Jack Derby, Management Coach, Tufts Professor, Entrepreneur, Author
Jack was responsible for the Tufts University Entrepreneurship Center where he teaches and managed a highly engaged and active center of 17 professors, coaches, investors and 700+ students constituting the largest minor on campus. The Center hosts 30+ entrepreneurship events each year culminating in the $100K New Ventures Competition. Jack individually coaches 20 Tufts student startups each year. Today, he continues to teach a marketing course and a sales course in the Center, where he received the Henry & Madeline Fisher award voted by students as the highest rated professor on campus in the Department of Engineering. Prior to stepping down as Director in 2020, due to his wife’s health issues, Jack was the Cummings Family Professor of Entrepreneurship. For 20 years, he has taught business planning and marketing in MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department where he continues.
In 1990, Jack founded Derby Management, a regional consulting firm specializing in strategic and business planning with deep expertise in the specializations of business planning, sales productivity and marketing optimization. Prior to starting Derby Management, Jack served as CEO of Mayer Electronics and President of CB Sports. He is or has been a board member of 21 companies.
Jack’s 17 years of corporate background consisted of being President of Litton Industries Medical Systems, CEO of Datamedix and Executive Vice President of Becton Dickinson Medical Systems, a market leader in hospital monitoring.
For his work as an entrepreneur, Jack was named to the Boston Business Journal’s Mass High Tech’s All-Star Team, he received MIT Enterprise Forum’s Vince Fulmer Award for his work as chairman, and in 2019, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Corporate Growth of Boston for his work as long-term chairman of this leading M&A organization. Jack has founded or co-founded nine startups over the years acting as CEO in eight.
Today, Jack is an active and highly engaged board member with a long investing history as an early stage investor as General Partner at Kestrel Ventures, Chairman of Common Angels and currently as a General Partner at Converge Ventures.
I trust that everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend and enjoyed the perfect spring weather, fun family gatherings and a special time to reflect.
On this Easter Sunday, I found myself on the NH beach at sunrise realizing once again that in the environment surrounding me, the only opportunities I can personally impact are those where I can take specific actions to impact specific change. I like to make the complex simple, which is difficult, so I bring it down to my own points of interest where I can personally make a difference.
What I certainly cannot do is to impact the tide coming in or the sun rising. Similarly, I can't impact geopolitics or make any meaningful difference to the general economy, tariffs or political infighting. That being said, what I can do is take immediate action right now to impact revenue growth in my own company! What I know from a lengthy list of unexpected disasters, recessions and global wars over decades of running businesses is that now is the time to take action to grow revenue and not retrench and hunker down.
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Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Yesterday was the last content class in my Science of Sales course with 12 final presentations now scheduled for that course and my Marketing course during the next two weeks when the senior management comes to Tufts for 2-hour presentations on the final projects. The students work with management each week and then management provides 40% of the team grade for these complex semester-long projects.
There are no excuses in Sales Rule
These courses are based in formal processes, detailed tools, HubSpot software, and more than a few important "Jack Rules", one of which is that if you're late to class, and you have not previously notified your TA, you owe the class pizza fund $5.00.
It's actually been a no-incident semester in my Sales course until last week when one of our very active and most engaging students, whom I know very well from this and another course, was 5 minutes late. Having some fun with him...while taking his $5.00...I asked him if he would update the archaic "But, the dog ate my homework" excuse that I grew up with, and here's what he came back with:
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Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Could not ask for a more Spring-like day in New England than this: a rainy, clingy, cold and windy Saturday morning. Spring in New England!
Here at the NH beach, it's just wicked grey rain at 8:00 AM.
In VT, it's either snowy rain or rainy snow according to my Ring camera, but whatever it is, it's not doing much to get rid of the heavy snow still out by barn.
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Sales Management Best Practices,
best sales practices;,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Is it just "the older me", or did others of you grow up with the following little poem that is right now rattling through my head this cold and rainy classic Vermont Spring morning?
Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the birdies is.
They say the birdies on the wing, but that’s absurd.
I always thought the wing was on the bird.
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Sales Management Best Practices,
Sales quota,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
My teaching in both my Marketing and Science of Sales courses provides a laboratory for my work with my students and with our management consulting practice building sales and marketing processes.
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2024 Sales Planning,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
With the last selling day for February today, I thought that it might be interesting to share what we've been seeing changing all through 2024 and now into the first two months of 2025.
12 years ago, I asked Tufts if I could develop a new course titled "The Science of Sales" to match up with my Marketing course. Today it's one of the core requirements for a minor in entrepreneurship which provides lot of opportunities to experiment and measure results while developing detailed research and comprehensive sales plans for six companies and another six of marketing plans over the course of 13 weeks.
What follows is a combination of what we're seeing in these projects, what we're observing using HubSpot's data since we use their software tools and findings in both courses plus the backbone of a recent McKenzie blog.
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Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Arrived here in Vermont late last night to discover everything was just wicked cold...and totally frozen...even though I had been watching the plow guys and shovelers on my Ring for the last two weeks. Right now, I'm in my downstairs office but not able to see out the window which is covered with 4 feet of snow. One has gotta' love living in Vermont, but then my family has been here in this valley for 7 generations, so every once in a while, I trick myself into thinking that I'm used to constant snow and temps below 0...but not really. My great grandfather, Horace, lived up the road a piece in Poultney and (according to my grandfather) talked about 9 months of winta', 1 of summa', 1 of mosquitos and 1 of damn poor sleddin'".
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
finding sales jobs,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
