It’s an interesting day since on one hand, you can accept the thought that the world is traveling or planning to travel later today; therefore, there’s no sense following up with your prospects in your December pipeline.
Jack Derby, Head Coach
Jack Derby, Head Coach, Derby Management
As founder and Head Coach of Derby Management, Jack Derby and his managers provide strategic planning, and sales and marketing optimization services to growth and middle market companies. Prior to forming Derby Management, Jack served as CEO of Mayer Electronics Corporation, President of CB Sports, President of Litton Industries Medical Systems, CEO of Datamedix Corporation and President of Becton Dickinson Medical Systems.
For his work in the entrepreneurial community, Jack was named to Mass High Tech’s All Star Team. He also received the distinguished Pro Bono Publico award from the Smaller Business Association of New England, the Meritorious Service Award for the Association for Corporate Growth, and the Vincent Fulmer Distinguished Service Award from the MIT Enterprise Forum. He is a frequent speaker at numerous sales meeting and business organizations including the Association for Corporate Growth and the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, where he was Chairman of both organizations.
He is a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, where he teaches two courses: “Entrepreneurial Marketing” and “The Art & Science of Sales”. In 2015, Jack received the Henry and Madeline Fisher Award given to the best teacher on campus, an award that is voted by the graduating students and the faculty. He is the first faculty member from the Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies Program to be given this recognition.
He is also a lecturer at MIT, where for the past nineteen years, he has taught classes in business planning and marketing to undergraduate and graduate students in the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Jack is currently an active board member in a number of companies, including the Associated Industries of Massachusetts, Accounting Management Solutions, Aviant Hospice, Brainshark Corporation, Chase Corporation, Rome Snowboards, Reiser Inc, and Tufts University’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Studies Advisory Board. He is also the past Chairman of Common Angels Ventures, one of the most active seed and early stage investment funds, now rebranded by Jack and management to Converge Ventures.
Recent Posts
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling
Try something different today. Tomorrow no one is going to be paying attention to you.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling
27 more selling days left in the year assumes that you (and more importantly, your prospects) are working this Wednesday, December 23rd and all 5 of the days between Christmas and New Year’s. The probability is pretty low that this is going to be the case, but days are days. The other issue that you need to consider in creating your own personal selling and closing calender between now and the rest of the year is that many of those days you define are not going to be fully available given the time of year with budget meetings and the end-of-the-year crunch.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness
So with just 27 more selling days left in the year, and you sitting there today frustrated that you still have not been able to break through to the key decision maker at your prospect, the purpose of this little blog series is to provide you with a tip a day. At this time of year, just leaving more voicemails and sending the same old emails is merely following of The Strategy of Hope. Not a good strategy to follow at anytime and certainly not now.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling
With 28 more days in the year to actually close deals, if you’re having trouble getting to Mr/Ms Decision Maker, take a hard look at the messaging that you’ve been using. Think about all of those voicemails, emails, and marketing messages that you’ve been hitting the Decision Maker with, and ask yourself the simple, objective question of … “So What?” If you were sitting in their seat, is the messaging that you’re hearing definitive in terms of the actual value that your product or service is going to provide them when they buy? Or is it just a list of cuter, quicker, smaller, cheaper features.
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Tags: sales productivity, sales, sales management, selling, sales optomization, Sales quota
Today, there are 29 more days in the year in which we could close orders that are in our pipelines. Given typical sales cycles and the normal B2B complex selling processes, it’s almost impossible to believe that anything now that’s near the top of our funnels is going to move quickly downstream through the myriad of decision makers and signoffs so that it’s going to close before December 31st. So, right now, we’re talking about stuff in the narrow end of the funnel, typically in the stages that follow sending your proposals out: in some form of negotiation or in the seemingly black hole of “getting sign offs”.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness
Just back from an early morning walk on the beach. Love to get out there on the non-snow weekends just after the sun has come up, smell the ocean, figure out what’s changed on the beach from the tides the night before and walk the entire length of the beach picking up the plastic sea trash. Gives me something do, justifies the walk and keeps me green-friendly something I’m not in my day-to-day business life.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling
It’s bad enough that we need to listen to the politicians attack one another and tell us all of the negatives that their opponents are doing/have done. What I don’t want to hear is whining and complaining from underperforming salespeople in the 4th quarter about “how tough it is out there”, or that “our prices are too high”.
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Tags: sales productivity, sales management, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, improved sales management, Sales quota
Jack’s Vermont – Roots
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, selling skills
Back in Vermont for the long weekend and find myself-as usual-trying to balance my time with the seasonal rhythms of the long list of “Things to Do Before The Snow” hanging in the workshop with the necessity of taking quiet time to do real work that just can’t be squeezed into the frentic workweek. No complaints here since it is what it is, and, quite frankly, I enjoy the pace plus I have the privilige of working and playing in the mountains of Vermont and on the beach in NH. By the way, an interesting factoid is that Vermont used to be seaside property-500 million years ago-and the acclaimed Vermont marble is, in fact, created from miles of compacted seashells squeezed up from sea floor as the continents pushed toward one another over those millenia.
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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, sales management, sales effectiveness, selling, sales management training, selling skills, Sales quota, leadership
