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. 

As anyone knows from reading these weekly blogs, I love what I do, and for the balance of 2025, my unrelenting focus is directed to what I can change, and where I can make an impact both in our work at the firm with customers and in my work at Tufts with my students and colleagues.

Now's the time to impact growth:  3 Ideas 

1.  Grow or Go?

I'm a sales and marketing nerd, and I love the science of sales and marketing processes, analytics, specific tools such as playbooks and the simplicities of waterfall math coupled with the complexities of how to select and train salespeople. 

We know from our work during the first four months of 2025 that the time is right now to either grow or go. Having run more than a few companies in times of major uncertainties, I well know the pressures of needing to make cost-cutting decisions. Having said that, I also know from my own experience (both good and bad) that now is not the time to cut back on focused marketing initiatives or the hiring of new salespeople since both of those actions will significantly jeopardize your future growth in 2026. What I did as a rookie manager was to make too many decisions to simply cut costs across the board, which meant layoffs and cutting expenses in every department. What I didn't realize was that those decisions had a major impact on my revenue growth the following year.  

What I now know based on much more experience is that approximately 50% of the revenue coming in the year following a downturn will come directly as a result of highly targeted marketing. Similarly, given the fact that it often takes 12 to 18 months to get a new salesperson fully ramped, a hiring investment made this quarter will fully pay off this time next year.  

2.  Innovate Now!

Largely through my work at Tufts, every week, I'm surrounded by innovation from my students and my fellow professors who are highly focused on solving today's problems in business, in products or in technology.  As one of the top research universities in the U.S., Tufts is just an extraordinary environment for innovative thinking in moving forward and not standing still by constantly innovating to solve real world problems with real world solutions.  With that personal stimulation, I now ask....

• What can we do to expand the core of what we currently sell to our major customers?  Can we sell new services? Can we extend into new partnerships?  Can we change our pricing model to extend over longer periods of time?  Can we extend to other divisions in the same corporation?  Can we co-develop a new product in a few months and not a year?   Just ask... "Can We?"
• What would it take to achieve to get a 10% improvement in sales productivity in three months from our current sales organization if we were to take away just two of their current challenges and break through the bottlenecks of an antiquated policy or two that was put in place back in the old days of 2021?  Here's a bigger question to ask this Tuesday: Are we selling the way that our customers, and especially our largest customers, want to be sold today?  Our research clearly states...probably not.
  
  

3. Experiment with AI now!

For those of us who grew up at the dawn of the Internet, what we are experiencing today with AI is not only just as revolutionary, it's happening at a speed of 10x (maybe it's really 100x) of what took place "back in the day".  I am not suggesting this morning to make huge investments into AI to redesign your current ERP activities or your complicated supply chains...hopefully, you've been doing that already.  What I am strongly recommending is to utilize "Beginner's AI Tactics" into the same easy-to-implement tactics that my Marketing students consistently use in our in-course projects such as:

• Augmenting marketing lead creation with the use of highly personalized short reel videos.
• Creating specialized podcasts which reach out to highly detailed persona groups. 
• Improving by 50% the results of primary research while reducing the time that it takes by 25%. 

Have a Great Day today!

Just a few ideas this morning after a very busy weekend and yesterday's excitement of the Boston Marathon and surprise of surprises a Sox win over the White Sox...plus the sun's out this afternoon.  A perfect day to think differently and to take action now!

Tufts Stuff 

Although I don't teach the Science of Sales course in the fall semester, I do teach a very similar Marketing course both semesters, and I'm currently looking for marketing projects for the fall. This picture is from yesterday's superb final presentation to CEO Mark Miller of Artisan Industries and a very energetic Tufts alum.  

If you're interested in learning more, just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com, and I'll send you the instructions and a copy of this current semester's semester, and we can then set up a call to talk. The new syllabus will be sent to the new students on June 15th. 

It's time to update your 2025 business & Sales plans for what lies ahead

Think about taking a day out in early May to 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!