Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Tough loss last night for the Celts.  The most polite word, I read this morning in The Globe and heard on 'BZ was "blowout".   

The U.S. economy keeps throwing up surprises, so those of us who are the managers of smaller and mid-market companies are left scratching our heads trying to figure out what's behind this and more importantly what are we to do. 

Let's take a look at what we see happening:

Just a superb win last night! 

Can't say enough about the game and, more importantly, the various sports reporters are saying and showing it this morning better than I could ever do. 

On to Sunday!

No, I am definitely not going to ask this morning that question of whether Mr. Trump's conviction yesterday will make any difference in the election, or will it be simplified to a "So What?" and the election discussion moved to inflation, the border and the budget.  One thing we've learned early as salespeople is never to get involved in any discussions about politics.  One basic rule is that it's none of my business, and two, as a salesguy, I'm 100% focused on selling VALUE that fits my specific persona, whether that person is a new prospect or an existing customer.  I simply cannot afford to be sidetracked or fall down the rabbit hole of politics!

I think that I've been teaching this course which I titled "The Science of Sales" for seven or eight years now. At the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, I teach a course in entrepreneurial Marketing both semesters and then this Sales course only in the spring.  I teach in a framework of "Content in Context" where I and my outside lecturers, all alums from my courses 5+ years ago provide "content" within "the context" of six real companies who have signed up for the delivery of sales plans, playbooks, sales tools, sales process development and often HubSpot software integration. 

Every student needs to be HubSpot Inbound Selling certified in order to take the class.  Each company gets 5-6 juniors or seniors assigned to it. Real life research working directly with the head of Sales where the senior company management of the company project provides 40% of the final grade.  Lots of complex hard work where learning instantly becomes more than academic with exciting results both for the client companies and for the students many of whom then go on to work in marketing and sales jobs. 

Every spring, everything tumbles and crashes into one another in our business.  It's merely the rhythm of our consulting business when the excitement and optimism of the annual January sales meetings meets the reality of Q1 sales forecasts measured against actual results  Sometimes up, sometimes down, but never exactly as was planned, which then results in increased business for us at the firm.  It's just the rhythm of our business which always seems to align itself with the seasonal calendar rhythms of the year. 

Add to this cyclical rhythm the reality that the implementation of any new sales or marketing plan will always take a minimum of 90 days before any results are seen, which is why we always focus on Q2 as being the most important quarter of the year.  By the month of May, we know what's working and what's not, and there's still plenty of time to make adjustments that will pay off in Q4.  

I'm love being a salesguy!. I love what we do in our consulting practice working with companies in the rapidly changing environments of Sales and Marketing, plus the fact that I can explore those practices even more intently by teaching both subjects at the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts provides a perfect flywheel of experiences with highly  positive results.  Personally, I can take out of the classroom and labs new ideas and bring them into our customers while many of our customers take advantage of three-month deep dives in perfecting their planning with my student teams of juniors, seniors and grad students. 

Not sure how we got here so quickly, but here we are at the 12th week of a 13 week semester with all that's left being the end-of-semester final Marketing presentations of the student teams to their company managers over the period of the next two weeks. Those 90 minute presentations accompanied by detailed marketing plans account for 40% of the students' semester grade, and that 40% is determined by the company manager graded on the basis of how the student teams of five or six met their objectives.  All very exacting, all very real-world, all real-life detailing of Marketing strategies, tactics and accompanying expenses.  The reality of the hard work accomplished by the students is what's exciting for me and keeps me motivated.   

It's been a demanding, complex, fun and very exciting semester   The Science of Sales course has one more content week, and then their final presentations and detailed sales plans will unfold through the balance of the month into the first week of May.   

This afternoon's Finals of the Tufts $100K Business Plan Competition started with 100s of February applications and countless hours of expert advice from hands-on-coaches which then moved to 30 Semi-Finalists three weeks ago and today will come down to the judging of 15 finalists for all of the marbles.  Along that path, our distinctive expertise in applying our own brand of "Entrepreneurship for the Rest of Us"is the uniqueness that we provide at The Derby Entrepreneurship Center.

On a particularly cold, wet and gray Vermont morning as I look out at the remnants of the two feet of snow earlier this week in addition to it being the last selling day of the quarter on Good Friday before Easter Sunday, I've was thinking a lot about "rhythms" on the drive up from Boston last night.  Take Easter for example since everyone including me has been commenting on "how early Easter is this year", the simplest way to explain the date of Easter is that it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the spring equinox.  Bottom line is that it's more complicated than that, but the simple fact is that there is a definitive rhythm to setting the date of Easter.  Next time it will be on March 31st btw will be 2086.