The Scores are on the Board!
2019 in review
The scores have been on the scoreboard now for a few days since the official year ended on the 30th, and the final game tapes have been reviewed. There'll be a couple of minor adjustments made during this week, but the big numbers are already posted on the board!
- The Patriots lost. We all have our own opinions and comments, but, who cares? They lost!
- Our own sales numbers are done! Most of us are happy; some not so much! 2019 is done!
We Gotta Get Moving!
When I took on my first job as a division president, that same week I fired the head of Sales and hired my first real sales manager. Solid guy, older, heavily experienced and market experience-all good. On completing our first year working together and ending up on the positive side of the scoreboard, I walked into his office during this same week in January, thanked him profusely and talked excitedly abut the year ahead. He shut me up (always the sign of a smart manager btw) and asked me to look down at his desk where he had a well-worn, leather-encased calendar already outfitted with the new paper refills for the year ahead. He flipped back to the last day of December, and, then, as he flipped ahead returning to the current day, he said, "It's a new day in a new month in a new year, and we gotta get moving today!. What was last year is just that-last year!"
Even today, years later, I still love that phrase, "gotta get moving today!", but along the path of all of those years since then, I've also learned the hard lessons of having a team-developed and highly-communicated game plan in place.
- “Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is small.” – Sun Tzu
- "It's not the plan that's important, it's the planning process that's critical." - Eisenhower
- "Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes, but no plans." - Drucker
- "By failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail." - Franklin
- "I ain't Martin Luther King, I don't need a dream. I have a plan." - Spike Lee
Thinking ahead about this 2020 kickoff blog, over the holiday break, given that I spent most of the time dealing with a flood problem at the NH beach house preventing my annual holiday trip to Stratton, I decided to do some heavy editing on our three "How-To" planning books for Business Plans, for Sales Plans and for Marketing Plans. Good therapy for my head and a good distraction from my daily education on the physics of groundwater, full moons and accompanying tides.
Always Start with your business plan!
If one thinks about planning for 2020, my recommendation is to start with updating your company's business plan before you dive into the details of your marketing and sales plans. And, they should be done in that order-first your business plan, then your marketing plan and finally your sales plan.
Most probably, what you're going to be doing is just updating what you had in place for 2019 in terms of your overarching business strategies, and, depending on where you ended up on the 2019 scoreboard, you should spend your time updating your tactical and activity plans. At the end of the day, everything in business comes down to activity planning...but, those detailed activity plans absolutely must Lego-lock into your overarching tactical and strategic planning for the business as a whole.
Writing the Winning Business Plan
20 years ago, I started this document teaching my first course at MIT. Every summer since then this document undergoes a major editing on the NH beach with advice, editorial comments and content coming from associates and customers. Growing in size and its level of detail, this free Writing the Winning Business Plan ebook has been downloaded about 25,000 times and is now used both at Tufts in their Entrepreneurship Center and is the business planning book for MIT's edX online courses.
Take a look. https://www.derbymanagement.com/solution-center/sales-tools
Begin the journey, and then next week, I'll provide the details of both of our books on Writing the Winning Marketing Plan and Writing the Winning Sales Plan.
In the meantime, if you have any questions about the business plan book, just connect with me by text or email...or if you need to know about ground water, sump pumps, or the physics of internal and external concrete pressure, you can also give me a call.
Please stay connected!
jack@derbymanagement.com
Head Coach, Derby Management, experts in...
-Sales & Marketing Productivity
-Business and Strategic Planning
WHAT WE DO AT DERBY MANAGEMENT
Professor of the Practice, Tufts Entrepreneurship Center
