Deals for the quiet month, built from what sold this time last year

If the same month goes quiet every year, last year’s version of it is sitting in your till. Something still sold. That’s the thing to build an offer around, while there’s still time to tell people.

Here’s how to find it, and turn it into an offer you can stand behind.

Where do you find what sold this time last year?

In your till, your booking app or your accounts software. Run three reports for the same weeks last year:

1. Sales by item or service, for the quiet weeks. What sold, how many, and for how much.
2. The same report for the busier weeks just before, so you can see what dropped and what didn’t.
3. Sales by day of the week for the quiet weeks, so you can see which days went empty.

Export each one as a spreadsheet; a CSV file, a plain spreadsheet format, is fine. If you can’t find the report, ask an AI assistant “How do I export sales by item for a date range in [your system]?”, then check its steps against your system’s own help pages.

How do you find the one thing that held up?

Look for whatever kept selling, or dropped least, while everything else went quiet. You can do it by eye, or let an AI assistant do it faster.

First, delete any column with customers’ names, emails or phone numbers. The AI assistant doesn’t need them, and it’s safer not to hand them around.

Then paste the three reports into ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini with this:

These are my sales reports from last year: the quiet weeks, the busier weeks before them, and the quiet weeks by day. Rank the items or services by how well they held up in the quiet weeks compared with the busier ones. Tell me which days were quietest and anything that sold mainly on particular days. Show your working in a table. Don’t guess at anything the numbers don’t show.

Check two of its numbers against the report yourself. An AI assistant can get a sum wrong.

How do you turn it into an offer?

Build it on what held up, not on what you’d like to shift. People still wanted that thing in the quiet month, so you’re asking less of them.

1. Add rather than cut. Pair the thing that held up with something, or move it onto your quietest day. I’d rather add value than drop the price, and I’d never price it below what it costs you to deliver.
2. Write the terms on it. What’s included, the price, the dates it runs, any limit, and who it’s for.
3. Make the saving real. If you say it’s marked down, it has to be off a price you really charged. The ACCC, Australia’s consumer watchdog, lists as misleading a sale price marked down from an earlier price when the items “were not sold at that price for a reasonable period right before the sale started”.1
4. Give it an end date. The ACCC also says that calling a price a sale price for an extended period “may be misleading”, because it has become the normal price.1

A made-up example: a pub bistro finds that last January, weeknight meals fell away but the Sunday roast barely moved.

So this January’s offer is the Sunday roast on Wednesday nights, at a set price with dessert included, dine-in only, every Wednesday of the month. The terms go on the poster, the menu and the post.

Who do you tell, and how?

Two groups, two rules.

People who’ve agreed to hear from you get one email or text. Under the Spam Act 2003, you need their consent first, and ACMA, the regulator for phones, internet and spam, says inferred consent, meaning permission you assume rather than ask for, “does not cover sending messages after someone has just bought something from your business”.2 Each message must identify you as the sender, include your contact details and make it easy to unsubscribe.2

Everyone else finds it where they already look for you: your Google listing, your social pages, your website, a sign on the counter. Nobody has to opt in to see a post on your own page.

Send it once, before the quiet month starts.

Check your own rules first

Some businesses carry extra rules on offers. This isn’t legal advice.

• Registered health practitioners. Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law bars advertising that “offers a gift, discount or other inducement” unless it “also states the terms and conditions of the offer”. Ahpra, which runs the national register of health practitioners, says the terms go clearly beside the offer, or the ad says where to find them.3
• Licensed venues. NSW’s liquor promotion principles say a promotion “should not involve the provision of free drinks or extreme discounts”, or short-lived discounts that encourage people to drink fast.4 Under section 102 of the Liquor Act 2007, the NSW liquor regulator can ban or restrict a promotion it considers undesirable.4 Build a venue’s offer on the food, the room or the night, not on cheap drinks.

Quick answers

What if nothing held up last year? Then look at the days. The day that stayed busy shows when people still come; put the offer on a quiet day beside it.

Should I just discount everything for the month? Not in my view. A blanket discount teaches people to wait for it, and it gives away margin on the things that would have sold anyway. Build one offer on one thing.

If you’d rather hand it over

On our menu this is the card Deals for the quiet month: what sold this time last year, turned into an offer. Start with one thing, or a bundle. If yours is different, we scope it.

Book a free hour, and bring last year’s sales.