With the Yankees showing up tonight at Fenway at 7:10 to take on the Sox, let me shift away from my last Friday's blog comparing being half way through the baseball season to being half way through the Sales year and focus on the Patriots on this superb summa' morning.

• Today is Day #3 of Patriots Training Camp which goes through August 18th. 
• Preseason opener against the Panthers is August 6th.
• Regular season starts against the Bengals on September 8th.

Coming off a tough season requiring tons of change and the corresponding unknowns of new players and a new leader, this year's training camp is especially critical highlighted by Coach Mayo's comment yesterday of "You're professionals. You've got to be one!" ,and then bringing his players through another intense 90 minute training session. 

Being a professional football player or a professional salesperson requires the same fundamentals of commitment and drive heightened by the necessity of repeated skills training.  You want to win; you need to train and train all the time!

As salespeople, we sell everyday...well, actually about 220 days...and in the reality of business, there is no "season" per se as there is in baseball or football, but in the reality of the rhythm of business, there are very distinctive selling seasons one of which kicks into high gear the day after the Labor Day weekend. The questions of this morning for you to think about on the beach, at the lake or hiking in the woods tomorrow are:

• Is your team ready for the upcoming 80 day season? 
• What are the 3 sales skills where the team needs more training?
• What's the plan to do that in one or two 90 minute sessions in August?
• What does it take to create a revised fall playbook based on the last 6 months?
• What are the 10 updated tools the sales team needs from Marketing by September 1?
• Does your 6 step Sales process need to be retuned?

The work to implement positive responses and then execution and implementation for the upcoming selling season on each of the bullets above requires little in the way of invention. Just discipline, commitment and a ton of hard work!  A personal example for me is that although we're already pro players in utilizing HubSpot in our customers when we build sales or marketing processes for them, we're currently updating all of our HubSpot tools this summer. Hours of work, repeated drills, tons of videos and calling in a HubSpot coach every once in a while to drill down until that particular play becomes common practice. Just takes dedicated time and the knowledge that sales training, professionally done by dedicated coaches, always pays off in productivity and winning games!

Just a few things to think about on a perfect summa' Friday.  Have a great day selling today and enjoy the weekend. I'm off to Boston this morning for a sales call at 11, Vermont later today and back to the NH beach tomorrow night.  Take care!

Executing on your Sales Plan in 2024!

For a few ideas on your sales plan for the second half of the year and improving the productivity of your own team, you can click here for our 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. 

Or, just give me a call, and we can kick around a few ideas, talk about game plans and specific training..

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.