The End-of-Quarter Trap

Ashley (Finance Director) and Andrew (Sales Director) are looking at the Q3 revenue dashboard in their office in Boston.

The End-of-Quarter Trap

Listen and choose the right answer

What is the main problem Ashley and Andrew discover on the dashboard?

• Sales volume is dropping rapidly across Europe.
• Excessive discounting has caused massive margin leakage over five years.
• The sales team is too small to handle new accounts.

What does the voicemail from Apex Logistics reveal?

• They refuse to work with the company anymore.
• They always wait for end-of-quarter discounts because they know sales will panic.
• They want to renegotiate their contract for next year.

What solution do they agree upon by the end of the conversation?

• To lower prices even further to beat competitors.
• To implement a pricing reset and enforce discount discipline.
• To fire all sales representatives in Boston.

How does Andrew feel about their past discounting habits initially?

• He thinks big enterprise buyers need commercial incentives to sign fast.
• He believes discounts never helped them close any deals.
• He wants to increase discounts by fifty percent.

Listen again and complete the sentences

• Ashley: Andrew, look at this chart of our five-year ____ in Boston. It's terrifying.
• Andrew: I know, Ashley, we've got a massive ____ problem across every single product line.
• Ashley: ____ is destroying our financials, and discount creep is completely out of control.
• Andrew: We were supposed to hold the ____ , but sales reps panicked every single month.
• Ashley: And look at this ____ spike. You've literally trained customers to wait for September.

Sources: photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels