Low sales season: when is it due to market demand and when is it due to your team

Is the low season in sales always the market's fault? No. In many B2C sales teams, leads keep coming in almost the same every month and what changes is the execution: fewer attempts per lead, abandoned retries, slower responses. If conversion drops and leads do not, the low season is your team's, not the demand's.

Updated: October 2026 · Written by Pablo Pascual, co-founder of Vixiees.

Almost everything published about the low season talks about demand: promotions, stock, and prices. Useful if you sell in an online store. But if you manage a sales team that calls leads, there is another low season that almost no one measures: the one caused by the team itself when they relax, stop retrying, and only stick to the easy leads.

Why do sales drop in certain months?

Sales drop in certain months for two different reasons that are often confused. The first is demand: fewer leads come in or they arrive with less buying intent. The second is execution: leads keep coming in, but the team works them worse, with fewer attempts, slower, and cherry-picking who to call. Each cause requires a different solution.

Demand seasonality is real and can only be planned. Execution seasonality appears when the month's result depends on how the team is doing that month. Typical causes:

• Follow-up stops when the team relaxes. After a good month or during holidays, no one picks back up with the leads who did not answer.

• Retries are abandoned. A new lead always seems more promising than one that hasn't responded for days, so the retry never happens.

• The best leads are cherry-picked. When each salesperson decides who to call, they work the easy ones and the rest go cold. It is lead cherry picking, and it gets worse when there is less pressure.

• Response time skyrockets. With fewer people or a heavier workload, the first contact comes hours or days late.

That last cause has a measured cost. In the study published in Harvard Business Review (2011) covering 1.25 million leads, companies that attempted to contact within the first hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify the lead than those that attempted an hour later. A team that responds later in August manufactures its own low season.

How to know if the low season is due to demand or execution?

To know if the low season is due to demand or execution, you must compare, month by month, incoming leads with conversion and with four activity metrics: contactability, attempts per lead, response time, and cadence compliance. If leads remain steady and activity drops along with conversion, the problem is execution.

We call it the Demand or Execution Test, with five signs. You need monthly data from the last 6 to 12 months, which almost always comes from the CRM or the call log.

1. Incoming leads vs. conversion. What it is: received leads and conversion percentage, by month. Who: sales management or operations. How to read it: if leads drop by 30% and conversion stays steady, it is demand. If leads stay steady and conversion drops, it is execution.

2. Contactability. What it is: the percentage of leads that were spoken to at least once. How it is measured: contacted leads divided by received leads, by month. How to read it: if contactability drops in slow months, there was no lack of demand, there was a lack of persistence.

3. Attempts per lead. What it is: the average number of calls or messages each lead receives before being given up as lost. How it is measured: total attempts divided by worked leads, by month. How to read it: if, for example, in good months the average is 5 and in bad ones it is 2, conversion follows effort, not the market.

4. Response time to first contact. What it is: the time between the lead coming in and the first attempt. How it is measured: monthly median, not average, so a forgotten lead does not distort the data. How to read it: if it goes up during holidays or closing weeks, part of the drop is yours.

5. Cadence compliance. What it is: the percentage of follow-up tasks that were done on the scheduled day. How it is measured: tasks done on time divided by scheduled tasks. How to read it: if you cannot track this because no one schedules tasks, you already have your answer.

If three out of the five signs point to execution, tackle the process before investing more in acquisition: buying more leads only leads to losing more.

Real case: CapMédica thought they lacked marketing

CapMédica presents itself as the largest hair transplant clinic in the Canary Islands. It acquires patients through social media campaigns and its own sales team. Their lead-to-visit conversion remained between 37% and 47% depending on the month, and the internal diagnosis was clear: they lacked marketing, no new patients were coming in.

The real problem was different: leads were handled by sheer willpower, without cadences or follow-up, with two or three calls at most and a distribution Excel sheet with duplicates. Almost all the signs in the test pointed to execution.

In a few weeks, they set up the process in Vixiees: two playbooks (one for appointment booking and another for sales up to the day of surgery), up to 9 mandatory contact attempts per lead, and one-by-one distribution, with no duplicates.

Without changing the marketing or bringing in more leads: CapMédica stopped losing the ones they were already paying for.

