We Run to the Fire!

This afternoon at Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, we will hold the semi-finals of our annual $100K Business Plan Contest, which is our flagship event drawing hundreds of applicants from across all the schools of Tufts from Engineering to Medicine, Dental, Veterinary, Nutrition, Arts & Sciences, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy and the Tisch College of Civic Life.  To get to this point of the second level of judging which will take place in three categories: 

  • General Entrepreneurship, which is mostly tech,
  • Social Impact 
  • Healthcare & Life Science...

...these entrepreneurs have undertaken countless hours of prep on their own, formally with our EIRs and informally with our professors and advisors many of whom are Tufts alums who have been through this process as entrepreneurs. 

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Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Business Planning

Marketing & the Importance of Events in an AI world!

In today's lightning-paced world of marketing, do events and conferences still hold a significant position in your marketing toolkit?

While they demand meticulous planning and often represent a hefty chunk of your customer acquisition cost, the answer is a resounding YES—events are indispensable!

 

In my continuing quest this year to simplify the definition of "What's Marketing?", what I absolutely know is that the essence of Marketing's success lies in one basic principle: "Generate qualified leads that yield desired outcomes at the lowest sustained cost!"

No fluff. No vague terminology. Just results-driven results, measured by expense over numbers of days.

If we opt to include events in our marketing arsenal, acknowledging their substantial cost, we must exercise even greater discipline: 

  1. Direct Sales Capability:
    Events should offer opportunities for immediate product sales. Consider a recent B2C pop-up event for our Tufts entrepreneurs, where hundreds purchased products, providing both revenue and valuable feedback.  https://derbyecenter.tufts.edu/

  2. Uniqueness: Stand out from the crowd! Whether it's a symposium on climatetech or an annual conference, differentiation is key. I recall how HubSpot, in its infancy, captivated attention with everyone wearing orange jumpsuits and providing short innovative demos using iPads.

  3. Expense Management: Beyond venue and fees, scrutinize necessity.  Ask: "How many attendees are essential?" and "Do all sales representatives need to attend?"  Rationalize expenses to maximize ROI.

  4. Defined KPIs Consensus: Establish clear, measurable goals. Determine prospect interest indicators, follow-up protocols, messaging strategies, and conversion rates—all within a rapid time frame. Without strict KPIs, event participation lacks purpose, and just maybe, you shouldn't attend at all.

This week's highlights showcase the power of impactful events:

At my Wednesday's Tufts Marketing class, we were honored to host David Meerman Scott, renowned for his expertise encapsulated in our course bible:  "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" His visit was nothing short of transformative, from AI insights to engaging anecdotes about The Grateful Dead.

The session was met with enthusiastic participation, culminating in a standing ovation—a testament to David's unmatched prowess in the field.

In my two decades of teaching marketing, David stands out as an unparalleled luminary in the field.

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Tags: Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

Leap Year, March 1st & Q1 Sales Quotas

Unless you're one of the 362,900 people in the U.S. born on yesterday's Leap Day, like rapper JaRule or motivational speaker Tony Robbins, the day was "just a day", except, of course for all of us salespeople with only one more month to meet our Q1 Quota. 

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Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

Sales & the Zen of Cabinet Making

For a salesguy, yesterday for me was a perfect day!

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Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, HubSpot Tips, 2024 Sales Planning

3 Things to do in Sales about Market Volatility in '24 !

 
The end of a week during which what was to be a major Nor'easter here in Boston with 6"-12" of snow ended up as rain with a day of cancelled meetings and closed schools.  On the other hand, my normally quiet 3- hour Thursday night drive to Vermont following my Tufts Science of Sales course turned into an unexpected 5-hour white-knuckle crawl last night marked by wind-swept snow which at times just blanked out everything. 
 
