Given the confusion and uncertainty in every market that we're involved in as to the current business landscape, there continues to be a lack of clarity in how to plan for 2026.
Having said that, as we've experienced in every September-November annual planning cycle, most management teams will ultimately come together in an timely process. Like the seasons of the year, this fall planning process maps the natural rhythm of business, and well-performing management teams always figure it out. My advice for this season's planning cycle: Focus only what you can control and don't get distracted by politics or by national and global economics. Be aware, of course, of what's happening around you, but run this year's planning sessions on the mechanics of your products and your marketing and sales go-to-market tactical planning focusing on what your customers want and how they want to be sold and marketed to. In 2026, we believe that success will be all about customer mapping.
One of the outputs of your business plan cycle will be your 2026 hiring plan. What we're experiencing is that this is a great time to be hiring with more people not only available, but at a much higher degree of quality...at least in Sales and Marketing. BTW, for what it's worth, our forecast for 2026 is very positive!
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Sales Hiring Perfectly,
entrepreneurshipfortherestofus,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning,
2026 Sales Planning,
2026 Business Planning
Gotta hand it to the Celtics for their hard work, their athleticism, their perseverance and just true grit, but with Friday night's final score, we're on the sidelines watching the rest of the playoffs. Playing the game to win is the very nature of every sport, and it's also the core essence of every activity that we engage in as professional salespeople.
You want to win, you gotta' play to win which means that if you're behind right now halfway through the quarter, you may want to think about changing up your baseline drills for success.
Here's a few simple, but directly impactful ideas to try out this beautiful Monday morning:
- Every month: Update your written team playbook by getting everyone on the team directly involved.
A playbook is not your annual sales plan that you architected last December. This is a living, breathing document that's frequently revisited and updated with the team at the beginning of every month. We've been insisting on these now for a few years, and the direct impact has been amazing.
- Every week:
-Hold one-hour early AM training drills on one or two specific tactics.
-Personally connect for 15 minutes with 1 successful person who inspires you.
-Read 1 technical article written in 2024-2025 on what it takes to be successful in Sales.
- Every day:
-Think like a customer first, not a salesperson selling anything.
-Focus on what you can do to drive direct business value for your customers.
-Begin each day by verbalizing out loud why you're the best salesperson.
-Start with activities that energize you-maybe it's exercise or listening to a podcast on the drive.
-Dig into tracking the math in detail: every play, every conversion and every score.
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Sales Hiring Perfectly,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
A very Happy New Year! 2025 promises to be a year of solid business growth, but as usual, a number of unexpected speed bumps as we speed along the highway. In addition to making personal new year resolutions while formalizing our business sales and marketing plans, it's also a time when many managers at all levels begin to think about possible job or career changes. It's just the normal rhythm of the year and planning out the year ahead. As a result, those individuals do the normal thing and reach out confidentially to their friends and business colleagues, dust off their resume and send an email vaguely worded as "if you see something, please keep me in mind." The absolute worst waste of time in trying to market yourself!
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Sales Management Best Practices,
Sales Hiring Perfectly,
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2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
DavidMeermanScott,
2025SalesPlanning
I'm love being a salesguy!. I love what we do in our consulting practice working with companies in the rapidly changing environments of Sales and Marketing, plus the fact that I can explore those practices even more intently by teaching both subjects at the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts provides a perfect flywheel of experiences with highly positive results. Personally, I can take out of the classroom and labs new ideas and bring them into our customers while many of our customers take advantage of three-month deep dives in perfecting their planning with my student teams of juniors, seniors and grad students.
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2024 Sales Planning,
2024 Marketing Planning
- Leaving a wonderful Thanksgiving, we're now full speed ahead into the holiday season
- With 13-14-more real selling days in the Q4 season, we're updating forecasts daily.
- After weeks of working on our 2023 business plan, we're deep in the season of budgeting.
And at Tufts, the reality of the seasonality of the last class of the semester, occurred this Wednesday after 12 weeks of content including 10 technical lectures from my alums and my TAs ranging from pricing to SEO, PR, research, competitive analysis, social ad buying, blogging, the art of presentations, budgeting and much more. Added to this was one HBS case study, 36 individual value proposition presentations and Hubspot Inbound Marketing certifications.
Then it all came to a close on Wednesday with a team lunch and a final presentation from another extraordinary marketing executive alum on her process of bringing together her own marketing plan. Next week are the final 90-minute presentations to their host management of their team projects where 40% of their overall semester grade is decided by the management of their companies on the depth and quality of their marketing plans constructed over the semester. For me, it's been an extraordinarily exciting semester which has resulted in strong academics and 18 new part-or full-time jobs generated from the course.
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Sales Hiring Perfectly,
Teaching entrepreneurship,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2023 Business Planning,
2023 Sales Planning,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center
As I write this on a 14-degree sunny Saturday morning, I'm just in from snowblowing deep in the woods of Winhall (or Bondville) Vermont (pop.647). Known by the State of Vermont, the town of Winhall is-according to the Feds-also the village of Winhall in the town Bondville. Or maybe it's the other way around. Hard to figure.
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sales leadership,
sales success,
Sales Hiring Perfectly,
sales management plans,
sales management productivity,
selling trust,
sales motivation,
writing sales plans,
sales readiness
Vermont's Marketing in the Fall
25% of Vermont's tourist dollars come as a result of four weeks during the leaf-peeping season from caravans of busses out the Midwest and outright commercialism of marketing and selling everything that is the essence of Vermont.
To the left is a picture from last weekend taken from my dirt road 'bout half a mile from my house. Doesn't get Vermont-better than this in terms of the beauty that is the fall...and the tourist dollars that come rolling in as a result.
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Tufts university,
value propositions,
Sales Hiring Perfectly,
jack derby professor at Tufts,
sales management productivity,
creating trust in sales,
sales careers,
Tufts Entrepreneurship
