. Join us over at school. It literally is the easiest thing you could possibly do. As a reminder, you can sign up for free. So I'll tell you how it works. There's a there's a free version where you can come join the community, and there's gonna be some mini courses, there's gonna be some cheat sheets. If you want to get into either a group coaching um opening or you want to do one-on-one, you can sign up for that as well. There's monthly, there's monthly memberships now. You can come and go as you please. I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for people to get access to 25 plus years of business experience for all facets. If you are looking for a role, if you are looking to get a new job, if you've even been thinking about looking for a new role, we got stuff. I got stuff for that. If you want to create the easiest method that you can put into your business today to close more deals faster with less headache, that's the P3 sales method. And then sales builder, sales builder accelerator is A to Z. That's for the VIP level. That's for the one-on-one coaching. It's A to Z everything to build your business to scale. But when you're looking at 2026, you have to be aggressive. You can't just say to yourself, well, I'm hoping for maybe two, three percent growth. That's not good enough. That's not gonna cut it. You have to start looking at 25, 30, 40, 50% growth. That's your mindset. That's the first thing you have to do is say to yourself, okay, I'm gonna grow 50% this year, I'm gonna grow 60% this year. How am I gonna get there? And then you have to reverse engineer it. You have to come up with your action steps, you have to do your your your um smart goals, you have to be able to track it. Okay. So for instance, smart goals, and I hear all the time, oh, I want to increase my sales. Well, what does that mean? Take your baseline, okay, and then say, I want to do X. Either you can do it, I know that in some industries, it's just raw number. Um, some of the jobs I had, you know, pharmaceutical world, it's prescriptions, it's orders, it's clients, however, your metrics, write it down. What do you want to grow? What percentage? As a reminder, the smart is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time bound. You have to do that, period. You can't do it any other way. So, for instance, if you want to grow uh 40% in 90 days, great, put it down. What is that number? And you have to define it. Don't just say, well, I want to grow 40%. Okay, what does that mean? Okay, from what to what? Does that mean you want to grow from you know$50,000 a month to$90,000 a month? Great. Or whatever 40% is. Uh 20% 20,000. Great. You want to go from 50 to 70? Great. How do you do that? You have to look at, okay, whatever I sell, how many units is that, how many new clients, how many new customers? Then you have to backtrack. Okay. That's your goal. Then you want to start breaking down your steps. How do you get there? Then you have to figure out to yourself, okay, what type of weekly goals, weekly activities do I need to have in order to hit my goal. And then you have to create habits around it. It's not really, it's not rocket science, but so many times, so many sales professionals that I talk to are just shooting from the hip. They wake up in the morning and they think to themselves, hey, I'm I'm just gonna wake up and just go make a bunch of calls. I'm telling you, it's not going to work. So if you happen to hear this beforehand, today at four, uh, I've got this is in December, so if you miss it, don't worry about it. This is gonna be recorded. Okay, so I'm gonna do a webinar today on school, and I'm gonna record it for about 2026 about the things that you need to be doing, okay? What needs to be done in order to have the best year that you want. So the so it's a monthly webinar, okay? So the monthly webinars are gonna be free for the school community, okay? Any of the other training and coaching classes are gonna be for the members, are gonna be for the paid members. So that's gonna be siloed and pay paid members. Um if you want to come, you just need a little bit of help, a little bit of assistance, great. There's gonna be some free resources, happy to help. Tell your friends, happy to help. If you want to take action and you want to go to the next level, sign up for one of the membership levels. Get the access to the the trainings, get the access to the coaching. I'm telling you, it's gonna be the best, the best thing you've done in 2026. But I'm very excited about the the new platform. Um, I'm excited about uh the simplicity of it. I can't tell you how much I've been struggling. I've I can't tell you how much I've been struggling the last you know several months thinking, how am I gonna pull off creating all of this stuff? And then, of course, my mentor I mentioned before just kind of plopped it in my lap and said, Hey, everybody should be going to school. If you're not utilizing school, you're missing out. And I was like, oh my gosh. It makes total sense. So 2026 can be set up for a big year. You just have to, you have to take action. You can't just sit back and think it's gonna happen through inertia. It's not. There is, there are very few products nowadays with the amount of products that are out there. There's so many copycats. I mean, shoot, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day who does uh medical devices, still does lasers, and he was just telling me that there's