Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Like many of you, I listen to the radio or podcasts on my daily 90 minute commute from the NH beach into Boston or Tufts. Over the years to reduce my craziness in driving through the 4th worst traffic in the world, I constantly flip stations between news from Bloomberg and listening to podcasts from WSJ and McKinsey.  

As a result, over the years, I've become a student of the intricacies of announcements from the Fed and the somewhat immediate impact that those statements on jobs make in terms of availability of talent, salaries, and hiring and layoff trends. 

In a word, what I see right now regarding jobs in general is "caution".

At the NH office, there's a huge oak tree directly in front of my office window. Probably measures 18' feet in circumference and maybe 200' in height. 

Beginning about two weeks ago, as I started my daily dawn beach run down at the end of the road, my sneakers started crunching acorns, which have moved from ..."what's that?" and "Fall's coming!" to now being a daily annoyance with hundreds of irritating acorns littering the road every morning. 

But then this the rhythm of the seasons in New England.  In Vermont, the leaves are already starting to turn while here in NH, acorns do what acorns are supposed to do reminding us of course that that same autumnal rhythm applies in the same seasonal way to our work as sales leaders.  It's time to push!

It's been a great summer!  For me, it's been wicked busy with just enough time off here and there to refresh. Off this morning with the unhappy cats already packed into the car to head to Vermont for a week before back to Boston for cataract surgery on the other eye the last week of August. I thought I would end the summer blogs with answers to a question that I get asked all of the time and for whatever reason was asked by a bunch of people after last Saturday's blog:  "What books do you recommend for keeping up with Sales & Marketing?"   

For me this has been an "interesting" week of cataract surgery.  Completed on Wednesday, checked on by my surgeon on Thursday and now learning to relearn my typing abilities today. The other eye in two weeks because I needed to get all of this done now before the  craziness of September accelerates, and I didn't want this ever-increasing problem to slow me down either at the firm or at The Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts.

I'm a highly-committed snowboarder who just loves the summer! 

Sitting here in our Boston office this AM, with the temps to reach 90 and real-feel of 100, I'm loving the idea of the drive back to the NH beach tonight in the red summer car.  A month from now...BANG!...we're all accelerating from August's flip flops to real shoes, sports jackets, starched shirts and whatever cruising speed fits your work habits.

With the Yankees showing up tonight at Fenway at 7:10 to take on the Sox, let me shift away from my last Friday's blog comparing being half way through the baseball season to being half way through the Sales year and focus on the Patriots on this superb summa' morning.

Not only is Boston a great city to live and work in (if you don't count the traffic), clearly we are wicked sports-crazy coming off the huge Celtics championship. The Sox as of mid-July have had a pretty good season so far marked by both ups and downs. While they’re not leading the division, they’ve shown flashes of strong performance, particularly with their offense and some standout pitching moments. Actually, half way through the season, the team’s playoff hopes are still alive, but they’ll need to maintain consistency and capitalize on key games as the season progresses. In my own comparison summary, the status of the Sox sounds similar to what I'm hearing from many of our customers and business partners:

I trust that everyone had a fun and relaxing 4th and was able for a day or two to leave behind the pressures of the office, quotas, politics and geo-turmoil and focus on celebrating this most important holiday with family and friends.  For me, I retreated to my tiny Vermont town of Winhall (pop. 769) where my major decisions came down to painting the second floor deck of the studio and whether it was worth the two mile drive to the general store for milk, or could it wait for another day?

The answers were that the painting could not wait, but the trip to the Winhall General Store was put off for multiple days.  It must be something in the Vermont air because the entire state of Vermont...along with Bernie Sanders... operates at its own pace and nothing a flatlander does or says is going to make any difference in terms of political or financial impact.  Even with 7 generations of Vermonters surrounding me, I always remember "my place" since I was born on the south side of Chicago and grew up in Boston's suburbs even through 5 generations before me were "true' Vermonters".  

As business managers and especially as salespeople, we're measured all the time.  We know that on Day 1 when we accepted the responsibility of this job.  We play to the numbers, we know the math and what it takes to succeed and ultimately we're measured often times every week, and especially...like today...at the end of the quarter.  8 hours from now, the final buzzer sounds. Most probably we're going to take some of next week off given the simple math of the 4th on Thursday, so next week is not going to be a great week to connect with buyers.  Take an hour or two sometime and review your own math.  

Today will be historic in Boston, which, as all of us who live here already know, is a wicked sports town!

Today, Boston will show off that everything-green pride for the Celtics in its Duckboat celebration bringing 1 million people to the city this morning. 

Whether you're in town today or you're watching on your phone this morning or tonight on the evening news, this is about celebrating the best ever in team success!

By taking a look at the Celts' record shattering success resulting in a 4-1 historic win over the Mavericks, there are a number of very solid takeaways for those of us who run businesses and especially sales organizations that you should think about.

• This success was as much, maybe even more, about creating and living a team culture than individual skills.  Add to that comment about culture, an underlying drive to win that comes from within the team itself rather than from one or two individuals. 
  
  An Idea: Take a step back when you finish the quarter in two weeks and rate your perception of the team culture of your sales team.  Choose a 1-5 scale and simply write that down adding a couple of notes about why you think that way.  Then ask your sales team to do the same at a work meeting in July.   It may well be that you have a Celtics-level culture.  If you don't, then set out a plan to change.
  
  
• The Celtics win had to do with solving a math problem, They ended with the best offense in the history of the NBA because that's where they deliberately focused one portion of their training figuring out how to high percentage shots.  Sales success is often about who has the most consistent training, and the application of that specific training depends on the math.  Everyone on the Celtics team understands the exactness of the math and where they need to be at any time in the completion of their own specific stats and the metrics of the entire team. That same thought process of understanding the details of the math needs to apply in our case as sales managers relative to where we are in the month, the quarter and the balance of the year.  
  
  An Idea: In July, spend a day with your sales team and work backgrounds from where you need to be at the end of Q4 and Q3 in your critical KPIs. Most importantly, figure out both the deal and revenue math moving up from the bottom of your sales funnel which is the number of closed deals that your sales plan requires.  As a group, do this math both for the team in total and then have everyone work through their own  math individually. Then work backgrounds as you walk up your sales funnel from the bottom until you get to the top SQL step. Now figure out your conversion rates from step to step and ask yourself whether the numbers make sense, which they may well not as you look out for the next six months. One question then become what's the type of training you can apply beginning now into the early fall. The other question is where do you need to make changes in the team..
  
  
• Take a hard look at your team and figure out where you need to make changes now and bring in new talent. The Celtics excel in their recruiting and training. Interestingly, as a result, they do not have a player who finished in the top five of MVP voting during the season.  On the other hand, what they do have to a person are exceptional performers all unified around their unique culture of winning.
  
  An idea:  Do a specific sales skills assessment of your individual sales players and ask yourself is it time to make a change and make that judgement on the basis of your own assessment of that person's skills and whether you have the time to put into training and coaching that player to be an "A" level.  If not, it's time to make the change now and not get caught up in the false math that some level of sales from a B- player is better than no sales. That math never works.  Just make the move now and don't look back.  There's plenty of high caliber sales talent available right now. 

Good selling today and enjoy what's going to be a perfectly beautiful and memorable Friday!   

Executing on your Sales Plan in 2024!

After the quarter is finished, for a few ideas on your sales plan for the second half of the year and improving the productivity of your own team, you can click here for our new  "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024", for a few ideas on structure, sales models, process funnels and a number of productivity tools and how to recruit and hire the best.  Or, just give me a call, and we can kick around a few ideas

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.