Your Year is Over!

Jeffrey Czajka • June 1, 2025

When people think of the year, they tend to think chronologically, January to December. It’s June. How is my year over? 


Another “year” exists that is rarely discussed but often felt. It has its own seasons that are disconnected from the environmental seasons of the calendar. Depending on your sales model, industry, market segment, and a few other things you feel it differently. If you are a business owner or a sales professional, it will make or break your year. It could even break your business. But do you know it? 


This “other year” doesn’t even have a name. It is the intersection of your strategic plan and sales cycle. Most people are aware of them separately but rarely look at how they work together. For ultimate success you cannot have one without the other. To work with one and not the other, or work with each separately, is like putting together a sports team while only looking at one side of the game. You will either have all offense and no defense or the other way around. 


In business you see the results a few different ways. You see companies, departments, or individuals that have a “great plan”, but never produce when the focus is mainly on the strategic plan. Other times you see great sales results, but it’s messy. Driving the sales cycle while not connecting it to strategy has a high cost in the way of energy, emotion, and money. Yes, you can succeed in either group, but it’s expensive in many ways. 


As of this writing, my first day of sales training was almost exactly 25 years ago. It was four hours long and we focused on two things, the psychology of the phone script to set sales meetings and what they called the “Business Diagnostic”. A “successful” phone call took three, maybe four, minutes. A lot of good detail was covered, things I still use today. That said, learning, understanding, and applying the “Business Diagnostic” has fundamentally empowered much of my professional success. It’s why I could take a PowerPoint idea for a Fortune 500 company and create a new advisor program for them that added $250,000 of EBITDA in year two.


The “Business Diagnostic” is all about understanding the effectiveness of your sales cycle. Some people refer to this as the “art and science” or “skill and activity” of client acquisition. Call it what you will, the fundamental truth is that your effectiveness is the product of your skill and amount of your activity. The better you perform a skill and the more times you do that activity, the more effective you are.

All this gets complicated by the fact that most sales cycles have multiple steps. Build your business diagnostic. It will empower you to diagnose your sales cycle, address the real issues, and make impactful adjustments. Once you know your ratios, then you can connect them to your strategic plan and achieve great success!


This all matters because if you believe Google and AI, over 74% of sales cycles are over four months long. At least if you are in a B2B model. That means from first contact to purchase it takes at least four months. Think about it, it’s June! You need to deal with summer vacations, kids going back to school, and end of year holidays. You basically have one sales cycle left this year.


Not to mention, this only deals with prospects that are now in the queue ready for you to start reaching out to them. Have you been successfully prospecting in the last three months so you have enough people to reach out to? If not, what’s your prospecting cycle? How long does it take to get new people in your pipeline? Now add four months. The year is over, Happy 2026!


Yes, if you operate within a B2C sales model, or sell a more transactional product/service, your sales cycle may be shorter. In that case you have more time. It may not be six months, but at least it is a little more time that will allow for a few more sales cycles this year.


The point here is many people enter mid-year planning meetings with the thought they have six months to achieve their goals for 2025. You don’t. If you want to be successful, you need to deal with the reality of your situation. If your sales cycle takes four months, and you don’t have enough prospects in the funnel to begin with, you need to do two things; 1) get creative on your prospecting, and 2) learn how to get more efficient in your sales process. 


At Advisor Growth Solutions we help professionals (and businesses) design the strategy and build the skillsets to accelerate growth. Click here to learn more about how to combine Strategic Planning with the Business Diagnostic to achieve greater success.   

Radio poll

By Jeffrey Czajka • December 1, 2025
On the radio this morning, the daily call-in question was “would you rather have a raise or more feedback from you boss?”. They said their online poll had something like 65% of respondents say “feedback”, but a higher percentage of those calling in said “more pay”. Interesting…  While this question may spark good interaction with the radio show audience, it oversimplifies a very complex topic for all parties involved. There is base pay, variable compensation, bonuses, benefits, time flexibility, time off, and so many other things to consider when designing (or accepting) a compensation package which makes looking at the two radio options very situational. Personally, I’ve always found this topic very interesting and revealing when talking with owners/managers. Compensation policies explain a lot about employee retention, productivity, and customer service levels. It also requires the right person to be the in the right job. In the end, there are a ton of creative and impactful ways to attract, retain, and reward employees to achieve growth for everyone. As the radio poll suggest, it is not all about the money, but the money is important.

The Fallacy of Quality Over Quantity

By Jeffrey Czajka • November 1, 2025
During a recent conversation with one of my consulting clients today, they made a comment justifying their lack of activity this past week because they want to focus on quality over quantity. Immediately, my internal fallacy detector went off! It doesn’t matter what industry or profession you are in – you could be a financial advisor, business banker, loan officer, wholesaler, dentist, optometrist, family practice, psychologist, a lawyer, CPA, engineer, or any other service orientated profession that needs to build a client base while delivering their services to paying clients – this fallacy of quality over quantity applies to you. It’s a great point to dive into if we truly want to experience exponential growth.  There are so many impacts that we could discuss on this topic. To one extreme, focusing on too high of “quality” could turn you into a “whale hunter”. You might land the big one, but are you able to stay in business until it happens? Another extreme is, are you educated or experienced enough in your specific profession to be able to handle the “quality” you aspire to work with? Only seeking high “quality” clients typically goes with less but bigger clients. At this point in your career, are you okay with concentration risk? Each client is a larger percentage of your business and if your “quality” client leaves you, a larger percentage of your revenue leaves you too. One way to better understand this dilemma of quality and quantity is to look at building a client base from a game of numbers perspective. Each industry / profession (and person) will have different numbers, but no one is perfect. Not every prospect you meet with becomes a client. Whatever your ratio is, it applies to prospects of any quality level. If you need to get 10 prospects to gain 1 client, you can’t obtain 5 prospects and then justify it by saying “I’m focusing on quality over quantity”. Say what you want, but if you need 10 and get 5, at best you get half a client. Now since we are dealing with real people, you can’t get half, so reality says (more than likely) you round down and get zero. Another reason why people say such fallacy is they are mentally searching for justification of poor performance. On one hand, it might just be laziness. (We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and rule that one out.) More likely, it is poor execution skills. People may not know what to do. If they know what, they many do not know how. If they know both, they may not be very good at it. For many people this is a combination problem they need help solving. You may say, one “quality” client is better than 3 “inferior” clients. That may be true. No one would rightfully argue against quality control measures being in place. That said, if your object is exponential growth over a short period of time, you can never sacrifice one for the other in this equation. You must uphold your quality control AND do the quantity needed. If you deliver both quality and quantity at the targeted levels, the best thing that could happen is you arrive at your goal early. The worst thing that happens is you reach your goal on the intended deadline. If you miss the goal, you probably had the wrong metrics. Building a clientele is a professional exercise comprised of art, science, and execution. It is good to define your quality control measures, but you still need to do the appropriate amount of work to get the job done.
More Posts