 
 
Half way through Q1, there’s been no shortage of storms so far this year whether those disruptions have been the weather, the overhang from 2023 of economic uncertainties, the wars, the distractions of Washington politics, or even "the normal"  February concerns that we all encounter at this time of year as we think through how we can shock-proof our 2024 sales plans. 
 

 In any period of heightened volatility...  

  1. Focus only on what you can control.
  2. Require increased detailed sales planning.  
  3. Increase the commitment to sales training. 
During this critical quarter in an age of volatility, no one in sales management can afford to "watch and wait"!  
 
1. Focus only on what you can control!  "Results-Objectives-Activities"
As salespeople and sales leaders, none of us can control results!  In fact, none of us can control either our objectives or our KPIs.  The only thing that we can absolutely control is our Activities.  In our own work we define this as a "30-60-90", in which we want to see week-by-week planning for the next 30 days, an outline for the following 60 and just a general structure for the 90 day outlook.   

2. Create a Sales Playbook!
The 30-60-90 day activity plans, presented by the salespeople in half-day monthly QBRs, will take care of themselves as all you need for your activity plans.  Now add to that, a detailed sales playbook for the balance of the year.  No different than any playbook for sports, music, surgery or any disciplined activity plan where the stakes are extraordinarily high and the deciding factor for success is in the detailed following of a process, the use of the correct tools, the review of the resulting analytics and the requirement for certified training. 

Creating a solid first-time playbook should take you a weekend.  You could rough it out tomorrow.  We are all-in with our partners at HubSpot ("1 Single Source of Truth"), and here's a great place to start thinking about the basics of what goes into a playbook.  Connect with me for additional ideas, but this is a great place to start!   https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales/playbooks 

3. Commit to a different type of Sales Training!
No, this is not the deadly 8 hours of sales bootcamp training.  Maybe you've done this in the past, maybe you have something planned for the summer.  This is different.  It is focused monthly skills training accomplished in 120 minutes during the first one of two days of each month.  Hands-on skills training with an active in-class engagement exercise which is dissected and discussed with an outside highly skilled expert sales trainer.  


Have a great weekend! The sun is now up, and it's a balmy 24 here in Vermont, so I'm off to deal with the 6 inches from last night.  Great exercise and a good way to clear my head before more sales calls for the day!

NOW'S THE PERFECT TIME TO LAUNCH YOUR 2024 SALES PLAN! 

CLICK HERE:  "WRITING THE WINNING SALES PLAN IN 2024"

 

You can click here for this brand new  "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024", for a few ideas on structure, sales models, process, a number of productivity tools and how to hire.  

BTW, I always have tens of the best associate-level juniors and seniors available for an internship this summer or a full-time job in June.  Through our 28 instructors at the Center, we can provide highly personal recommendations for jobs in Finance, Marketing, Sales, Product, and Computer Science.  Give me a call,  

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.

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Startup Basics...You Gotta Sell Some Stuff!

Two years ago, I met the well-known Provost of Research at Tufts, Simin Meydani, and she had a question. 

Not about her 10 years of ground-breaking nutrition research on healthier living, reducing cancer risk by 25%, increasing life span by 50% and reducing weight gain, but a technical question on company formation.

As a result of that discussion and hundreds of others, we launched FulLife Nutrition  with two other co-founders who are deep into the science of nutrition, FDA regulations, the early-stage engineering of food, and, of course...marketing.  We then extended our unpaid team to startup food and beverage experts from the many people in the Tufts food and beverage community.

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Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

Folklore, Forecasting & Punxsutawney Phil

Today it's all about Punxsutawney Phil!

The famous prognosticator has been making weather predictions from his Gobbler’s Knob home in Punxsutawney PA since 1887.  And with Groundhog Day 2024 here this morning, the pressure is on for Phil to once more deliver his prediction about how many dark and icy days are ahead.   

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Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

I love dark days and black ice!

I've lived in Vermont for a very long time.  At various times, that has been for a few years, but most of the time, it's back and forth every week driving the triangle between my tiny VT town of 729 people, the NH beach where I live, and Boston or Tufts where I work.  A bit of driving, but I love what I do, and as a New Englander, I've learned the realities of living in the winta' with dark days and black ice.  As a snowboarder, I will often meet people on the chairlift on one of those very few perfect blue-sky days who would talk about how wonderful it would be to live full time in Vermont. Since I've done that twice in my life-plus my family has lived in this valley for 7 generations-I always point out with my best artificial Vermont accent... "looks beautiful today on a perfect Saturday with beautiful people on the slopes, but it ain't this way most dark days in January".

 

 

Gotta Love the Rhythm 

  • There's always the seasonal rhythm, and winta' is always going to be dark and cold in NE!
  • There's also the rhythm of business, and January will always require sales plans! 

Debating the NE winta' compared to the summa' is trivial by comparison to the rhythm of business, but it does provide a healthy if slightly tedious conversation path of getting through January and February. My personal attitude is that the weatha' is what it is, and I can either be positive and use my Vermont grandfather's phrase that there's no such thing as bad weatha', only bad clothes, or I can be miserable and grumpy for 25 percent of the year, which is, I remind myself, 25% of my life.  I choose to be positive, so I end up burying myself even more intently into our sales and marketing consulting work and into our entrepreneurship center at Tufts.

Thinking through the rhythm of business...

I know from years of data, hundreds and hundreds of company examples and thousands of salespeople, that everything we put into detailed tactical planning in January and February will pay off in the second quarter, which I regard as the most important quarter of the year. It's this time of the year in the rhythm of annual B2B sales planning that the large-scale strategies are brought down to the street level by creating detailed monthly and quarterly tactical planning. It's this level of detail that defines every "A" level salesperson.  Those superstars have...

  • detailed week-by-week action plans continuously updated in their CRM 
  • 30-60-90 day Key Account Plans for the 20% of accounts that will bring in 80% of quota
  • detailed playbooks for each of their primary products . 


it's All About the Planning

As anyone knows who has followed this blog for a while, I'm a devoted student of the teachings of Sun Tzu, and as I think about my own planning for the rest of this month even with only a few more days, I am reminded this morning of...

Those who are victorious plan effectively and change decisively. They are like a great river that maintains its course but adjusts its flow...they have form but are formless. They are skilled in both planning and adapting and need not fear the result of a thousand battles: for they win in advance, defeating those that have already lost.

 

I certainly don't have the creds of Sun Tzu or even his ability to put into a few words the summation of his successful battle practices.  Instead, I just updated last year's edition of "Writing the Winning Sales Plan", which you can download by clicking here which will then bring you to our sales productivity web page. 

 

You can download there...or just connect with me at anytime at jack@derbymanagement.com. 

The bottom line for this cold and rainy day in Boston is that if you can prioritize the detailing of creating individual sales plans for your own team members and the creation of playbooks on your own part as the manager, I will guarantee you a successful 2024!   

Have a great day selling today and a superb weekend! 

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.

 


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Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning

The Marketing of Prostate Cancer

For a cold Friday morning at the end of a very busy and shortened week, hopefully the title of this morning's blog gets some attention...because it should.  Terrible news with what has occurred over the last two weeks regarding Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's complications from his prostrate surgery.  He has already stated that there are actions he should have taken that would have provided better communication and better met protocols. 

 

And unfortunately, given the current Washington environment of rabid finger-pointing and heightened political back-stabbing, there are now calls for his resignation.   

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Tags: Making Tough Choices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

Writing a 2024 Business Plan is Wicked Tough Work!

The first time I heard the phrase "business plan" was when I was purchasing manager of a division of Becton Dickinson.  That exercise given to me by the Controller was actually to just set prices on 10,000+ components for the year ahead. 

Click HERE for the 2024 edition of Writing the Winning Business Plan

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Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Making Tough Choices, Teaching at Tufts University, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning