Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

A 3 Minute Sales Management Course

A Vermont eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing. A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, 'Can I also sit like you and do nothing?'

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales tools, selling, sales management training, sales training

 

Tags: sales coaching, sales management, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales management training, sales training, sales plans, sales effictiveness, sales culture

3 Simple Tips for More Effective Sales Connections.

As a sales guy, I have no problem with making connections.  For my business associates.  For my MIT and Tufts students.  For our customers of the firm.  It's part of the process of living and working in a tight ecosystem like Boston...or in any other city for that matter.

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, selling, sales management training, selling skills, sales training

Been an interesting summer so far what with lots of hospital visits, more docs than I want to know, surgery and now recuperating through Labor Day.  As my Facebook friends know, I decided to reward making it through the surgery and receiving very good news from pathology by buying a new Corvette Stingray.  Seemed to be fitting in keeping with the whole beach and ocean thing, plus I've always wanted to own a sports car.  Not to worry, the garage still houses the Subaru Outback and the Acura MDX since the Stingray will never see one flake of snow or ever travel on an ice covered road.

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales and marketing best practices, sales effectiveness, sales management training

Sometimes we make this strategic planning stuff much too difficult, too mysterious and too complex to be useful in the real, rough and tumble world of scaling a profitable growth business. 

Tags: sales and marketing best practices, sales management effectiveness, sales plan process, sales effectiveness, sales management training, business planning, strategic planning, improving sales productivity

At the firm, we have the privilige of working one-on-one with hundreds of heads of sales and CEOs every year.  It's exciting and complex work that often comes down to discussing, assessing and implementing  a series of best practices that are heavily based in metrics and data.  From all of these interactions, there appear to be two or three priority concerns that these execs have in common regarding the management of their companies, and I've listed them below in priority order:  

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, sales management training

• -220 work days in the year
• -"the best" sales people work 57 hours/week
• -15%/week is the average time totally wasted
• -only 57%/week spent on actual "selling"
• -most deals take 6 calls & meetings to close
• -most salespeople give up after 3 calls
• -most salespeople create 65%+ of their own leads

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, sales management training

April 21st marks the 118th running of the Boston Marathon.  Considering the tragedy that occurred last year, this particular marathon will be steeped in pride and emotion as a record number of runners participate to show their support for the event and the runners, along with their respect for those who died and were injured in last year's horror.

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, sales management training

Monday morning I was reading what turned out to be a really stupid HBR article about "professionalism".  It actually started with the interesting question of "Do your colleagues think you’re professional?", which got me to thinking about the perceptions that people have regarding salespeople in general. Unfortunately, the article then went on to attempt to tie "professionalism" to the way one decorates their cubicle and then tie that result into gender and race.  Note to HBR:  you really need to do a better job at screening your writers.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, sales coach, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales optomization, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity, sales boot camps

Last week I celebrated my xx birthday.   No magic number.  No big celebration.  But, as a friend of mine from my daily high school email posse remarked... "Having birthdays is a whole lot better than not having them".  James Geshwiler and Maia Heymann began our 8:00 Monday morning  status call at Common Angels by singing "Happy Birthday".  Mike Schumann, VP of Sales at Salsify, asked through Linked In how it felt to be 49? I responded, of course, that "I wouldn't know...yet." 70 of my FaceBook friends chimed in with best wishes and another couple of hundred through Linked In. And, yes, I did get two actual paper birthday cards...from the cats.  And, oh yeah, I bought myself a car as a birthday gift.

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales effectiveness, sales management training, sales training, sales boot camp, sales management boot camps