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.
During a "normal" non-Summa' work week, I spend 20-25 hours in traffic commuting from the NH Beach to the Boston office or to Tufts. It is what it is in America's worst city for traffic and accidents. In the world of "Things That You Don't Need to Know", Boston drivers are 244% more likely to get into a collision than the national average. This year for me has been especially "interesting" with 24,000 miles added on already through July plus a major repair caused by my losing argument with a concrete post in the Tufts parking lot.
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Tags:
Sales Optimization,
Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
It's early Monday on a perfect summa' morning as I head off for a two-week Vermont mountain-top retreat to first explore, then consider and finally plan out the next year or so looking toward the end of 2026. The weather this summa' for me has been spectacular with a perfect balance of rain, sun and lots of heat, which I love.
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Tags:
Sales Best Practices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
I was out running on the NH Beach this morning and picked up too much sand and a small pebble in my way-too-loose Saucony's. I tolerated it for the run out, but then reaching the end of the seawall, just sat down, took off the shoes, shook out everything, laced up and motored back.
I'm a pretty bad runner and basically, it's an excuse to get out on the beach at 6:00 AM when the weatha's as superb as it's been.
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Tags:
Sales quota,
Making Tough Choices,
Sales Hiring & Onboarding,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
The very good news is that we are now only 50% into the summa' approaching "The Dog Days of August". You know the flip side of this good news/bad news equation regarding the remaining 50%, so I will save you that depressing note.
Although later today, I'm driving away from the NH beach where I live even with today's forecast of a perfect beach weekend, my "Summa' love of reading books will simply be transferred to the outside deck in Vermont.
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Tags:
Sales Management Best Practices,
business planning,
best sales practices;,
creating trust in sales,
bloggingacriticaltool,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
If you're confused about the direction of the current job market, there's a reason for that given the weekly changes on tariffs and immigration, the unanswered questions raised by the recent legislation and the unknowns of the wars in Israel and Ukraine. All issues with serious consequences, which, of course, leads to business uncertainties which directly results in delays on hiring decisions. Underlying any discussion on today's job market is the fact that while the overall unemployment rate is little changed since May, the number of unemployed has risen each month since February, the longest streak since 2009.
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Tags:
Sales Hiring & Onboarding,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
We have always had the privilige of living in the the United States and believing in its foundational truths even though too often we have been divided because of ...
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4th of July
Today, June 20th, marks the official beginning of astronomical summer with the arrival of the summer solstice.
It becomes the longest day and shortest night of the year, offering maximum daylight hours to pick up the phone and start selling this morning before kicking off the weekend tomorrow that we've all been waiting for since the wicked days of February, the long weeks of March and the last 7 weekends of rain here in New England.
The Science of Our Longest Day...
The summer solstice occurs when the North Pole is tilted closest toward the Sun, positioning our hemisphere to receive the most direct sunlight possible. At exactly 10:42 AM EDT today, the Sun reaches its highest point in the sky, marking the precise moment of the solstice. This astronomical phenomenon has been celebrated by cultures worldwide for thousands of years, and for good reason...it represents the peak of solar energy.
The Science of Time and Sales Efficiency!
- As an "A" / "A+" salesperson, you work on average 60-65 hours a week.
- From those 3,120 hours a year, subtract 15% as normal "non-productive" time.
- Reduce that number by 15 days of well-deserved vacation.
- Reduce that number by 10 company holidays and then by 5 sick days a year.
- We're left with 2,352 hours which is our "Available Time" to Sell baseline
- Our collected data for 10 years at the firm shows only 61% of that is going to be spent actually selling (39.7%) or prepping to sell (21.4%), which leaves us with about 1,300 actual selling hours a year assuming that an "A" level salesperson is 90% effective in utilizing their time.
- That 1,300 number at 90% is relatively direct to achieve assuming you have a customized sales process, quarterly playbooks, CRM fluency, certification, interlaced tech tools and quarterly training sessions.
- Bottom line: the average B2B salesperson starts with around 3,000 hours, loses 2/3 of that in non-sales administrative time, non-customer meetings and necessary travel and ends up with 30-35% of prime time to sell. Our job as professional salespeople is to make sure that we're utilizing that available time scientifically with the best tools, coaching and team training.
Daylight Hours: Your Time Dividend Today
Depending on your location, today offers a generous helping of daylight that won't be matched again until next year. Here in Boston, we'll enjoy approximately 15 hours and 5 minutes of daylight making today both a psychological and physiological boost which extends directly into our physical and mental well-being as we begin our sales day today.
Have a superb day selling today with nearly 15-19 hours of daylight at your disposal. My recommendation before I hit the phone for an 8:00 sales call today is that you you should take some of that extra sunlight today before you head out for the first non-rainy weekend in 3 months to broadly plan out the next 75 days or so until Labor Day.
Think about Taking time this summa' to update your Sales playbook!
Think about taking a day out of this Summa' to work with us to tune up...or maybe actually create your first sales playbook. Our free how-to ebooks for general ideas:
"Writing the Winning Sales Plan"
"Writing the Winning Business Plan"
"Writing the Winning Marketing Plan"
We facilitate ideas on structure, models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit, hire and onboard the best people. We're real salesguys who continue to play and coach the game every day.
Connect with me any time at jack@derbymanagement.com and let's discuss.
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Actually, the origins of Friday, the 13th are complex, a mix of both realities and myths:
The date itself is an extension of the fear of the number 13, known as paraskevidekatriaphobia, which was heavily popularized by fiction writers back to the 19th and 20th centuries and extending, of course, by our own love of the 1980 horror flick, Friday the 13th...and its many haunting extensions.
The date is shrouded with many myths...or at least unknowns. There's the actual number 13 traced back to several sources such as Judas who supposedly was the 13th guest at the Last Supper before betraying Jesus. In medieval times, the actual day of Friday was thought to be an unlucky day to begin any important work.
The reality is evidenced in events such as that on Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the mass arrest of the Knights Templar. Hundreds of these powerful medieval knights were imprisoned and many were later executed.
With that as background, and since, in fact, it is Friday, the 13th, let me shift to the many myths surrounding the profession of Sales since most of these end up costing salespeople unnecessary time, but more importantly are on the wrong side of the equation for building trust and value creation with the prospect.
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Tags:
Sales Optimization,
Sales Best Practices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
This morning after a 95-degree day in Boston where I was yesterday doing booth duty with the DurraPanel team, one of our new very exciting investments, I was thinking in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, as to the various interpretations as to when the summa' begins:
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Tags:
4th of July,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
