The last holiday break of the year is almost here. As you transition from one celebration to another, you can’t risk ignoring the leads in your pipeline. There’s a lot of potential customers and revenue that could slip through the cracks when you’re not watching. To keep up your sales velocity this Holiday Season, let AI do the grunt work for you. 

Here are five ways to keep leads flowing through the holidays:

1. Communicate your unavailability/availability: Your business website is open 24×7 for prospects. Once they are on your website, they may need more information or quick answers. With an AI chatbot deployed for live chat, you can engage your website visitors. Using a CRM with auto-assignment, you can route incoming chats to a sales rep who’s available on shift and take the business forward. 

2. Set up appropriate handovers: Having proper handovers in place ensures a seamless transition of your deals in your absence. With contact notes, agents who engage with leads on your behalf can jot down important information and save it within your CRM. This information can provide context and help you pick up conversations from where you or your colleague left off. 

3. Keep leads warm with sale sequences: Customers today prefer businesses that treat prospects like humans than numbers. You can set up a sales cadence with the right product mix, holiday-centric content, and end with a simple new year greeting and help prospects stay connected with your brand through the holidays. A CRM with sales automation can help you trigger sales cadences across different channels. 

4. Review past trends and prioritize your objectives: When you have limited staffing to oversee sales, you need to be wise about the deals they need to track and the regions/customer segments that are likely to be very active. This can be done by tapping into historical data to make strategic decisions. A CRM with advanced reporting can help you turn data into meaning, apply filters to narrow down the timelines, and sales performances. This will help you forecast better.

5. When in doubt, always schedule: When you break away for the last holiday break of the year, it’s essential to mark your unavailability. If you’ve scheduled email campaigns, ensure that the replies go to a common team inbox or a team member who will be available. As a pre-holiday routine, schedule your emails to go out after the holiday ends. A CRM powered by AI can help you detect your prospect’s out-of-office notification and lets you find the next best time to schedule meetings.