Andriana Oprsyko

Every year I hear the same thing in February. "January was dead, nobody was buying." We looked into this for a piece on sales seasonality, and the pattern is pretty clear.
January and February aren't hard because people don't buy. They're hard because almost nobody created new pipeline in the second half of December. The slow months are an echo of the weeks when nobody was reaching out. One thing that surprised me. If you assume a buying committee of 13 people with normal holidays, the whole group is available together in only about 35% of regular weeks. Around holidays it drops much lower. So the window to actually get everyone in a room is smaller than it feels.
A simple check that changed how I look at it. Plot your pipeline by the date deals were created, not the date they closed. The "January gap" usually moves back to December.
How are you planning the next 10 weeks? Are you pushing harder now, or do you have a different way of keeping January alive?

Mine used to go into three places at once. The CRM, a Notion page and a random Google Doc.

A week later I couldn't find the one thing I needed before the next call.

Now I think the problem was never taking notes. It was that nothing connected them to the next step.

LinkedIn, their site, their pricing page, their careers page, a podcast they were on, Crunchbase, two competitor tabs, my notes doc, and four tabs I genuinely don't remember opening.

Then I write three sentences.

I stopped working this way a while ago and I want to know if everyone else did too.