Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Just got back from my almost-daily early morning walk up and down the beach. Today looks like another overcast but pleasant day, but duty calls, and I’m off to the Boston office. Last Sunday, there was fog so thick that it was hard to see the ocean since it was just at that tipping point between fog, heavy mist and light rain-all of which made my daily search for sea glass impossible.

I happenned to be with Mike McEachern, the CFO of Brainshark, one of our favorite customers, the other day, and we got around to talking about plans for the weekend.  Among the countless normal “HoneyDo” tasks that all of us are faced with every weekend, Mike was making sure that he squeezed in sufficient time to put 50 miles on his road bike.  Mike has been a serious biker for a number of years now ever since he started participating in the Pan Mass Challenge, one of the biggest charity rides in the country.  In the winter, when the snow and nasty cold don’t favor his training requirements, he hits the ice every week with a local hockey team.  When I asked Mike why all the physical conditioning, the answer was simply, “Just to stay in shape.”

Q2-The Perfect Balance Point
Four months into the year is sufficient time to figure out and make decisions on what’s working and what’s not. With your budget and quotas firmly anchored down into the hearts and souls of every salesperson, every lead generator in marketing and every business development manager out scouring the landscape for new deals and new partners, it’s the perfect time of year to make decisions and firm up your plans for the second half.

Balance

We’re heavily experienced sales managers and heads of companies who have sat in the sales management seat numerous times and have been directly responsible for quotas, forecasts and detailed sales plans. We believe in process, metrics, integrated sales tools and detailed sales training through which we can provide 30%-50% increases in the productivity of a sales team.

I remember very vividly when I first began the consulting business…and was not doing that well. I’d been pitching a relatively large prospect on the benefits of my background, processes and systems of what we today would call “lean manufacturing”.  Working my way through the maze of Purchasing, Quality and Manufacturing Managers, I finally engineered a meeting with the CEO for the final pitch.  Although I never did receive an order for manufacturing process improvement, he and I hit it off during that meeting such that we went on to develop a multi year relationship building the business and finally selling it very successfully to 3Com.  I had became his coach, and he had became a very valuable partner.

It’s Wednesday morning, and I, just like every other salesperson, am out on the road focused on sales for the quarter. It actually looks like a very good next couple of weeks with a proposal going out today, numbers of client assignments scheduled plus a deal transaction narrowing down to a close, and a large number of other activities in the funnel to keep me and the boys busy for a while. So, why are there questions about selling rummaging around in my head this morning?

Doc Rivers was quoted on ESPN where he was asked about his career in coaching the Celtics, and he described it as “a miserable joy”, and anyone who has been a student of either pro basketball or became caught up in the most recent excitement of March Madness, knows exactly what this means. The cliffhanger of Duke’s final win in the NCAA championships this year, and the stunning upset of Kansas’ unexpected loss a couple of weeks ago bring all coaches to the point of either tearing their hair out- the misery- or basking in the glory of the final win and its accompanying praise -the joy.

Tuesday, 4:30 AM

The good news is that, as a firm, we’ve had a very busy Q1. With budgets in place, almost every customer we’ve worked with in the first quarter held either business or sales planning sessions to think through and create detailed tactical plans. In some cases, these plans focused on Q1, while the majority of them typically detailed just the first half of the year. Only in a few companies, did we bother to define the second half of the year except to note the general financial plan assumptions that led up to the 2010 budget.