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. 

"The natural rhythms of the seasons", which is a perfect segue into the end of Q1 on Monday as we think ahead to what I've always regarded as the most critical time of year:  The Second Quarter!

• Tune up our sales plans, territory plans, hiring plans and most importantly finalize our Q2 Playbook since we now have all of the analytics from Q1 to make the required adjustments we've learned from Q1 and lock those down into a Q2 plan no later than April 7th.
• Make decisions on the various players from AEs to BDRs & SDRs, to Sales Engineers and SalesOps.  Who needs training and who do we need to replace?  If we are going to hire, most importantly tune up the checklist of the exacting details of what types of people do we need to hire right now in terms of their specific skills, their detailed experiences and most importantly the attributes and personal characteristics that will fit with everyone else on the team. 
  
  When we hire salespeople and especially heads of sales for our customers, we go through a detailed checklist of each of these categories-Skills, Experience, Attributes-with a checklist, with testing, with formal presentations and a required personality assessment.  We know from hiring thousands of salespeople, that companies too often hire on skills and experience as they should, but then fire on the attributes of not fitting in because they did not do an outside personality assessment. We've been requiring PIs for the past 10+years, and although we still make a few mistakes, we know from the assessment analytics what to watch out for and also what to nurture and build on.
• Recalculate the MQL/SQL mix dividing up the weekly numbers required from Marketing and the numbers that will be driven by individual a BDR.  Our motto is that BDR's qualify; AEs sell!

Whether you go through these processes that we formally work through during the first week of every quarter or your own series of checklists, the point to consider on this rainy Saturday while you are thinking ahead about running a QBR next week or the week after is that the much more important activity right now is the creating of a detailed  Q2 playbook.  QBRs are great for looking back; a detailed Q2 Playbook is about planning ahead!  

I'm thinking ahead and planning my Fall Tufts marketing projects.

At the Derby Center at Tufts, I'm now 9 weeks into the 13-week semester which will end with two-hour presentations to the senior management of the 6 Marketing project companies and the 6 Sales project companies.  Management provides 40% of the team grade for each of these complex projects.

• 6 teams of 5-6 mostly juniors and seniors across a wide discipline of majors. 
• 6 projects from different markets ranging from revenue-generating startups to $50m businesses.
• Each team purposefully has a mix of experiences from none to heavily experienced.
• Students have read respective books from hands-on-experts prior to the course beginning. 
• Students are certified in HubSpot Inbound before the course begins.
• Weekly meetings are required with management.
• Detailed operating plans and research totally focused on management's objectives. 

In the fall, I only teach my Marketing course since I also teach at MIT in the fall. 

Right now, I'm looking for six companies-I may already have one-for the fall.  Students will receive the fall syllabus, and the short company outlines on June 15th and will have five days to make decisions and then do light work over the summer of reading David Meerman Scott's iconic book "The New Rules of Marketing & PR" and get HubSpot certified in Inbound Marketing.  Some of the very best students will reach out to their host companies during the summer, and then everyone hits the ground running at a very fast pace on September 4th.   If you're interested in participating, just email jack@derbymanagement.com or jack.derby@tufts.edu, and I'll send you an outline and then we can talk.  

Have a great...albeit rainy...weekend!  Next weekend will be perfect...maybe!

updating your 2025 Sales plans for Q2!

Just like our upcoming sales meeting on the 31st, think about a day out of April to take the results and learnings from the quarter and tune up your business and sales plans.  Here's our free how-to ebooks for a few ideas:

"Writing the Winning Sales Plan"
"Writing the Winning Business Plan"
"Writing the Winning Marketing Plan"
"The Marketing of Me"

We outline ideas on structure, models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit, hire and onboard the best people.  A few hands-on guides for real managers written by real managers with their fingers in the dirt.  

Connect with me any time at jack@derbymanagement.com and let's discuss your own Q2 plans!