Why your leads are dropping: Seasonality in B2B Explained
How to understand the situation and defend it to your boss.
US buyers take vacations in June, Europe disappears in August, and the blended average is hidden in the graph as a total drop in leads.
Every summer your pipeline drops, and it is not one drop. It is a US drop and a European drop, and they do not line up.
Note: This does not take into account different seasonality timing in MEA & APAC. Consider your target audience, this newsletter is focused on the Western markets.
I have watched this play out for many years on a row, and I had to defend seasonality. This year, I turned my scars into a newsletter, so you won’t have to re-invent your reports alone!
This is how it really looks underneath the hood 👇
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It’s the Weekly Dashboard
Managers, CMOs, CEOs… watch daily or weekly.
Your boss will come asking for the weekly drop. In a week, the macro-view is not visible, it looks like something went wrong.
The truth?
People went for vacations.
If you don’t have experience in the industry, or years of data, it’s difficult to understand what’s going on. Especially in growing startups where every month is bigger than the previous, a slow-down feels like a death sentence to many founders.
What you should do:
Look for year-over-year results
Consult your industry experts - colleagues, experienced sales people, industry veterans
Check the calendar, if there is a vacation day in your target industry
The US Drop-Off
US pipeline softens from mid-June and does not fully recover until (almost) August.
Mid-June: schools stp[, parents start booking and taking vacations.
June 19, Juneteenth: a federal holiday that turns into a soft week.
July 4th: people take off the week before or after, some take 2 weeks off.
Late July into August: buyers filter back and the pre-September prep begins.
So the American curve dips first, bottoms around early July, and is already climbing back while most of your dashboards are still flashing red.
This is how the US looks like in the summer:
Europe - A tale of many Countries
As the US comes back, Europe goes dark. And Europe is pretty fragmented to the North, Central, East, and South:
July: Northern Europe starts. Scandinavia in particular treats July as the holiday month.
August: Southern Europe effectively shuts down. France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus. Companies may even have policies to close down specific days up to a week.
Return: most European buyers are back at their desks after August 20th.
Overlay the two curves and you do not get a cliff, you get a wide, shallow trough. The US drop and the EU drop are offset, so the blended average show a drop but not clear signs of what’s going on.
If you don’t have enough data, you might get crazy trying to figure it out.
Even if your Buyer / Champion is there, Deals Slow Down
A B2B deal does not move on one person. It moves on a buyer committee:
a champion,
a technical evaluator,
legal,
finance,
procurement.
Any one of them out for two weeks stalls the entire deal. And, usually people won’t coordinate vacations, many deals stall in multiple stages.
Your champion can be fully engaged, back from vacation, ready to sign, and still stuck, because legal is gone until September and procurement will not process anything without them.
How to Deal with Seasonality?
You cannot push pipeline through the deep summer window. Trying to is a fool’s errand.
What you can do is protect your engine and prepare for later:
Improve how you report. Add a year-over-year and same-month-last-year note on your report. If you can, try to manage expectations by including it in your predictions.
Consider Paid Ads. Killing paid ads will make you reset the “learning phase” in many situations. Consider reducing budget first. Only fully pause if you are going dark for a month or more.
Rotate targeting by geography. Lean US in July while Europe is dark. Lean Europe in June and again from late August. You are not recovering lost pipeline, you are pointing your motion at whichever half of the West is actually at their desk.
Prepare for the September spike. Most buyers return after August 20th and you get a natural surge as the whole committee reassembles at once. Have your campaigns warm, your content queued, and your re-engagement list built before the surge, not during it.
Do the work that needs no live buyer. Summer is the right time for content, owned-audience building, case studies, and review collection.
Take a break. If your ICP is not there, maybe it’s also time for a well-deserved break.
Been there, Done that…
If your boss is worrying about lost pipeline, deals not closing, and leads drying up…
It’s the usual worry of an entrepreneur.
Especially in the startup world, a couple of slow months might mean death… or that’s what investors preach.
The beautiful all-growing graph disappeared, their storytelling falling flat, their negotiations for raising more fall…
I am too realistic.
I will tell them the reality.
Few people take deeps in their business calmly, most treat it as an emergency and can burn out their whole team.
My take?
You need to rest and prepare for the real season!