15 plus years ago, I learned the details of a new concept called "Inbound Marketing" from a young startup called Hubspot.  Since I had known co-founders Brian and Dharmesh, I started to explore their website that first summer just after we moved to the NH beach. I was amazed that they were making all of their detailed content about these very different strategies to be used in Sales and Marketing available on their site for free. I actually kept wondering when Hubspot would email me with a large invoice for all the content i was using, and then I discovered that providing free expert content itself was one of the pillars of Inbound. 

At the time, It made no sense to me to be giving away these jewels of expertise, but I would spend a couple of hours reading with the sun just coming up on the horizon at our new ocean house. I would then print everything out, load it into my beach bag and head out to the sand to devour what for me was an entirely new approach to sales and marketing than what I had learned as a salesguy. 

Process, Tools, Technology & Math seemed to me to be much more practical than just "stopping by and bringing Dunkin' & Doughnuts"

Piece by piece over the next year, I began to put these theories into hard practices coupled with Hubspot technology and realized that we could dramatically increase sales productivity for our customers...assuming that they wanted to learn and practice the science...and the discipline...of Inbound. 

Fast forward to today...

• We practice these initiatives in our sales and marketing productivity work.
• We've proven with metrics in hundreds of companies that the tactics work. 
• We've digested 8 editions of David Merman Scott's book on "The New Rules".
• We've devoured every Hubspot video and been certified in many courses.
• I teach Inbound principles in both my Marketing and Science of Sales courses.
• All my students must be certified in Inbound just to take the courses.
  
  

And then yesterday... 

I had Dan Tyre, employee #6 and the first salesperson at Hubspot come to class and deliver the principles on The Inbound Organization from the book that he and Todd Hockenberry wrote about a year ago.

Dan is a long-time close friend and a mentor to me and hundreds of others, and the opportunity was a perfect solution at the perfect time in the flow of this course.

All of the students had read his book and also  been Hubspot Inbound Sales certified prior to yesterday so the delivery and the active engagement back and forth was just extraordinary!

-The fundamentals of "Process", which is core to Inbound.
-The strategy of selling the way your customer wants to be sold
-Persona definitions
-Plus, tons of specific sales tactics to use in their projects!

All of which kept coming back to the Inbound Journey, which is all about creating persona-comfortable processes focused not to sell "things" but to create economic and personal value externally and highly efficient internal processes that dramatically shrink sales cycles internally.   

People ask me all the time, why do I teach?  

Yesterday was the answer!

• Highly engaged, wicked bright students working directly on real company projects. 
• An opportunity to bring in experts like Dan Tyre
• An opportunity where my now-older alums also return to also teach
• An ability to bring process, technology, tools and metrics to create science 
• An opportunity to make sure that I stay on the competitive edge
  
  

2023 Sales Planning 

One of the tasks I completed during the holiday break was to update our sales productivity site page and our new edition of Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023.  Or you can just email me, and I will send you a free copy, and, of course, connect with me at any time for questions, comments or just catching up.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND & CONNECT ANYTIME!

Connect with me at any time for some quick ideas and feedback. 

There's never a cost for a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about Sales & Marketing.   

Enjoy the weekend!  I drove to VT late last night after my class with Dan to discover 12" of snow.  A sales strategy meeting today at 9:00, and, of course, the hill snowboarding tomorrow. 

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.