Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Well, maybe not actually "breaking the rules about time" since time itself is illiquid, but as a sales and marketing guy, other than my skills, the only real currency I have is my own time, and how I chose to use it. It's as simple as that and...paying attention to the laws of time.

The very good news is that we gain an extra hour of sleep on Sunday even though millions of Americans-including me-say they’d prefer to have more daylight indefinitely.  

With around 37 real selling days left in the Q, 90% of our sales and marketing expertise and our rapidly eroding time needs to be spent on pumping, pushing and pulling deals down into the funnel. 

The actual closing process at the end of the funnel should be the easy part; it's the prep and the actual selling of the value that we provide that takes the time over the next 37 days.   

BTW, just in terms of other sales factoids that rattle around in my brain sometimes, did you know that there are more than 30 different B2B closing tactics we could be using? Here's an old video I did back in my sales training days that still has value in its simplicity. My experience is that the very best salespeople are experts in 3 types of closing techniques, and they hone those to perfection all the time!  

To make it more direct (I didn't say "easy"). our work as salespeople needs to be always focused not on us and our products, but on the actual business and personal value we deliver.  To help guide you along that path, I have pasted below excellent advice from last week's blog post from my sales-expert friend, and Fractional CRO, Mike Schumann, to provide you with specific ideas that should get you activated in the science and the math of Sales.  Mike's philosophy and hands-on expertise exactly matches our own at Derby Management, where for over a decade we've built customized detailed sales and marketing methods that follow our underlying mantra of "Process-Tools-Technology-Math & People".   When executed completely, the results are productivity improvements of around 25% in less than a year.

Last Friday's blog titled "We're Just Selling Vanilla Ice Cream" emphasized the criticality of total focus in these final weeks of the year to delivering the simplicity of the exact and very direct business value that we're bringing to our customers and to avoid getting off focus and slowing down the sale.   "The Vanilla Idea" came from my friend and fellow board member Kevin Greene, a superb salesguy and the CEO of Tassat Group.   Kevin followed up with me after reading last Friday's blog, and I thought that it would be helpful for a couple of minutes this morning to consider his practical hands-on experience of what it takes to sell right now.  

In a world... where we were struggling two years ago to figure out what "the new normal" would be, and, just when we thought we had done that, we were hit with ugliness of inflation, the media hype of recession, the invasion of Ukraine and now the tragedy of what is happening in the Middle East.  The bottom line of this opening to this Friday's blog is that there's very little right now that any of us can do to change any of these outside influences on our businesses.   

What we should be doing is to take rigid control of what we can control and reduce that to the simplicity of selling vanilla ice cream!

Let's start with the total raw workdays between Monday and 12/22.  

Just about 40 days!

Here we are already at the end of September! 

 "The A-Team" shows up at 7:00 AM tomorrow for the first of the fall "Big Cleans" in Vermont.  A team of four to six men and women now in their late 20's who began this tradition with me when they were students at Green Mountain College up the road a piece in Poultney. 

Very coincidentally, Green Mountain has come up numbers of times in my Vermont life.  Decades ago, it was my first college teaching gig long before MIT and Tufts. 

Poultney is a classic example of a picture-perfect small Vermont town, and it's where my father, grandfather and GGF and GGGF lived for generations of being entrepreneurs.  It's in the blood!

With the leaf peeping season well underway, Saturday's A-Team will be back again at the end of October to do the final clean-up in the woodlot and stack the three cords that will get me through the winta'.  In Vermont, the winta' comes early, and as my grandfather used to say, "there's 9 months of winta', 1 of mosquitos, and two of just bad sleddin'."

Fall officially starts tomorrow, but in my trip to Vermont house last weekend, it was obvious that the rhythm of the seasons was in full cycle which is great since the fall season provides 25% of the tourist income for the state.   Vermont is absolutely in full rhythm for the fall:

Results, Results, & More Results!

Ok, a good way to think on a rainy Tuesday morning as I head out to a day of meetings in Boston in a wicked busy week. 

Finished my intro business planning class at MIT yesterday and while I'm thinking about my second class at Tufts tomorrow which is all about market research, today's focus is 100% on sales, and where I need to be by the end of December...only about 100 workdays away.

It's been a great summer! 

Sure, like you, I've had way too much work, a couple of speedbumps here and there, the cancelled long-planned August trip back to Tanzania, and, of course, today the reality of the seasonal rhythm that shuts that door hard on the summa of '23!  Different from my buddy, Red, whose comic strip I read whenever I can, the fall is a great time to be back at work and at school, to be healthy and looking forward to the busiest time in any business year, 

Rhythm

Most everything in business has a definitive rhythm.  Every quarter is marked by various events of annual planning, budgeting, sales kickoffs, trade shows, and of course...summa' vacations, which no matter how carefully we plan around them, they always seem to impact our sales forecasts with delays.