Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

My Hubspot blog template asks me this morning "What are we writing about today?". This Thursday morning, I'm pretty consumed with the excitement and the logistics of tomorrow's day-long Founder's Workshop and its incredible line up of real-life entrepreneurs, early stage investors and expert coaches, all focused on making sure that our early stage entrepreneurs do not fall off the cliff.

Back-in-the-day, working in corporate healthcare at Becton Dickinson, I didn’t know how to spell the word, “entrepreneurship”.  Even though three prior generations of my family had built businesses, that word would have been confusing at best since all that was talked about around the kitchen table was “the stores”.  It was the stores, open six days a week and Friday nights where my grandfather, father, mother, and me and my brothers worked.  It was never thought to be anything special. 

Been a wicked busy and wicked cold January, so not much in the way of blogging, but now with this leap into February, I’m back at it.  It was my great grandfather Horace, who lived up the road a piece in the beautiful town of Poultney, Vermont, who talked about 8 months of snow, 2 months of mosquitoes and 2 months of “just damn poor sleddin’”.  My family has lived in this valley for just about 250 years, and what I know is that it takes real work to live here. Vermont’s beautiful on one hand, and just hardscrabble tough on the other.

Being a disciple of the high priests of David Meerman Scott, the guys at Hubspot and the gurus of Jamie Turner, Mike Troiano, Dan Tyre and Mike Volpe over the past decade, I'm an Inbound Marketing kind of guy!.  

In the billions of years of time, we hopefully have 60 or 80 of those in which we can make a difference, so  let's start, beginning today, with taking control over the next 150 real work hours remaining in this quarter! 

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and while most normal people are already thinking about the 3 F's of Family, Friends, and Football, guys like me are calculating just how many selling days there are left in the year.  The Answer: 

at Best, there are 22 selling days left in the year !

- First, you should thankful that there are 22 !
- Second, 22 is a maximum number !
-The obvious days of this Wednesday & the immediate days after any of the holidays are not included.
- Even if you and your Champion are around post-Christmas, the probability of everyone involved in the process is zero !

-And, btw, there are a huge amount of other end-of-year distractions much more important than you between now and then.  
- So, now is the time to plan out every possible day that you can own of those 22 days. 

One of our most highly respected, most resourceful and most energetic sales leaders, Colleen Honan, CRO at Brainshark, refers to this detailed selling process as "Your Plan to Make Plan", which gets right down to what I call "Selling on Streets not States":

• In a quarter, in a month, and certainly in these 22 days, planning is not about strategy !
• It's about planning out next week's daily activities and the following week's tight travel and calls !
• It's planning travel at a street-by-street, city-by-city level travel to maximize your efficiency !
• It's about re-doing your Discovery Checklist and asking questions about prospect's holiday plans.
• Nothing is worse than having a commit and then learning that the Purchasing Manager is skiing.
• It's about taking today/tomorrow and making tons of calls and emails to get December meetings,
• At the very least, you should be reaching out to wish your prospects  "Happy Thanksgiving!" 

Had the occasion to have breakfast with my close friend, Dan Tyre, last Tuesday at Hubspot headquarters in Cambridge.  Picture I took sports Dan's Movember Stash.

Clearly, THE MOST ENERGETIC SALES LEADER I know anywhere, any company, at any time ! 

In addition to being a superb sales pro, a Hubspot evangelist and director, a highly experienced and acclaimed speaker, he has just published his most recent book on The Inbound Organization-How to Build Your Organization Using Inbound Principles, not just "another" inbound marketing book, but a fundamental guide for both selling and marketing in today's totally changed customer world !

Download now, skim over this weekend, see what nuggets you could use for these 22 days, then read it completely over the next couple of weeks !

So, that's it here on a Monday morning!  Time to get moving, but before you do...

Tufts- "Content in Context" Marketing projects

It's that time of year again, when I go out to our greater blog, LI, FB and Twitter communities and begin the process of soliciting complex, semester-long Marketing projects for next semester.

When I began teaching at MIT 20 years ago, and then at Tufts 13 years ago, I quickly realized that the only way I was going to provide any meaningful content...and keep my students awake...was to wrap that content within the context of real companies who needed new or updated marketing plans. 

Our clients for these courses range from tiny startups often looking for their first marketing plans to large public corporations who are launching new products or are looking for a different perspective from young adults.

• We're looking for six Marketing projects for the spring semester which starts mid January
• Your marketing project might be for an entire company or for a specific product
• Out clients' businesses range in size from startup companies to public corporations
• Each project will be assigned to a student team of four to six students
• At least two of each team will have solid prior marketing sales experience
• The project definitions and the syllabus are sent to the students on December 26th 
• There is research work that they will need to do in January before coming to class
• The deadline for applications to be submitted to me is December 7th 

If you are interested in participating, please just email me at jack.derby@tufts.com or text me (617-504-4222), and I will send you the instructions of how to participate. 

Have a great day selling something today!    

 Please stay connected!

Jack Derby, Director, TEC-Tufts Entrepreneurship Center
Cummings Family Chair Professor of Entrepreneurship
Spark-Incubate-Accelerate@Tufts
Come to our Events
Cell:  617-504-4222 jack.derby@tufts.edu  

Advisor, Derby Management, experts in-
-Sales & Marketing Productivity
-Business and Strategic Planning
WHAT WE DO AT DERBY MANAGEMENT    

At the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, in addition to shepherding 450 enthusiastic and curious students a semester among 16 wicked smart professors, I've been focusing on building an event structure throughout the year that leads up to our $100K New Venture Competition in the spring.  Right now, you should Mark April 5th in your calendar and come and participate in what Forbes ranks as one of "The top 15 business plan contests in the country." 

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.

When I became the Director of the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, one of the Center's professors, a great guy and a superb instructor noted in our first faculty meeting "since you are the oldest..." , at which time, I jokingly cut him off, and he quickly course-corrected to point out... "I meant, you've been teaching here the longest". 
I've also realized during the last six months through Tufts' very unique perspective on entrepreneurship, innovation and research, that age has its benefits.  

Two thirds of the way through this superb summer and plenty of time left to take a bit of vaca, squish the sand between the toes, pack those gotta-read-this-summer books into the beach bag, and in general just prepare yourself physically and mentally for the wicked fast acceleration into the first week of September. 

The Dog Days of August occur  when everyone realizes that the beginning of the summa' has passed them by, and now there's just five weeks left to take some time off and do that forced relaxation thing.  Forget trying to find anyone in France or Italy, and the same applies to any venture or PE person in the U.S, who all seem to be hiding out on Nantucket. It is what it is, and September will be here soon enough.  To a degree, who cares, since this is all about you, so right now, this morning, click open your calendar and just mark off all the days you can with the words "beach", "golf", "kids" or "nothing".  You won't get another chance since when it's over, it's over