Hey, 👋 Scott from The Sales Mastermind here.

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We're back, baby!

2025 is going to be a big year.

Here is what you can expect from The Sales Mastermind Newsletter:

• Weekly (or close to) newsletters which are 4 minutes or less
• A heavy focus on Founders who sell but aren't salespeople to close more deals, build the right systems, and hire a sales team
• A mix of quick tips, longer stories, hyper-actionable techniques, and more
• Occasional extra sections such as "Cold Outreach Gone Wrong," "Amazing Cold Outreach", and "Book Club."

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Now, here are three techniques to start 2025 right:

1. Pick your personal KPIs
2. Use momentum
3. Start with a win (or 10)

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Pick your personal KPIs

Whether you are a founder or have any other role, the only sales numbers that matter are the ones you set yourself. Don't accept the public number you told your board, cofounder, team, or anyone else.

An all-too-common and worst-case scenario is when the public number you tell others becomes your internal best case, and then you miss and tell yourself, "Yeah, but that was the stretch goal."

Don't be that person.

Instead, the public number should be treated as a minimum. That's your worst-case scenario.

Next, work out your personal number for 2025 and break it down quarterly or monthly.

Then, link your number to personal growth. Do you want to hit more net new revenue than ever before? Do you want to close the largest deal ever? Whatever you pick, make it personally significant.

Finally, backward engineer this number into a daily KPI or a weekly KPI. How many dials/DMs/emails/meetings/deals/closes/whatever do you need to hit daily?

Now you know what to do day in and day out to get the result you want. And you'll hit the public number you told everyone you would as a byproduct.

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Use Momentum

Every business and industry has a natural cycle and natural momentum/

For example, when selling SaaS to e-commerce, new sales are usually low in Q4 because e-commerce brands hyper-fixate on December sales to survive the rest of the year. Then, in Q1, new sales more than makeup for this as e-commerce businesses want to avoid whatever pain they just experienced in December.

When I sold to gyms in Australia, the two months in which they made their money (or went out of business) were January and September.

Knowing your industry allows you to take advantage of real momentum instead of trying to create fake momentum.

This applies to industry trends as much as it does to the calendar. Buyers like to start onboarding at the beginning of the week/month/quarter and want to purchase at the end of the week/month/quarter.

A less well-known use of momentum is using holidays as a deadline to close a deal. The best part is that this works both ways; either the buyer OR the seller could be the one taking the holiday.

So, since it's a new year, quarter, month, and week, use the coming days to reach out to people and start new buying cycles with them.

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Start with a win

Following the above, a win is the best way to start the new year.

That could mean a new deal in the pipeline, a bunch of January meetings, or closing a deal you weren't expecting.

To make this happen:

• Begin by working out what recently changed in your industry or product offering. You want at least 3-4 changes.
• Then, open your calendar and review every meeting from 2024.
• If there is even a hint that they may be interested, reach out and mention a change from above.
• Assuming a 48-week working year and 3-10 weekly meetings, you should have between 144 and 480 people to contact.
• Next, open your CRM and do the same with every deal that didn't close in 2024.
• Lastly, go through past clients and book new meetings too.
• Expect ~6% of your outreach to result in a meeting and up to 3% to become customers.

The key to starting with a win is that the 3-4 changes are interesting enough to trigger intrigue.

And for you to be shameless, reach out to everyone you can.

The more people you connect with, the higher your luck surface will be. And they were interested in the past, so some will be interested again.

That's all from me, but I'd love to hear from you - what do you do to win the new year?

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Until next week,
Scott Cowley

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