The best month of a salesperson’s career is often followed by the worst. I call it the sales success hangover. I have watched it happen to first-year reps and twenty-year veterans, and it has almost nothing to do with talent. It has everything to do with what you stopped doing while you were celebrating.
LNFWGUTF
Years ago I worked at a company called Rawlco alongside a guy we called T Bone. He told me about an acronym the executive team used to carry around on their clipboards. It looked ridiculous. LNFWGUTF.
I asked him what it meant. He said, “Let’s not forget what got us this far.”
That one sentence is the whole cure for the sales success hangover. The reason you hit the big hairy audacious goal is that you had a formula for filling the pipeline. You hit your target because enough deals were far enough along to close in the window you needed them to close in. The minute you relax on the formula, the formula relaxes on you.
The Mechanics of the Hangover
Here is how the hangover actually happens. A seller has a monster month. Commissions hit. Leadership pats them on the back. Everyone talks about the deal at the all-hands. The seller takes a breath.
During that breath, the activity stops. The prospecting slows. The follow-up loses its edge. Thirty, sixty, ninety days later, the pipeline that fueled the record month is empty, and the seller is suddenly staring at a worst month instead of a best month.
This is what I mean when I say:
“The greatest moment of your life where you achieve your highest performance could also be the beginning of the lowest performance.”
The Remedy: Keep Prospecting
The fix is unglamorous. When you are crushing it, you have to keep prospecting. The work that will land your deals three months from now is the work you do this week, not the work you do after the well runs dry.
Here is what I tell sellers to do while they are on a hot streak:
- Protect the prospecting block on your calendar, no matter how busy the closing calls get
- Debrief every winning deal to identify what to replicate
- Re-engage older opportunities that went cold during the busy stretch
- Ask current customers for introductions while the momentum is visible
- Review your pipeline weekly, even when the quarter looks safe
For the foundational mechanics of this, see my post on how I teach sales reps to master prospecting.
Sales Leaders: Stop Ignoring Your Top Performer
Here is the part most sales leaders get wrong. When a rep has a big month, the manager’s instinct is to leave them alone. “I don’t have to worry about Justin, he’s my top performer.” That is the exact rep you should worry about most.
Take Justin to dinner. Go through his pipeline deal by deal. Look at his prospecting activity from the last two weeks, not the last two months. If his next thirty days do not look as active as the thirty days before his big month, intervene now, not when the pipeline is already empty.
I worked with a manager named Prashant who treated this like clockwork. Every Monday after a rep had a big close, he would call them and walk through their pipeline. He was not looking for mistakes. He was protecting the top performer from the exact trap every top performer walks into.
What to Remember
The lessons I want every seller and every sales leader to take from this:
- Your best month is a warning, not just a reward
- Let’s not forget what got us this far
- Prospect when you are winning, not only when you are panicked
- Sales leaders, your top performer is the one most at risk
If you want to pair this with a wider view of how great teams handle both peaks and valleys, take a look at my piece on what makes a great sales team.
What is your prospecting cadence during a hot streak? That answer tells you almost everything about your next ninety days.