like 10 new companies that have popped up over the last year and a half. A lot of this technology is not proprietary. So now it just comes down to either price, it's a commodity. And the problem with commodities are usually the buyer is looking for the lowest price. And that's the worst position to see yourself in is price. Because it means that you bring nothing to the table. And that's why I've talked about it from the beginning. You have to you have to set yourself up as being a consultant. You have to be an expert in the industry. You know what experts do? They study, they research, they network within their market. That's another thing I'll be talking about next next year is networking. You've got to network. If you are not networking, if you're not going to events after hours, and I know I've heard this before. Well, Mike, I'm so busy. No, you're not. You're not. You're only busy with what you choose to spend your time. And a lot of you are spending your time at home watching TV, scrolling online. You're not getting out there and shaking hands, kissing babies, meeting new people that can change your life. You have no idea. That person you networked with could get you a job in about three years. Because here's the dirty little secret, okay? The older you get, the more opportunities, the more doors are going to open because of the people that you know. It's not necessarily going to be your numbers, okay? I know a lot of people that have gotten hired because of who they knew, not because, oh, I'm 10 times, you know, 10 times president's club winner. No. People want to people want to have people work for them who they can trust, they know, like, and trust. Because at the end of the day, that's what it all comes down to. So 2026. I'm hoping that enough people will hear this and you have enough time to get set. And yeah, just so you know, I believe 2026 really begins on January 5th. Okay. This, you know, New Year's, and then you've got New Year's Day, and then you've got January 2nd on Friday. No, that's that's not the beginning of the year. Because a lot of businesses are still going to be, you know, kind of the hangover from the holidays, the holiday hangover. And to be quite fair, January 5th, that first week, there's going to be a holiday hangover. So you just have to be prepared for that. It might be a little frustrating that businesses, accounts, prospects are just not responding to you. It's the it's the holiday hangover. It happens every year. It's okay, it's totally natural. It doesn't mean you just take a week off. You still have to go out there, okay? But just know what you're up against. You got the holiday hangover. Okay. A lot of credit card bills are going to be coming due mid to late January from Christmas. Okay. That's when the credit card bills are due. So you have to either strike at the beginning of January or you have to strike at the end of January, early February. You just have to understand the timing of how business operates and how business owners and business operators think. So 2026 can be the best year or it can just be another average year. It really is up to you. It really is. I don't care what people say. I'm not, I've never been concerned with quota in the past. I've never been, you know, oh my gosh, my quota went up. I didn't care. Because here's also another fundamental fact. Your business should be growing all the time. It should be growing. Your business should never be staying the same. And there's no such thing as maintenance. There's no such thing as maintaining certain levels. You have to be growing. If you're doing the right things, you will grow. If you're not doing the right things, you're not doing the right habits, you don't have the right processes and systems in place, you won't be growing. You'll just be staying flat. So hope this helps. Again, you can go to school.com, S K-O-O-L.com slash surviving outside sales. You can go there right now and you can join for free and introduce yourself to the community. And there are some freebies on there. I'm going to keep adding more resources. But like I said, if you want to take your career seriously, then sign up for one of the uh memberships and uh you know let's have a conversation about how we can get you to the next level. So I appreciate everybody who's been listening to the show. Just you know, one of my goals for 2026 is doing um 10 episodes a month. So that's my goal. My goal is to do 10 episodes a month, uh 2024 and 2025. I've had other businesses that I've been running that have really kind of, and and of course my coaching um that have really kind of slowed that down. But I'm making that one of my twenty twenty six goals. That's one of my business goals, is to do 10 podcast episodes every month. So that's about one, one every three days. So basically the way I was looking at it was okay, let's do Monday, Monday, Thursday. Monday, Thursday, Monday, Thursday. That's kind of the goal that I'm looking at right now. So I appreciate it. Hope everybody has a great end of their day. We'll be doing the uh monthly webinar. And then that recording will go on to the free access on school. So again, school.com, S K O O L dot com. You'll have content that will not be anywhere else. Um you can access it and uh love to see you over there. School.com slash surviving outside sales. So I hope everybody has a great rest of their year. Hope to see you over at school. And if not, we'll see you in 2026. Cheers.