It's come down to this...
- Today through Friday...still pretty good selling days !
- Next Monday, of course, is Christmas, so enjoy !
- As far as next Tuesday's concerned, everyone's traveling either here or there !
- And, then Wednesday-Friday, might be good for you, but most buyers have checked out !
The Blue Skies of Hope & The Valley of Reality
So, just to be conservative in our planning and quickly adjust our heads, and most importantly, our time this week, let's set out this Monday morning figuring that there are only five days to demonstrate our ability to bring in our forecasted deals and punch the ticket to go to President's Club in February.
Which means, we need to plan every call and every activity this week and not get distracted by, or totally lost in "the blue skies of hope".
- Forget about the Bluebirds
- Don't waste a lot time on brand new leads
- Just focus on the bottom of your current funnel
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Tags:
sales productivity,
Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
sales planning
Teaching Marketing at Tufts...
- A consistent search for real life Marketing & Sales Plan projects for my students
- 5-6 person teams work for 13 weeks on complex marketing and sales plan assignments
- All of our academic content is woven into these assignments from real companies
- I teach the tools; company management provides the real life experiences
The results are very positive and dynamically exciting from everyone involved
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Tags:
sales effectiveness,
sales enablement,
sales planning,
marketing effectiveness,
marketing plans,
how to write a marketing plan,
sales management plans,
how to write a sales plan,
marketing planning,
sales management productivity
Just to light up your memory banks, way back in August, August 21st to be specific, it seemed that everyone in the U.S. was caught up in The Summer of 2017 Eclipse Fever, when for the first time in 99 years, we underwent a coast-to-coast phenomena. Pretty basic stuff, but having said that, just as one example, one million people traveled to Oregon for three day just to grab the first view of the first light. Small towns in the Midwest with populations below 1,000 welcomed tens of thousands of visitors. Tens of thousands of people overpaid for the special glasses and overnight deliveries.
And then...just as suddenly...it all ended. We packed up our telescopes and stowed our sleeping bags...and the special glasses...into our campers, and we just as quickly changed back into our workaday lives marking off April 8, 2024 on our digital calendars.
All of that craziness and hype just follows the predictability of the rhythm of eclipses. It will be the same in 2024.
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Tags:
Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
sales plan process,
sales planning,
improving sales productivity
I'm now going to date myself, but it's an important perspective in understanding just why I, you and the entire profession of sales need to keep rapidly evolving while it focuses, not on the practice of sales itself, but on the value that we bring to our customers.
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Tags:
sales productivity,
sales coaching,
Sales Optimization,
sales coach,
sales planning,
sales tools
"I'm not old enough yet to play golf"
At the tender young age of whatever I am, I keep saying that "I'm not old enough yet to play golf". That somewhat "too cute" comment, especially at the age of whatever I am, is also just a bit too sarcastic even for me, so I've dropped that phrase in response to the frequent question, "Do you want to join us for golf this weekend?"
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Tags:
sales coach,
sales planning,
Sales quota,
sales training
Back in the day, you probably remember your mother warning you about making sure that you were wearing clean underwear "because if you're in an accident, and they bring you to the hospital, then, you want to make sure that you don't have dirty underwear". I must admit I didn't think about this a lot during my various ER experiences of broken bones after falling off my bike or crashing into trees while learning to snowboard. Actually, there never seemed to be any checklist at the ER asking about the health or even the cleanliness of my underwear.
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Tags:
sales coach,
sales planning,
sales tools,
Sales quota,
sales culture
Superb weekend last weekend and clearly fall is in the air!
The Corvette took me out for a drive to Vermont the weekend before, and the back roads were already packed with buses from Indiana and Ohio filled with Leaf-Peepers. This is the season when The Boys on the Bench down at the Winhall General Store in the town where I live (population 647) are thinking long and hard about how to squeeze in their deer hunting trips before the first sightings of the New York City and Jersey skiers appear with their long lists of well-paying jobs that need to be done the hill opens at Thanksgiving.
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Tags:
sales planning,
business planning,
strategic planning
Every morning, I leave the beach very early and make the one hour trek into Boston so that I'm able to be at the club when it opens for my daily workout . Good to start the day off with a bit of structure, plus the drive gives me the opportunity to think through the day while listening to Bloomberg News from London. For the last couple of days, a good portion of those news stories have been about the massive Greek debt problem which everyone, except the Greek government, seems to understand. Pretty simple problem to understand-less than 50% of the population doesn't pay any taxes. All I know is that this problem, created by a second-rate country 10,000 miles away, has had a negative effect on everyone's stock portfolio and is a speeding train wreck headed for the cliff.
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Tags:
sales productivity,
Sales Optimization,
sales management effectiveness,
sales management coach,
sales planning,
sales management training,
sales plans,
sales management boot camp
Monday's Boston Globe: Just after 7 Sunday evening, with 2.9 more inches of fresh snow blanketing Boston, the National Weather Service announced that the city had notched its snowiest winter since records started being kept in 1872.
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Tags:
sales productivity,
Sales Optimization,
Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
sales and marketing best practices,
sales planning,
sales management training,
sales management boot camp,
sales producitivity
