I first heard the word "entrepreneurship" hanging out for years in the packed seats at MIT's Enterprise Forum every 2nd Wednesday in Room 10/250. At the time, I was running a division of a large corporation and had zero idea of what an entrepreneur really did, or why they did it even though I grew up in a family of multi-generations of parents and GFs and GGFs who did exactly that. We just never used that word, "entrepreneur"
Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
With the snow now coming down heavily and with my birthday coming up next week, I am not going to recount the wicked storms I've been through.
Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, how to close sales, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
Fingers in the dirt
Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Hiring Perfectly, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans, Derby Entrepreneurship Center
Although not the best snowboarding season, this winta' has been easy on the shoveling, my fuel bills and other than last weekend's frozen pipes (-33.1 F ambient at the top of Stratton) in the VT house, it's been a relatively smooth kickoff for the new year.
Tags: Sales Best Practices, best sales practices;, 2022businessplansuccess, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Marketing Plans
Yesterday on Groundhog Day, it seems that Punxsutawney Phil declared six more weeks of winter. Certainly, as I sit here in Vermont this AM with the temp at 5 at 8:00 with a forecasted -25 ambient tonight, winta' like Phil is going to stick around for a while. On balance however, this has been a very mild winter, and although I'm looking out at 18" of snow in front of my office window, when I left Tufts yesterday, there's no sign of any snow in Boston.
Tags: Sales Management Best Practices, Tufts Marketing, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
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.
Tags: HubSpot Tips, Making Tough Choices, Inboound, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning
Very much looking forward to a board meeting, where I'm chairman, this morning at 10:00. As is normal in most companies, positive advances in 2022, a couple of speedbumps and a positive outlook for 2023. Most importantly, we have a management team and directors all solidly focused on both growth strategies and tactics for the year ahead. This morning, management will take us through the operating details of their 2023 business plan following the preliminary plan that they presented for board guidance on December 20th.
Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
There's a superb classic blues song sung by R&B greats, Ray Charles, Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughn and my personal favorite Joe Bonamassa, about luck...or in this case...bad luck.
On Friday the 13th, I thought that it was appropriate to kick off today as we enter the season of 2023 sales and business planning meetings with a couple of thoughts about luck.
Bottom line: Never plan on luck, optimism or even best efforts! What will happen, will happen only as a result of you and your team's personal involvement and rigid commitment to a planning process this year.
Tags: business plans, business planning meetings, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning
Like many of you, I hunkered down for the past three weeks mostly working, plus I fully realized that anything I had to say in a business blog among a well-meaning tsunami of cards, emails and social posts focused on wonderfulness, warm wishes and joyful times would be not important in an important personal time.
Tags: Making Tough Choices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
After graduating from BC, I went into the Peace Corps, and when I came back to the States, with little else than a degree in English and Biology, I was lucky enough to land a job at a large medtech corporation that was hiring interns based on attributes rather than skills and experience.
Very quickly, I and a group of other rookies hired at the same time for a specific new product, were pushed into an intensive, week-long management training session simply on "planning".
Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
