How Distribution Businesses Should Be Planning Ahead for 2025

It’s 2025. If you are just now planning for the year ahead at your distribution business, you’re starting well behind. The truth is that one should start preparing for the new year in the third quarter of the previous year. 

I have worked for a few companies that have not published sales goals until late into the first quarter of the new year, or even in the first part of the second quarter. Any sales professional will tell you that this is very frustrating, and one cannot help but question the leadership of the company when this takes place. 

A budget should not be created in a vacuum, with no input, and then just passed on to the operations and sales teams. Management may know well in advance what they would like to achieve, but if they don’t have the buy-in of their employees, they will struggle to obtain the results they want. 

I’ve found it useful to talk to each member of my sales team in the middle of the third quarter, asking for their thoughts about how the year will end and their predictions for the following year. We would talk over our strategies for bringing on new accounts and growing our existing customer base. The process of discussing the company’s accounts and where they were heading would give the sales team good direction on where we were looking to go with the budget. It was a heads-up on what they should be planning. The discussion kept them in the loop and allowed them to give input into what they were seeing. Your salespeople are the folks on the ground actually talking to customers on a regular basis, just like the operations team. 

If you’re trying to make a realistic budget, you should incorporate feedback from all departments and see what the employees in each believe is possible. It is wise to plan so that you can anticipate any market fluctuations or customer disruptions, or any competitors that you feel will be on the attack, so that you and your team are ready to overcome any of these potential obstacles in order to budget and achieve healthy growth for the new year. 

If your sales team is given unrealistic goals for growth, employees will start the year feeling overwhelmed and questioning their managers — especially if they have not been consulted before being given the goals. Do you want to hit the ground running, with solid plans in place that incorporate what your staff has seen and what they are telling you, or are you just meeting with the owner, the accountant, and others in management and trying to figure out what growth you would like to see for the year? 

One goal-setting exercise is to list strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in four different quadrants. We worked through this process in order to figure out where we stood as a company, so that we could better predict what would be possible for the upcoming year. 

Preparation is also important in order to avoid spending a lot of time reviewing, changing, and updating your budget. That can lead to analysis paralysis — spending so much time trying to make a perfect process that, somewhere along the way, focus gets lost, and you’re always working on a plan instead of growing the business. 

But there is indeed a fine line in determining the correct way to build a sales budget for your company. I would much rather fail by doing too much analysis than just randomly come up with numbers and assign them to the sales team. I have been on the other end when that has happened, and have found it to be incredibly frustrating; one cannot help but wonder whether the management team values your opinions. 

The new presidential administration will help the economy, and that will have a trickle-down effect on the HVAC industry. As consumers feel more confident about a growing economy, they will feel more empowered to improve or replace their HVAC systems and improve IAQ. The industry will continue to move toward ductless mini-splits wherever possible, and the opportunity to continue selling IAQ solutions will still be a fast-growing sector. 

How does your staff view your growth opportunities for the upcoming year? Have you recently lost any large customers, or did you pick up a couple of new accounts as you closed out 2024? Does it look like you are on the rise, or is the perception that you are flat or struggling? You need to deal with the perceptions of your operations and the sales team, so that you can either help steer the ship through potentially rough waters or help grow sales even faster. 

I think the industry in general will do very well this upcoming year. The question is how your individual businesses will perform. That ultimately will be determined by your staff, which you should lean into to get feedback and in order to give them a chance to get buy-in on the direction you want to go. If your budget is not readily available for all employees, you had better get with it quick. 

Where are you going to start the new year? Are you truly prepared, or are you facing the uncomfortable situation of having to assign sales goals at this late date? If the latter, you may not be prepared for the growth you might want. 

Luck is preparation plus opportunity, so make your own luck. Good luck, and happy selling.