Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

A breakfast with customers or referral partners is always my favorite meal of the day, and one of life's little pleasures is my careful selection of raspberry or strawberry "jelly", or sometimes, just to feed my wild side, a spoonful of marmalade.  Simple pleasures for a complex life.

I've found that there are two types of managers who work in our profession of Sales...

Back-in-the-day... MRP, ERP, Quality Circles, ISO900, DFM, KANBAN, and a myriad of other manufacturing productivity improvement tools and technologies were the structural keys to the success of the resurgence of quality and manufacturing superiority in the U.S.  

In the '70's and '80's, as a direct result of the new-age religions of processes, standardized tools, technologies and metrics preached by the High Priest, W. Edwards Deming, and national activities such as the Malcolm Baldridge Award, U.S. manufacturing steadily pulled itself back to worldwide superiority in such diverse markets as cars, appliances, in semiconductors and general electronics.  This refocus to massive productivity and quality gains, resulting in much higher levels of customer satisfaction, took a national call-to-action spread over a couple of decades, and it worked, and it continues to work today with US manufacturing productivity output doubling over the last 15 years.

And Yet, Sales Productivity in too many companies Sucks...

• In the last 10 years, selling costs rose faster than revenues.
• In the last 5 years, SG&A costs have increased 12.5% (Alix Partners 2013)
• According to Sales Benchmark Index, in the last 3 years, sales productivity declined for the world’s largest sales forces.  Only 41 of the SBI 100 companies increased sales productivity per employee.
• There's been an average productivity decline of 2.5 % over the last three years.

Joe Gusfaston, Chairman of Brainshark, the industry leader in Sales Readiness, who consolidated many of these stats, noted in an article published by Forbes that "Sales enablement is about how to improve productivity of sales by squeezing out inefficiencies and maximizing effectiveness,”    

Leaders like W. Edwards Deming, back-in-the-day, for manufacturing, and guys like Joe Gustafson today for Sales Readiness & Enablement, understand the sales productivity crisis and are actually doing something about it.
 

which is Why We've Teamed Up with Hubspot on March 20th For...

"Constructing a Winning Blueprint for 2017"

Most of us in our firm grew up on the manufacturing floors and in the engineering labs of our prior companies until we came to understand the reality of the simple business credo that..."Success in business is about just two things: Sales ! and other stuff" (Professor Howard Anderson, Harvard Business School).

We've also been devotees about everything Hubspot since the company was founded.  We use their tools, they are customers of ours, and we of them. 40+ of my Tufts alums (very happily) work there.  The Hubspot technologies are the backbones of my course in Marketing, and most recently my new course "The Art & Science of Sales".  Many of my class lecturers are my alums now working (very happily) at Hubspot.  All of this is very symbiotic, the process works perfectly and everyone benefits.

As a result of that partnership, we decided to co-host with Hubspot this "Constructing a Winning Blueprint for 2017" event on March 20th at the Hubspot headquarters in Cambridge, which is focused directly at the senior leaders (CEOs, and Heads of Marketing and Sales) of manufacturing companies. Kicking off with an introduction by Hubspot co-founder, CTO, and tech visionary, Dharmesh Shah, this unique event will outline the intersections of systems, processes and metrics between the rapidly evolving worlds of Sales & Marketing productivity and the productivity improvements being made on the factory floor.

The Agenda:

• 11-12 PM -Lunch & Networking
• 12-1 PM-Welcome and presentation from Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Co-Founder of HubSpot
• 1-2 PM Manufacturing CEO Panel, facilitated by Jack Derby
• 2-3 Q&A, Discussions and Networking

Questions?  

Just connect with me at jack@derbymanagement.com or with my partner, John Routhier, who, with Hubspot, is in charge of this event at john@derbymanagement.com, and we'll fill in the details.

Have a great day selling today! 

Head Coach  

When I grew up in Greater Boston, we had one "device" in the house, and that was one AM radio in my parent's bedroom.  No Internet?  We would never have even been able to comprehend the concept.  No, no Internet.  In fact, no TV.

An Epic Game!

There's nothing more that I could add to the accolades and the volumes of words, statistics and analyses that have already been written...except to add one word... GRIT !

Being successful in any business is tough work.  Always has been, always will be...and that's what makes it both an exciting career and very rewarding. Once in a while, we get lucky, but rarely, and then only for short periods of calm in a turbulent ocean of constant change.

Broccoli !

The high-antioxidant, nutrient-rich, heart-healthy poster child of new age eating, or the scourge of every child and teenager who has heard the battle cry of “You have to eat your broccoli” ?

The 2 C's:  Curiosity & Comfort

I still remember that Saturday training session as a young associate at Honeywell Computer Systems back-in-the-day when I learned about BANT.

Didn't know that Honeywell made computers?  Well, they didn't do it very well...but they tried to with the wrong product at the wrong time and got smoked by DEC and every other mini-computer manufacturer up and down 128, known at that time as America's Technology Highway-the precursor to Silicon Valley..."back-in-the-day".

To get into the mini computer business, Honeywell bought a young startup, CCC, in Framingham, MA, once again proving that most M&A deals never realize their potential.  Less than 10 years later, Honeywell quietly exited the market after losing hundreds of millions, while up the road in Maynard, startup DEC quickly became the largest computer company in the world for the next 15 plus years...until they also got smoked by that other little startup...Apple, and then everyone else as the lines became increasingly blurred between minis and the ultimate entry of personal computers.  Anyone remember Apple's Newton?

From back-in-the-day, you can throw in Wang, and I guess you could also do the same with Polaroid, and you would have a solid string of "Lessons Learned" of what not to do regarding proprietary, inward-focused businesses to keep in mind as you kick of your own 2017 business planning sessions later this month.

I just pulled the plug on my ISP.  

Big firm, terrible connectivity, and consistently poor service, so I finally made the decision to pull the plug last week since I just couldn't be held hostage anymore.  Lee Drake, superb tech CEO, at his IT support firm, OS Cubed, had been telling me to do this for the years, but I didn't want to go through the pain of disruption. Finally the pain of staying connected outweighed the fear of the pain of disruption. The move happens next week, the process will be transparent, and I could not be happier. The point of this introduction is that when I looked up our background with the ISP, I discovered that we had been with them for 20 years !!  

20 years?!?

20 years ago, the World Wide Web had just been invented.  We moved to WWW using Mosaic from Arpanet where we had stuck it out for years using arcane commands, slow speeds and calling people on our landline telephone to ask if they did in fact receive the email (although it wasn't called email, we did not have html, nor did the words that came through on the screen look like any email that we know today).   

Which brings me thinking about the 2017 concept of "Day 1", and the adoption of faster change in our business, in our sales development, and in my teaching Marketing, and, with this semester, a new course in Sales.  I should have made this ISP switch five years ago, and for some wacko reason, I just stuck it out piling up one wasted hour after another.  2017 is about every day being Day 1 and initiating more rapid change that brings more value to our customers' businesses.