"Since I have Vixiees, I don't have a low season."
Ana García del Río, Manager of CapMédica

Data reported by CapMédica (period: March to October 2025). See the full CapMédica case study →

Real case: Cleverea and a conversion that depended on the time of year

Cleverea is a Spanish insurtech that sells 100% online insurance with 20 agents, who receive thousands of leads per month from comparison sites and their own campaigns. They had HubSpot and Aircall, but each agent decided which lead to call and when. The result was a conversion rate that went up and down depending on the time of year.

The execution signs were there: 0% compliance with follow-up policies, unmonitored response times, and agents who always preferred a new lead over retrying one that had been in the pipeline for days.

"Before, it depended entirely on what the salesperson decided."
Álvaro Sanz, CEO and founder of Cleverea

They kept HubSpot as their database and built Vixiees on top, with auto-dialing, different follow-up policies based on the lead source, and automatic prioritization by economic value. In the first two months, they achieved a 20% higher overall conversion rate, 45% more calls with the same team, and the total elimination of seasonality in sales and productivity.

"With Vixiees, what gets converted is what I want to get converted."
Cleverea Team, in their success story

Data reported by Cleverea. See the full Cleverea case study →

What to do during low season with the sales team?

In the low season, the first step is to take the Demand or Execution Test. If the drop is due to execution, you must set mandatory cadences, take away the salesperson's decision of who to call, and measure activity every week. If it is due to demand, you must use the slow months to thoroughly work the lead database you already paid for.

The process to eliminate execution seasonality, in order:

1. Set a mandatory minimum cadence. What: a minimum number of attempts per lead and the timeframe between each, by channel. Who: sales management defines it, the system executes it. How it is measured: average attempts per lead and percentage of leads completing the cadence. At CapMédica, they went from two or three calls to up to 9 mandatory attempts. "Terrible. Five is the absolute minimum," was the response from Alex Sánchez, co-founder of Vixiees, when they told him they were calling two or three times.

2. Differentiate the cadence based on the lead source. What: a lead from a comparison site requires an immediate response, while one from a proprietary campaign allows for a different rhythm, as Cleverea did. Who: sales operations. How it is measured: response time and conversion separated by source.

3. Take away the salesperson's decision of who to call. What: let the system decide the workflow order by priority (value, source, age, pending retries), not each person's criteria on that day. Who: set up once for the entire team. How it is measured: percentage of retries done on time and conversion on priority products or leads. This is what Próxima Tarea does: it decides the next contact for each lead, through which channel and when.

4. Distribute one-by-one and without duplicates. What: each lead has a single owner from the moment it enters. Who: distribution is done by the system, not an Excel sheet. How it is measured: duplicate leads and ownerless leads. CapMédica added a rule that aligned everyone: whoever achieved better results would receive more leads.

5. Measure execution every week, not sales every month. What: a weekly dashboard with the five test signs. Who: the team leader, in a short meeting. How it is used: if a sign worsens two weeks in a row, action is taken before it shows in the revenue.

6. Use slow months to work the database. What: if there is a real drop in demand, free capacity is dedicated to retrying old leads that did not complete the cadence. Who: the same team. How it is measured: sales from leads older than 30 days.

To do this without slowing down the team, see how to implement a sales process change without stopping the team.

How to maintain sales reps' productivity all year round?

Sales reps' productivity is maintained all year round when the work pace does not depend on the team's mood or the season, but on a system that sets which lead is next, through which channel, and when, every day. If each salesperson has to decide and remember, their productivity goes up and down with their motivation.

Part of the problem is time. According to the State of Sales report by Salesforce, salespeople spend only 28% of their week actually selling, while the rest goes into managing opportunities and entering data. If, on top of that, each person decides who to call, that time is reduced even further in lower-focus months.

Three habits help performance stay independent of the calendar:

• A single work screen. Without jumping between CRM, Excel, and WhatsApp. Cleverea went from two platforms to a single interface.

• A non-negotiable daily plan. The day's tasks are already sorted when the salesperson starts. In daily organization of the sales team, you can find how to set it up.

• Activity targets, not just closing targets. If demand drops, the closing target drops, but not the attempts target nor the response time target.

A cadence that is met just the same in January as in August

Vixiees is an execution layer that sits on top of the CRM you already have, decides the next contact for each lead, and ensures the cadence is followed in January just as it is in August.

Find out how Vixiees works →

Keep reading: how to add a sales execution layer without changing your CRM and how to implement a sales process change in phases.