Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

I love Tufts where I teach a course in Marketing and another in "The Science of Sales".  Actually, considering the method that I use, both courses are deep into the engineering and analytics of their respective disciplines and follow a consistent thread of "Process-Tools-Technology-Metrics & People". Totally integrated into the courseware of building detailed marketing and sales plans for real companies, is the corresponding rigor of "The Marketing of You", where everyone needs to develop their personal Value Propositions for jobs.  

Most importantly, at Tufts, we have a superb Career Center with very highly experienced leadership and hands-on advisors who really care about their work. 

At this time, given 1,500+ alums who have gone through my courses, many of whom are now managers and looking to hire my recent graduates, plus a very wide network of thousands of business and investor connections, we can open a lot of job opportunities ranging from companies the size of Hubspot to Deloitte and Amazon down to tiny startups.  The process is fun, often complex in a marketing sense, which makes it more fun, and, most importantly, very rewarding!

Tags: how to write a marketing plan, Sales Hiring & Onboarding, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans, 2022 business planning, 2022 sales planning, 2022businessplansuccess, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Teaching entrepreneurship, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning

Yesterday, I completed my virtual follow-up visit with my cardiologist, Dr. Michael at MGH.  It's hard to even use those words, "my cardiologist" after being diagnosed with "massive heart disease" (another uncomfortable choice of words) five years ago with 100% of one artery blocked and 60% of another. 

The only reason I lived was that I had grown two new arteries which "naturally bypassed" the two diseased arteries. Who knew?  Not me!  Not my Vermont country doc who had incorrectly diagnosed my shortness of breath as asthma and loaded me down with three different scripts for inhalers which I used for years before moving back to Boston and new docs at MGH.  

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales effectiveness, sales enablment, how to write a business plan, sales planning meetings, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans

I attended the Tufts graduation this past weekend

Tags: marketing projects, free marketing projects from universities, interns for marketing projects, how to write a marketing plan, marketing planning, Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, 2020 business plans

By the end of a normal Friday morning, the front of my brain would have heard, dissected and categorized some hundreds of ideas, and I would have figured out one thread of hopefully a meaningful subject to twist around my travels to Vermont, my teaching at Tufts or my working at the NH beach.  This Friday is complicated by way too many jumbled "new normal" activities...not any different from any of you, I'm sure.  

Tags: marketing projects, entrepreneurship, jack derby professor at Tufts, Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, 2020 business plans, writing sales plans

No one needs to tell us how difficult this is!

Tags: sales forecasting, sales leadership, sales management productivity, sales effectivness, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans

Typically, at this point in the selling season, I'd be writing this morning about the end of Q1, telling everyone to crunch it for this final week ahead, and begin prepping for the upcoming most important quarter in any selling year,   But, not today!

Tags: business planning, writing a business plan, Making Tough Choices, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans, writing business plans

Already deep into January....

Tags: sales planning meetings, sales leadership, sales management plans, sales effectivness, sales motivation, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans, writing sales plans

Right now I'm about four hours away from my first Marketing course of this new semester at Tufts, and I never know who's more nervous or excited about the upcoming 13 weeks- me or the students? 

Experience says that it's always me!.

Tags: sales leadership, sales management productivity, Tufts Entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans

One does not need to be an entrepreneur to be entrepreneurial, so it's with that thought that I share a few ideas to take you through the holidays and hopefully a couple of days off for a much-needed break.   

In the spirit of sharing, the first three of these came to me last week from one of the all-time great entrepreneurs, CB Vaughn, the founder of CB Sports, who revolutionized the world of skiing and championship ski racing by designing and manufacturing outwear that became the market leader in design, while being extremely functional on the hill.  Still today, when people notice that I worked with CB, they will stop and tell me about the first CB parka that they bought, its color, and how they had saved up for a year to make the purchase at top ski shops like Pedigree Sports.

• Always Inspire !
  

  Above everything else, inspire your team and your customers to want to do work with you!  At CB Sports, we weren't the biggest, but we were certainly the leading brand in terms of design, quality and functionality!  There was never a question as to the absolute focus on our customers and the value that we provided. Long before the clinical marketing term of "persona" was conceived, we knew exactly who are customers were...and were not. With CB's very strong leadership, all of us from associates to suppliers to retailers were totally driven to focus exactly on the team on the hill.

• Be Prepared for Your Own SuperBowl !

  During the time that I worked with CB, he had the drive and, most importantly, the discipline of preparation to be able to interpret and translate the smallest detail into the impact and the value that it delivered to our customers. His SuperBowl has always been the customer experience, which, when you think about it should always define our own success in everything we do.

• 4th & 1: You Don't Need a Playbook !

  In any company, whether it's one of my many emerging startups that we innovate out of the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, or it's an established rapid-growth company like CB Sports, there are those critical times when you need to take control of the ball and just drive decisively down the field and win!

• Entrepreneurship is About Making Change Happen in your own world!

  Growing up as a corporate guy at Becton Dickinson, even though my great-grandfather, my grandfather and my father were all very different entrepreneurs, I couldn't spell "entrepreneurship" before I started sitting in the audience at the MIT Enterprise Forum, where years later I became an avid volunteer and a committed board member and chairman. 
  
  Back-in-the-day, even after working with CB and then starting a company when I returned to Boston, and then another company and another and more, I always thought of entrepreneurship as doing just that. I thought that entrepreneurship was all about starting companies and moving up and to the right from Concept to Team to Structure to Scale to Success. And, while that's somewhat true, that path works only in a tiny 1% of 1% of companies that actually succeed, and even then, it's never a straight line. 
  
  Of much more importance is our own entrepreneurial ability that's present in all of us to initiate and make change happen in whatever piece of the world where we choose to make it happen! 
  
  In among the holiday presents, the marvelous food and the travel, I would ask you to take a tiny slice of time and think about mapping out your own entrepreneurial journey for 2020.  I've just completed mine and looking forward to hearing about yours!
  
  Have a wonderful holiday!
  Enjoy !  Hug!  Be Safe! 
  Make Change Happen!
  Please stay connected! jack@derbymanagement.com 
  

  Advisor, Derby Management, experts in...
  -Sales & Marketing Productivity
  -Business and Strategic Planning
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Tags: entreprenurial, entrepreneurship, 2020 business plans, 2020 sales plans

 

Tags: sales management effectiveness, Making Tough Choices, jack derby professor at Tufts, sales management productivity, Tufts Entrepreneurship, 2020 business plans