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.

Although I would like to 😎, I can't control aging, but what I did do this summer is spend serious time studying, learning, asking questions and assessing the current state of technology and best practices regarding cataract surgery.  That amount of discovery led me to ask numerous questions of friends who had been through this and to interview various docs.  Considering everything, in two months, I went from not being able to spell "cataract" in June to being sufficiently educated to turn my eye over to the steady scalpel of the surgeon on Wednesday.  Bottom line here, I quickly discovered that although I could not control the problem, it was relatively easy to do research from respected sources that I trust, talk to different surgeons about processes and make a decision to quickly move ahead.    Of course, it also helped to live in one of the best cities in the world for healthcare. 

Because of my teaching at MIT for 22 years and now at Tufts for almost 20, one constant has been my commitment to lifelong learning and more and more discovery.  Not only has this driving force become religion for me since every semester I leave with a firm understanding of what I don't know, it also pushes me to spend a major part of every summer reading, listening to podcasts and watching countless videos about what's coming next in the new sciences of Sales and Marketing.  Given the massive amount of change happening with AI, I can't really see that deeply into a five year future of what Sales and Marketing practices will be, but what I can do right now is prepare myself to evolve, adapt and grow in what is now a very rapidly changing world of these two tightly intermeshed sciences. 

• Two years ago, I doubled down on figuring out how to better train BDRs at the top of the sales funnel.  Two years later in 2024, I'm preparing for a Sales world in which by 2026, there's simply no need for the job of a BDR since I will be able to create even more highly qualified leads that move directly from more targeted Marketing activities directly to a senior account exec cutting out both the cost and time delays of a BDR. 
• Back in "the old days" of 2020, I worried about how to train, test and certify salespeople in a variety of skills using many of the same-old/same-old techniques of in-classroom and online talking-head videos.  In just one year, Covid changed that view of executive training forever with today's use of highly-interactive omnichannel media.  That was three years ago.  What's here today in AI-generated videos is extraordinary and something that I and my students have been playing around with for a year.   The question is...and the discovery work I need to figure out is what my version of that landscape look like in 2026.  The only way to figure that out is to put myself in a proactive environment where you I discover more...which is why I teach. 

You can never foresee the future or be fully prepared for it, but what we all need to do is to continue to discover, to evolve, adapt and grow.   Take 30 minutes this weekend and think about how you might do that with your sales and marketing team over the balance of the year! Maybe you do something now, maybe in your January Sales meeting, but in today's demanding customer requriements, as sales leaders, we need to change!

Have a great Saturday!  I'm off to do battle with the water-soaked forest here in Vermont!

Executing on your Sales Plan in 2024!

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, talk about game plans and specific training..

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.