Yes, first and most importantly, a sincere expression of thanks for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday! A great time for families and a day or two of decompression before we jump back into the final 20ish days of the year where every point we can put on the board counts. Enjoy the break, have fun, take a walk in the woods and get ready for the final quota crunch. The very good news is that as salespeople, we have a lot to be thankful for.
Be Thankful for SalesTech!
Our experience this year with our own customers is an on-average increase in sales productivity between 20% to 25% from just implementing a formal sales process into the organization. A step-by-step process built on a technology platform which becomes "The Way We Sell". Formal, precise, transparent and filled with highly useful tools which crush time. I found this morning's blog from Gartner especially useful in the visualization of sales technology practicality. While our own numbers differ, they differ in very small variances.
3 Takeaways we can all be thankful for
1. Fully embrace the sales technology that's available! By now, you know our long history and love of Hubspot as "the single source of truth", and there are three or four other platforms to be considered. The bottom line is that trying to manage people, accounts, data without a robust and highly integrated CRM and the accompanying sales enablement tools is like the difference between driving any car built in 2013 and 2023. Actually, today's salestech tools are much smarter and more highly integrated than any car today! Plus, we are just now starting to experience and think about the revolution that is quickly coming to our profession using generative AI. A revolution that will be as critical to our success as the internet itself!
2. Create Fluency! The actual use of SalesTech is exactly like learning any language and our use of that language should be viewed with the same rigor of learning that we employed in learning French or Spanish or Portuguese back in the day. I think I'm "pretty good, but still not great" in my own use of Hubspot, plus I teach the stuff in both my marketing and sales courses, but every Saturday morning, I take dedicated time of an hour or so running through specific Hubspot tools where I don't yet have the necessary fluency.
3. Focus on these 20+ Days! Break down the days into two formal blocks of "Selling Hours" and "Marketing Hours" every day. Boldly get rid of the Time Wasters, those individuals and those activities that have nothing to offer your ability to get to quota between now and December 22nd. Sounds easy...and it is...but it does take specific decisions in your own use of your time. For me, it now means working out at home at 5:00 every day and not taking the extra time to drive into the Boston gym. Not as much fun, but I pick up 2 critical sales prep hours.
Have a warm and wonderful Thanksgiving! Enjoy, hug and be truly thankful for what we do have!
2023 SALES PLANNING
Check out our updated sales productivity site page. Just page down to get our 2023 edition of
Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023.
Or you can just email me, and I'll send you a free copy. I'm now into four weekends of updating this for 2024, so if you have ideas or just want to write content, just let me know.
www.derbymanagement.com
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.
