Kickstarting Q4: A Sales Checklist for Capital Equipment Suppliers After the Summer Break

Not sure where to start after the summer break? Read on to get some ideas from our post-summer sales checklist.

For many suppliers of capital equipment and machinery, the end of summer marks a return to full pace. Customers are back from holidays, projects that were delayed earlier in the year can start to move forward and sales teams need to hit the ground running.

How you start the coming quarter sets the tone for the rest of the year ahead. Establishing the right habits now ensures that opportunities aren’t missed and your team stays focused on the right project opportunities.

At Protel Projects, we provide capital expenditure (capex) project intelligence to suppliers like you, helping you prioritise the right key accounts, engage with the right contacts and focus your efforts where it matters most. As such, we have prepared a practical sales checklist to help you get started this quarter.

1. Revisit Dormant Customers and Prospects

• Why: Some projects put on hold earlier in Q2 or Q3 may now be picking up speed as budgets are released and timelines firm up. We often see a flurry of project activity leading up to the end of Q4.
• Action: Review accounts that were active earlier in the year but have since gone quiet. Reach out with a value-driven message – remind them of your solutions in a tailored way and position yourself as a trusted advisor.
• How Protel Helps: Our project intelligence highlights updates to live projects, so you’ll know if a dormant project is suddenly progressing.

2. Refresh Your Marketing and Messaging

• Why: After a summer slowdown, inboxes and minds are often crowded. Your messaging therefore needs to cut through.
• Action: Review your current campaigns, website copy, and sales messaging. Do they still resonate with your target audience? Are you tailoring messaging to sector-specific capex drivers (energy efficiency, automation, sustainability)? Read our industrial outlooks on the blog to help with this.
• How Protel Helps: Insights from our capex project database let you highlight trends and developments happening right now in your target markets. Matching your messaging to these trends and developments boosts credibility.

3. Rebalance Your Team’s Focus

• Why: Sales and marketing resources are precious. Ensuring the right people are focused on the right accounts maximises effectiveness.
• Action: Map your pipeline against the latest intelligence. Who should be focused on large, longer-term strategic projects? Who should revisit mid-tier opportunities? Are there smaller fast-paced projects we should be actioning?
• How Protel Helps: Our database makes it easy to segment projects by value, sector, or geography, so your team’s time is aligned with the biggest or most immediate opportunities. We can also help forecast longer-term trends with our new CapexData portal.

4. Align Sales and Marketing Around Project Timelines

• Why: Timing is always critical in capital projects. Approaching early allows a relationship to be built, arriving too late means missed opportunities.
• Action: Hold a joint session between sales and marketing to align on projects in the design and approval stages and agree who engages and how.
• How Protel Helps: With detailed milestone schedule information, your teams can time approaches perfectly and match with relevant messaging depending on timescales.

5. Build Consistency Through Weekly Habits

• Why: A strong quarter isn’t won through a single big push, it’s about consistent, structured effort.
• Action: Encourage your team to adopt regular habits: weekly reviews of project pipeline activity, project tracking updates, and coordinated outreach sessions.
• How Protel Helps: With live intelligence on capex projects, these reviews become simple and not guesswork, ensuring your team stays focused on opportunities that are moving forward or require action.

6. Set Clear Targets for the Quarter

• Why: Without clear goals and deliverables, teams drift. With them, they can thrive.
• Action: Establish realistic activity targets for Q4, breaking them down by month and individual responsibility. Focus on achievable and realistic outcomes such as meetings booked, new contacts gathered and requests for quotation.
• How Protel Helps: Use our data to identify the volume and value of relevant projects in your target markets, helping you set targets based on real opportunity.

Final Thoughts

The start of a new period is a chance to reset and re-establish momentum. By re-engaging past prospects, refreshing your messaging and aligning your teams around live opportunities, you’ll give yourself the best chance of success. Protel Projects’ intelligence makes this easier – ensuring that every sales outreach, campaign and meeting is informed by the latest insight. Use our sales checklist for inspiration, we’d love to hear about your plans and strategies.

Start strong this quarter. The capex opportunities are out there, albeit in many forms and sizes, make sure you’re in line to capture them!

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Contact us if you need help powering up your sales after the summer. We’d love to hear from you and help your commercial success.