It’s the Tween Season in Vermont. It’s neither foliage nor a lot of snow...yet, so it must be “‘tween huntin’ and winta’” With little this year in the way of foliage due to the wet summer and Irene, most of Vermont is now painted in various shades of just plain old dull brown. It’s that time of year that the highly celebrated natural beauty of Vermont becomes muted as every small community prepares itself for the coming of winter. It’s also that time of year when the hundreds of small contractors, which are the real backbone of Vermont’s economy, start feeling just a bit pressured when they receive those calls from their winter homeowner- customers asking how the new deck or the new kitchen cabinets look, when in fact, they still have the lumber in the back of their pickups.
Vermont is a wonderful state, with even more wonderful people, but when it comes down to schedules, I’ve found that the only way to get things done on time is to make sure that the actual year and not just the month is written into the contract when I want something built, delivered, created, reduced or dealt with. Being a six generation Vermonter, by this time, I’m pretty much convinced it’s something in the Vermont summer air, or maybe the water, that moves high performing contractors to skip over a year or sometimes two when they’re flipping through the pages of their calendars.
With early morning temps now mornings in the low 30’s and the first snow yesterday, The Tween Season is the season to hunt, which, in Vermont, largely means hunting everything and anything. With gun laws just a tad loose, and the only real enforceable rule being “don’t shoot from your car”, hunting is a passion and an inalienable right in the Green Mountain State. Currently it’s open season for most birds, turkeys and deer seasons are right around the corner, followed by moose and then it ends with bears (hopefully not the ones that inhabit our woodlot) in early December before the snow finally shut down the woods. Bottom line of all of this condensed hunting in a very short time period: Stay out of the woods!
Similarly hunting is on the minds of every sales professional that I’m now in contact with every single day. At this time in the season, we're actually now deep into the woods and hoping that we don't get lost along the way. This is more than Crunch Time as the calendar ticks off one day after another eroding into the seven weeks between now and Christmas. Although 43 is the actual number of work days between now and the end of December, as we all know from prior bad experiences, the real number for us as sales professionals is now around 35. The good news is that there’s plenty of time left…as long as it’s well planned into key accounts and larger prospects. The bad news is that "around 35" is less than last week’s "around 40."
Perhaps some of the free planning tools on our site might help, or you can always just give us a call to ask confidential advice.
Just like the good ol’ boys sitting on the bench down at the general store this morning in my little town (population 647) of Bondville, counting down the days until deer season, we also need to manage our own sales time and that of all of our salespeople to maximize the effectiveness of every day…and, yes, the weekends also…between now and mid-December. At this time of year, detailed daily planning counts!
Not that it's going to help you this year, but you might want to think about attending our Sales Management Effectivenss Boot Camp April 1st-April 3rd in Boston. After a solid quarter under your belt, we know that a retuning, a look at new ideas and the opportunity to talk to other management professionals is just the thing to kick up productivity for the rest of the year.
Read through the stuff on our website, and just schedule a 10 minute call to walk through the details and answer questions.
Just one more thing-I could use your help, and also thanks to those of you who responded last week.
As most of your know, I’m a professor of marketing at Tufts. To make the content more impactful for these juniors and seniors, they get embedded into real companies in six teams of five students to solve complex marketing projects. These are semester-long projects often resulting in marketing plans, market research, market segmentation assessments along with detailed recommendations. If you are at all interested in having a team of bright marketing students do a project for you for the January-April semester, please just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com, and I will send you an outline of what's involved.
Good Selling!
Jack
Head Coach
