What Makes November the Wicked Month?...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Wed, Oct 30, 2013

30 years ago, during one of my "I think I will once again try to live in Vermont" sojourns, I remember working high on a mountain ridge one cold, wet fall morning pouring cement that we had laboriously carted up by buckets in ATVs for the footings on a microwave tower.  It was November and long gone were the colorful fall leaves and smiling tourists visiting the antiques fair down in the postcard-pretty town Weston.  It was back to the hardscrabble work of running a commercial masonry company building a series of towers all along the spine of Vermont.  That November and December, we worked until the ground froze hard with most daybreaks spent chopping through the ice that had crusted over our water storage from the overnight freeze.  It was during that period of what seemed to be a never-ending expedition of increasingly cold, wind-whipped, ugly, steel-gray days that I made a decision that I was moving back to Boston and would do everything I could to avoid November in Vermont. 

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Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity

Interested in our Tufts Marketing Projects for spring, 2014?

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Mon, Oct 28, 2013

Why do I teach?

You would think that that between my day job of running Derby Management, being a board member of six companies and working with a superb team of partners as the Chair of Common Angels, I just might have enough to do. 

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Tags: marketing projects, ELS105, Tufts university

Are You Engaging?...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Tue, Oct 22, 2013

In St. John, New Brunswick, Canada this morning where I was a keynote speaker yesterday along with David Meerman Scott for the two day Engage Conference sponsored by the economic development and export trade offices of the Province and St. John.

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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales optomization, Sales quota, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity

Just got asked to write a business plan. What now?...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, Oct 18, 2013

A couple of times a week, I stop by Honovan's Cleaners to drop off laundry.  Right around the corner, Honovan is the epitome of uber customer satisfaction.  Open 12 hours a day, six days a week, she accommodates everything that I could possibly need. 

I don't want to be bothered with tickets, so years ago, Honavan simply told me "no tickets".  I don't want to wait in line.  Simple solution for Honovan was to give me a laundry bag.  I mentioned to her that I loved the fact that she opened, at 6:30 and then complained that the shoe repair store didn't open until 8.  That day, Honovan became the drop off place for the shoe repair guy.  Not satisfied with just laundry, shoes and, of course, alterations, a few years ago, she expanded to do the commercial laundry for many of the hotels in the Back Bay.
 

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Tags: Sales Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, business plans, how to write a business plan

Where do we fit into the Scale of the Universe...and Sales!

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Wed, Oct 16, 2013

I spend most of every day, most weeks (except a couple on the NH beach and a couple at Stratton snowboarding), every month and every quarter thinking about and working in the professions of Sales & Marketing. 

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Tags: sales management coach, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales training, sales plans, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity

How the heck can I get more sales from my team?...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, Oct 11, 2013


Just finished one of our two and a half day Sales Management Boot Camps, and right now I'm in the zone of somewhere between exhausted and excited.

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Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales management coach, sales effectiveness, sales management training, sales boot camp, sales enablment

You gotta have accomplishments...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Thu, Oct 03, 2013

 
Spectacular fall weather for selling and marketing stuff which also helped both my mind and body in completing the annual "Vermont Big Clean" last weekend.  Fueled by a small army of local high-school boys armed with rakes and a full array of mechanical things, we managed to clear out the summer gardens, rake up mountains of leaves and cut, split and stack a whole bunch of trees, bringing my theory of "a clean forest is a happy forest" to completion, once again. The picture above was taken up on the ridge in my woodlot after six trees were felled, sawed, hauled and split on Saturday morning.  Everything, neat and tidy-kind of the way that I think about a good end to a Sales quarter:

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Tags: sales coaching, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp