{"id":19451,"date":"2026-11-13T11:43:00","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T16:43:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/?p=19451"},"modified":"2026-11-13T11:43:00","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T16:43:00","slug":"outmarket-only-4-weeks-left-this-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/2026\/11\/outmarket-only-4-weeks-left-this-year\/","title":{"rendered":"Outmarket: Only 4 Weeks Left This Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

The calendar says seven weeks. Your buyers’ say something very different.<\/em><\/h3>\n

Count them. From Monday, Nov. 16 to New Year’s Day, there are seven weeks left in 2026.<\/p>\n

Now take out Thanksgiving week. Take out Christmas week. Take out the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when half of corporate America is out of office and the other half is pretending not to be.<\/p>\n

That leaves about four.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And for anyone selling into retail and foodservice chains, even those four weeks come with an asterisk.<\/p>\n

Your customers are in the middle of their biggest season of the year. The National Retail Federation<\/em> expects November and December retail sales to grow 4.2% to a record $1.013 trillion, and retailers plan to hire as many as 375,000 seasonal workers to handle it. The people you need to reach are running a marathon, not reading cold emails.<\/p>\n

That squeeze shows up in every channel you use to reach them, just not all at once.<\/p>\n

Email goes quiet first. Belkins <\/em>tracked 7.5 million cold emails across 2025 and found December had the lowest reply rate of the year at 0.35%, roughly 22% below its annual average.<\/p>\n

0.35%<\/strong> cold email reply rate in December, the lowest month of 2025.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The phone holds up longer than you’d think. In Belkins<\/em>‘ analysis of more than 175,000 cold calls, November was one of the best months of the year for turning conversations into meetings: 6.5%, against a 4.6% average. The next two weeks are a reason to pick up the phone, not wind down.<\/p>\n

Paid ads go the other direction. Retailers pour money into Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns, and everyone else pays for it. Varos <\/em>benchmark data, reported by Right Side Up<\/em>, showed Meta CPMs jumping 33.5% from October to November 2023, with Google CPMs up 20%. A B2B ad aimed at chain buyers is bidding against doorbuster ads for the same eyeballs. Those costs ease after Christmas, when CPMs have historically dropped about 13% in the final week of the year, so a campaign held until then, or until January, buys more for the money.<\/p>\n

Deals stall last, and hardest. Gong Labs<\/em> analyzed more than 400,000 sales interactions and found prospects sign 27% fewer contracts during Thanksgiving week and 78% fewer during Christmas week. Anything not signed by mid-December probably isn’t getting signed in 2026.<\/p>\n

The numbers only tell part of the story. Selling into chains at year-end comes with traps of its own. Many retailers freeze system changes, store visits and new vendor setups during peak season, so a deal that needs IT, a store test or a new item number can stall until January no matter how ready the buyer is. The people go dark, too. Your champion takes the last two weeks off, so does their boss, and a deal that runs through one person suddenly runs through nobody until January 4th.<\/p>\n

Some of the damage is self-inflicted. Plenty of suppliers send January 1st price increases, and one that lands in a buyer’s inbox during Cyber Week makes an enemy, not a sale. Then January brings its own reshuffle. New fiscal years mean reorgs, promotions and new category assignments, and the buyer you pitched in December may not own the category in February.<\/p>\n

So what do you do with the time you’ve got?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Start by front-loading the asks. Anything that needs a decision before 2027 should land before Thanksgiving, and so should any bad news. If a price increase, a discontinued item or a lead-time change takes effect first thing in the new year, tell buyers now, while they still have room to plan around it.<\/p>\n

After that, aim where the doors are still open. Store operations teams are underwater until January, but corporate procurement, category managers and foodservice buyers are often still reachable. And the conversations you do get tend to count. RevenueHero’s<\/em> data has a silver lining: when B2B demo requests fell 24% during Thanksgiving week 2024, the share of leads that qualified held steady at about 69%. Fewer buyers engage in late November and December, but the ones who do are serious. Some of them even have budget that expires EOY, so ask, and make the “yes” easy by offering to lock 2026 pricing or bill now and ship later.<\/p>\n

When the calendar finally goes dark, don’t blast. Use the quiet weeks to clean your list, add a second contact wherever a deal hangs on one person, and load sequences to launch the first week of January. The suppliers who show up first get the first meetings of 2027.<\/p>\n

Every one of those moves depends on reaching the right person at the right account, and a second person when the first one is out. CSG LeadSearch\u2122<\/a> puts verified decision-makers at retail and foodservice chains in one place, from buyers and category managers to procurement and operations leaders, refreshed daily with unlimited exports to Excel, CSV or your CRM.<\/p>\n

Seven weeks on the calendar. Four that count. Make every one of them land.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The calendar says seven weeks. Your buyers’ say something very different. Count them. From Monday, Nov. 16 to New Year’s Day, there are seven weeks left in 2026. Now take out Thanksgiving week. Take out Christmas week. Take out the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when half of corporate America is out of office… Continue reading Outmarket: Only 4 Weeks Left This Year<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":19452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"post-template-with-sidebar.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-19451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-outmarket","tag-csg-exclusive","entry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19451"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19453,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19451\/revisions\/19453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}