Like many of you, I listen to the radio or podcasts on my daily 90 minute commute from the NH beach into Boston or Tufts. Over the years to reduce my craziness in driving through the 4th worst traffic in the world, I constantly flip stations between news from Bloomberg and listening to podcasts from WSJ and McKinsey.  

As a result, over the years, I've become a student of the intricacies of announcements from the Fed and the somewhat immediate impact that those statements on jobs make in terms of availability of talent, salaries, and hiring and layoff trends. 

In a word, what I see right now regarding jobs in general is "caution".

On a more practical level, I'm always looking for intern and full time job opportunities specifically for my students in my Marketing and Science of Sales courses plus the broader spectrum of the 1,000+ students that The Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts touches every year.  With 20 years of teaching at Tufts and 1,200+ of my personal alums out in the market, I can open a lot of doors for my new students by simply asking my alums...

"I could use a favor. Could you take 15 minutes to provide guidance to one of my students". 

As a result of those 5-10 connections a week I make for my students plus the active recruiting for VPs of Sales and VPs of Marketing that we do at Derby Management as an extension of our strategy consulting and building sales and marketing processes, I get very personally involved in the local Greater Boston/New England job market for Sales and Marketing jobs.

Here's what I'm seeing:

• There's a definite change in the job market since April.  Job opportunities in Sales and more so in Marketing are down this September by 20% compared to last January.  What I'm hearing from our customers in general is "caution"-a little bit because of the unknowns of the election, and yet at the same time, that sense of caution is not directly related to the economy. Just an overall increased sense of "caution" evidenced by and "let's wait on that and see how the rest of the year comes out"   

• Annual base compensation for new hire Sales BDRs and for AEs is down by $10k-$12k compared to January. Initial discussions we are having with customers regarding their 2025 commission plans show much more scrutiny and tighter controls balanced at the same time with more added incentives on the upside above quota.
• There's a significant amount of very strong Sales and Marketing talent quietly looking to change jobs at the end of the year. If I had to put a number to this, the increase is certainly 10% and most probably around 15% compared to last year at this time among my alum Millennials who reach out to me for connections. 

With the second class of my Marketing course now completed this Wednesday, I'm always looking for job opportunities as interns during this academic year and full time jobs when my seniors graduate in May.  My students tend to be Juniors and Seniors with a few grad students mixed in, and their backgrounds and majors range across a broad spectrum from economics to computer science and everything else in between.  The results through this connection process in my courses for some companies have been strong given my close proximity to my best students.  At a very large software company in Boston, 100+ of my personal alums currently work there in Sales with others in Marketing and CS.

If you're interested in potentially hiring out of my courses or other courses in the Center, or you just want to learn more and consider building into your 2025 budget a marketing-experienced associate-level new hire or a highly trainable BDR to bring more productivity to your salespeople, just connect with me in the next couple of weeks. I begin each class with 5 minutes on "Available Jobs I have this Week". 

Thanks for reading this today.  I'll now let you get back to making the most of these remaining 65 "real selling days" between Monday and December 20th.  

Have a great day selling today!

Executing on your Sales Plan in 2024!

For a few ideas on your own sales planning for these four months and for your 2025 planning,  you can click here for our new  "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024", Ideas on sales models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit and hire the best people. 

You might also want to think about having us facilitate your upcoming 2025 business planning meetings or your sales planning sessions for Q4 and 2025. Just connect with me at jack@derbymanagement.com or text to 617-504-4222.

Of course, at anytime, just give me a call, and we can kick around a few ideas, talk about game plans and a few specific ideas. I drive a ton of miles every month, and there's nothing better than a quick call to talk about sales and marketing as I challenge the end of day commute out of Boston back to the beach.