Unless you're one of the 362,900 people in the U.S. born on yesterday's Leap Day, like rapper JaRule or motivational speaker Tony Robbins, the day was "just a day", except, of course for all of us salespeople with only one more month to meet our Q1 Quota. 

In our hyper computerized daily lives, at least for me, it's more than a little interesting to think that the calculations of implementing that extra day every four years was figured out in the reign of Caeser around 46 B.C. to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the Sun.  It takes the Earth approximately 365.242189 days - or 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds - to circle once around the Sun and without that extra day plugged in, we would lose almost six hours every year and after 100 years, our calendar would be off by approximately 24 days.  The resulting Lead Year math was actually tweaked 1,500 years later (again, no iPhone to ask Google or Chat GPT to do the calculations) when Pope Gregory XIII mandated his Gregorian calendar. 

So, here we are on March 1st !

• 21 full days in which to sell.
• No national holidays except Easter prep. 
• Unlikely we will have any major snowstorms given a wicked warm winta'.

The math of the Sale 

We're making great progress this semester in our Science of Sales course at Tufts: 

• 6 real-life, complex sales projects from both B2B and B2C companies.
• 5-6 students/team focused on customer objectives for sales plans or playbooks.
• 40% of the course grade is determined by their customers.
• Research, personas/value props, sales processes, hiring & the math.

At the end of yesterday's class when mid-term presentations were delivered, we walked through the exercise of "how many hours does an "A" level salesperson have to sell?".  The results led to a heavily engaged discussion on hours ranging from no less than 65 to 75 a week, improvement ideas, productivity, work-life balance and the differences between "A" versus "B" level producers. 

While our heavily researched math for 20 years defines 60 hours as the expected workweek of "A" level salespeople, the students who live 70+ hour weeks all the time, clearly felt that 60 hours was only "B" level performance.  Of course, that was before we began discussing time for commuting, sales meetings, customer travel, 15% deductions for "non-standard time",  prospect research and prep time, which led us to a bottom-line range of around 1,500 hours a year to actually sell.   All of which led the students back to their company project work to redo their sales processes and playbooks.

Today, on this first day of this brand-new month, you might want to actually take 30 minutes and plan out your own math over the next 21 days since Q1 always sets the pace for the year! 

Have a great day selling...and planning...today! 

For a few ideas on sales math and improving the productivity of your own team, you can click here for this brand 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.  

BTW, I always have tens of the best associate-level juniors and seniors available for a Sales or Marketing internship this summer or a full-time job in June.  Give me a call to discuss at 617-504-4222 or jack@derbymanagement.com. 

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.