"A clean forest is a happy forest !"

In the tiny town of Bondville (Federal government's name) and/or Winhall (the State's name), population 647, I was out in my Vermont woodlot this past weekend. Always a work process of love for the land that is good for my head, the soul and especially for the woods!  
My family has lived in this valley for over 250 years, and I have enough great grandfather and grandfather stories of real entrepreneurship to fill a book. I think that it's not by coincidence that I'm now director of the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, just two miles from my grandfather's first retail store opened in Davis Square in 1908.  Bapa left the not-so-rural town of Poultney, just 20 miles up the road a piece from where I live in Vermont, to settle in Somerville next to the Tufts campus.  

Last Friday, Mike, my trusted co-worker, and I were deep in the Vermont muck with chain saws and ATV's cutting, bushwhacking, and generally cleaning up the final damage of the winta'. 

At the end of an exhausting day, we looked around, happy with the view and knowing that no one else could appreciate the fact that at that specific point in time, in those specific 10 acres, everything was "in place".   

Being in Place Today

Being "in place" today, the last Wednesday in the quarter, with just three more days until the end of quota time is critical to both your mental and your financial health.  

• If you're behind where you need to be, think of the fact that you have three full days to go.  Both you and I already know all of the negatives of..."but, there's only three days left" and "everyone's leaving early on Friday for the 4th". 
  
  Bottom line...these are the comments of losers, plain and simple! 
  
  What you need to do is separate your head from the losers, lock in on your own set of superb sales tools just totally focus on these three days. 
  
  I get the fact that next week is vacation week for lots of people, including me, but I also know from years of working as a purchasing manager, a VP of manufacturing, a VP of operations and a president in numbers of both large and small companies, that making decisions and clearing off the desk at the end of the quarter was just as important for me as an operating guy as it was when I was sitting on the opposite side of the table as a salesguy.  
  
  
• On the other hand, if you're over quota, don't slow down! 
  
  I was in the office of one of "The Best Sales Teams" that I know on Monday, and not surprisingly, many of the VPs of Sales were already way over quota.  Outsiders would term this success as "sandbagging", but knowing the company's leader and the sales team as I do, there's little room for anything but the black and white truth of numbers. 
• As one of the sales managers quickly took me through his upcoming potential deals for the balance of this week, I realized that there was no slowing down...even when quota has already been achieved.
  
  In that company, which has an extraordinary sales and customer culture, bordering on a cult, they openly share their basic sales beliefs:  
  
  1. An unrelenting total focus on building customer trust everywhere all of the time. 
  2. A focus not only on the value they provide their customer, but the customer's customers.
  3. Never slow down and take every order available simply because they deserve to win.
  
  For long distance winners like this team, they operate at only two speeds-sleeping and full speed ahead.  Their rationale in this is that by operating at full speed in the good times of the straightaways, they will then have that necessary reserve power to push through the slow times of the unknown twists and turns in the unknown roads ahead.

Good Selling Today...push and max out every possible hour since you and your team, more than anyone else, deserve to win !

Have a VERY SUCCESSFUL DAY!  

Coach & Advisor to Derby Management
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies, Tufts University
Cummings Family Professor of Entrepreneurship