As everyone who knows me, I'm an over-the-top planning kind of guy 7 days a week. It's how I'm wired working with customers, teach Sales & Marketing at Tufts and how I live my life. 

Arriving in snowbound VT last night around 8:00, my first thought was to figure out how I could straighten out the not-so-perfect snow plowing from the 18 inches of snow.  I had to rationalize plowing perfection balanced against the need to get the wood stove started to warm the house from its 50-degree sleep. The wood stove plus not incurring the wrath of my neighbors across the field again, from the noise of Big Red, won out.

Vermont 

Right now, 18 inches on the ground down here in the valley; much more on the hill at Stratton.  For skiers and riders, the next 10 days of holidays are planned down to the hour in terms of vacations, reservations and the details of finding and decorating the perfect Christmas tree...one of my objectives this afternoon right after I square away the plowing problem with Big Red. One thing I know about living in VT is that everything requires detailed planning in the winta'.  

TUFTS

I love my work at Tufts from teaching students about the science of Sales and Marketing to making sure that they get jobs, but unless it's very tightly planned, the results can be chaotic. Not so this semester!

• 36 students, 7 complex projects, 5 TAs,10 lecturers-all alums
• 12 weeks of content; 10 days for final presentations. 
• Company management provides 40% of the grade.
• 1st final presentation was Team H Bar C -extraordinary!
• Spring syllabus with 12 new projects goes out today.
  
  

SALES!  Everytihing comes down to these 10 days!

A full year of detailed planning, exhausting travel, 100's of meetings and 1,000's of calls, emails and texts with way-too-many speedbumps and disappointments along with a few positive surprises thrown in all comes down to the next 10 days and the reality of closing deals and making quota! 

Activities over these 10 days whether it's trying to squeeze in just one more unplanned trip, or it's spending 18-hour days online has zero to do with Marketing!  

These 10 days are simply all about closing deals and pulling and pushing prospects through the final steps of your sales funnel and over the goal line.  With everything on the line, there's simply no time for excuses, no time outs, no time for being sick or worrying about your back pain from shoveling.  It's goal-to-go every single day for 10 days, and almost nothing else matters! 

One thing you can do this weekend is to tune up your own personal 10 Day Playbook.  As anyone who reads this weekly blog knows, we're 100% all HubSpot for how we market, how we sell, what I teach in my classes and where 130 of my personal Tufts alums work today.  Very simply, no one does Sales, Marketing and Service productivity better!  Our HubSpot mantra is always "One Single Source of Truth". 10 years ago, HubSpot introduced us to the extraordinarily powerful tool of creating Playbooks. Take a look, and if you have any questions about playbooks in general or want to know more about HubSpot, just reach out, and we can give you 10 minutes of best practices. 

Enjoy the day!  It's now warmed up to 20 outside and Big Red, the snowblower, is calling me!

working on your 2025 Marketing & Sales plans!

For a few ideas on your own sales and marketing planning for 2025, click here for our "Writing the Winning Sales Plan, and Writing the Winning Marketing Plan, outlining ideas on structure, models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit, hire and onboard the best. 

Give me a call and let's discuss having us facilitate tuning up your 2025 planning process in January. This picture comes from one of our planning sessions for our customers we held at Stratton. Nothing like a quick call to talk through your current thinking for your 2025 planning .