"Tis the Season..."

No, it's not The Season, this is the other one...the end of the Summa of '25.  One can already hear it in the language being used by parents with their kids, most of whom are already back in school.

This August, we are also celebrating the end of this particular summa' with two solid Patriots wins already on the scoreboard!  Nothing is better than football in New England in the fall!

And for me personally, I'm very much looking forward to an intense three-month planning season with the firm plus another very exciting semester at Tufts teaching marketing and sales. The syllabus went out in June. Six company projects have been assigned to teams, each with six students, who are right now working through the required HubSpot certification in Inbound Marketing that they need for the course.  

Another weekend of spectacular weather if you were anywhere in New England.  I returned on Saturday from a Vermont retreat with very limited internet access and plenty of time to think through and plan what lies ahead for the balance of this year into the first half of 2026. I then spent a few hours on the NH beach yesterday paging through HubSpot's "The 2025 State of Marketing".  Tons of ideas, a waterfall of great stats that I'll use in my marketing course plus one superb takeaway quote from Kipp Bodnerr, HubSpot's CMO.

"A year from now, will I feel like I've learned enough, tested enough, and evolved our strategies enough to keep up with the shifting landscape.  The next decade will look a whole lot crazier than the past decade...." 

What this, and everything else I've been reading every week during this year from Pitchbook to McKinsey to Gartner means for me is that we have entered a hugely different era of planning for our businesses in general and for our Marketing and Sales planning specifically. 

Since we're in this business of facilitating planning sessions in our management consulting, what I know about this annual "Season of Planning" that kicks off every September wrapping up in early December with board and management presentations in early January:

• 20% to 25% of B2B companies do not have a formal planning process involving the entire senior management team!  They may have a financial plan pulled together with the CEO and CFO and maybe one or two other managers-usually the VP of Sales, but they do not a formal planning process that actively engages, works through with data and balanced dialog, and gets full 100% agreement from the senior management team.  
• "Business Planning" is not "Strategic Planning", but too often the two are mixed in actions and terminology causing confusion and misalignment in management's commitments. My own definition is below, but it's not important.  What is critically important is that the terminology, the definitions, and the actual multi-month seasonal planning process is totally agreed and committed to by all the direct reports to the CEO and then translated down one level to the departmental managers.  

This week-right in the middle of the Dog Days of August-is a great time to align your team’s September schedules to kick off your own 2026 planning cycle. If you have any questions about best practices or just want to talk through a few ideas, reach out and connect with me at 617-504-4222 or by email at jack@derbymanagement.com

Have a great day selling today!

It's time to begin your business & Sales planning for what lies ahead in 2026.

Think about taking a day out this month to tune up your business and sales plans.  Here's our free how-to ebooks for a few ideas:

"Writing the Winning Sales Plan"
"Writing the Winning Business Plan"
"Writing the Winning Marketing Plan"
"The Marketing of Me"

We outline ideas on structure, models, process funnels, productivity tools and how to recruit, hire and onboard the best people.  A few hands-on guides for real managers written by real managers with their fingers in the dirt.  

Connect with me any time at jack@derbymanagement.com and let's discuss your own 2026 planning!