Q4 is your last chance to close deals that count toward this year’s number, and your best chance to start the sales discussions that set up next year. The quarter moves fast, but there’s still time to plan and run campaigns that move the needle.
AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting, so for each idea below, we’ve included a note on how to use AI to get it done faster.
1. Industry calendar
At Anyword, we created a Publishing Calendar with holidays and special days relevant to the publishing industry (their target audience). We published it as a downloadable PDF, which got a lot of downloads and positive feedback, and led us to create a print version too. We sent the printed calendar to customers and leads as a holiday gift.
Let AI help: Turn on web search and ask your AI assistant to research next year’s holidays, awareness days, and major industry events for your audience, with dates and sources. Connect it to your shared drive so it can pull in your own launch dates, webinars, and conference plans. Then have it build the calendar as an interactive page you can share as a link, plus a print-ready PDF for the physical version.
2. Holiday gifts
Speaking of holiday gifts… use your customer holiday gift operation to send a token gift to prospects too. A coffee gift card (“let’s meet for coffee”), a lottery ticket (“it’s your lucky day!”), or the calendar from idea #1 all work well.
Before anything ships, check gift policies. Many enterprise buyers, especially in government, finance, and healthcare, have strict limits on what they can accept. And to avoid the classic pitfalls, read our post on 7 swag mistakes.
Let AI help: Connect your AI assistant to your CRM so it can pull open Sales Opportunities and recently engaged prospects, then suggest a gift tier for each based on deal stage and size. If you’ve saved your brand voice as a skill, it can draft the gift notes in your tone. Ask it to put everything in a shared tracker with addresses, shipping status, and a follow-up date for each recipient.
3. Holiday-focused content
Q4 is full of holidays and special days: religious ones like Hanukkah and Christmas, national ones like Thanksgiving, and unofficial holidays like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If these are relevant to your audience, build content and campaigns around them.
Retail and e-commerce are the obvious examples. If you sell to those teams, the holidays are their busiest and most stressful stretch of the year, so keep anything you send short and useful.
Let AI help: Point your AI assistant at your blog and content library (Notion, Google Drive, or wherever it lives) and ask it to find past pieces that fit the season. It can then draft a short seasonal content plan with headlines and angles in your voice.
4. Trends from this year, predictions for next year
Go beyond the obvious topics everyone will cover. Prediction posts are everywhere in December, and “AI will change everything” won’t stand out.
Think interviews with key industry personas and data journalism (data analysis relevant to your industry, ideally based on your own proprietary data). These set you apart and make distribution easier.
Let AI help: Give your AI assistant access to product data exports, support tickets, or call recordings and have it surface patterns from the past year. Use its deep research mode to scan public reports and summarize what changed in your market, with sources. Then do the part AI can’t: pick the one or two takes you’re willing to defend.
5. Year in review
This is a more visual and interactive way to summarize the year. Borrow from the classics, like Spotify Wrapped, Fitbit’s Year in Review, and Google’s Year in Search. For inspiration closer to home, check out Blue Seedling Wrapped and how we made our New Year rap video with AI.
Let AI help: A personalized “Wrapped” page used to require a developer. Now an AI assistant can take a spreadsheet of usage data and build a polished, shareable page, even one version per customer. Our AI video playbook covers the video side. One caution: aggregate or anonymize customer data.
6. Survey
Send your audience a survey about industry trends. It’s one of our favorite campaigns to run, and Q4 is an excellent time for it. Package the results as a report, blog post, or webinar in Q1 and beyond.
Let AI help: AI can draft the questions and build the survey form. Once responses come in, upload the raw export and ask it to run the numbers in code (instead of eyeballing them), so every stat is accurate and traceable. Ask for a dashboard with charts, and ask it to flag any finding based on too few responses before you publish it as a headline stat.
7. Plan for next year, finish this year strong
Which content can help your audience reach their goals next year? Which technologies should they look into (hint: yours)? Which planning tips can you offer?
Plan a blog post, email, or webinar that helps your customers handle the year-end transition. This post is an example of that kind of content. How meta!
Let AI help: Have your AI assistant pull this year’s pipeline by channel from your CRM and marketing platform, so your plan starts from data instead of gut feel. Plug our marketing plan and budget spreadsheet into your AI assistant to structure its analysis.
8. Last-week-of-the-year campaign
Plenty of teams write off the week between Christmas and New Year’s. We’d push back on that. Inboxes are quieter, competition for attention drops, and the prospects who are working tend to have more time than usual.
The key is matching the message to the moment. Keep it lighter and shorter, and make it useful enough that someone reading on their phone between family plans will click.
Let AI help: Ask your AI assistant to split your list by region and holiday calendar, so you know who is likely to be working that week. Then have it draft a shorter, lighter version of your usual email for that group, in your brand voice.
9. Customer referrals
Many of our clients run referral campaigns throughout the year, and Q4 is a great time for a final push. Try a message like “help a friend start the year right (with our product),” a Thanksgiving “giving thanks and asking for referrals” note, or a special end-of-year incentive.
These relationship-driven campaigns tend to be more effective than transactional referral programs, because everyone involved wins.
Let AI help: Have your AI assistant scan your CRM for your happiest customers (strong usage, recent renewals, high satisfaction scores), then draft a personal referral ask from each account owner. Have it save them as email drafts so a human reviews every message before it goes out.
10. Bonus: Holiday party! 🎉
Invite customers and prospects to a casual “friends and family” holiday party. You’ll get relaxed, informal time together with plenty of food and drinks, which is always a good thing in our book. For the hosting basics, see how to host a dinner people show up to.
Let AI help: Event logistics are perfect for skills plus automations. Our team uses a dinner-planning skill that builds a dated task tracker for each event and sends every owner a weekly Slack reminder of what’s due. Use this setup for a holiday party, so the guest list, invites, RSVPs, and follow-ups stay on track without anyone chasing.
The bottom line
There’s still time. Here’s to running a couple of quick campaigns to close the year with a bang, and keeping the momentum going into the next one.
