Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Every morning I'm up at 4:30. First, I ask Alexa to play WBZ 1030 Radio, so I get my "5 Things You Need to Know" with the local news plus what I really care about which is the traffic and weather to gauge my travel time from the NH beach to Boston.  The traffic is always wicked, so  I'm just listening for the big accidents like..."yet another truck got Storrowed early this morning", which if you live in Boston, you know what this means.

I then ask Alexa to "Play Bloomberg News", while I click into my newest edition of the WSJ on my iPad and comb through whatever appeals as interesting articles for the day. Last Tuesday, I stopped on this headline of "Millennials Are Changing What It Takes to Succeed in Sales".  

The next day, I was reminded of the same article when one of my most faithful blog readers and repeated entrepreneurs, Jerry Brecher, sent it to me. I'm going to link the article here, but my expectation is that by clicking on it, unless you're a WSJ subscriber, you will not get past their paywall. If you cannot, I would encourage you to hunt down the article and read it thoroughly.  

Me & Millennials

I began teaching at MIT 22 years ago and Tufts 17, so where I started in this wonderful profession was initially working with Xers and then mostly with Millennials.  Exciting, extremely smart, powerful in their statements and curiosity, very energetic, fast-paced and always questioning to move ahead and make an impact in the world!  Clearly in numbers, the largest generation: more than the Boomers who carried that badge since the 1940's.

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!

A crisp 55 in the Seaport where I am at 7 this morning.  Probably 45 down at the Winhall General Store in Vermont and just cold enough to start planning seriously about filling up the woodshed. While the weatha’ dictates my long list of Fall "To-Dos" that need to be done at the NH beach and in the VT hills, with only five more selling days left in the Q, quota success for the balance of this year is all about detailed account planning:

Gearing up for re-entry into the Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts since in four weeks, I'll need to accelerate from my normal 70 mph day-to-day Derby Management work to 110 mph at Tufts. 

That faster pace and my personal excitement of Tufts are the result of the tight integration of my teaching marketing to 36 juniors and seniors who are already signed up in six person teams working on six complex semester-long marketing projects.  Of these six projects, three are well-known companies to Derby Management, one is an emerging company begun by one of my alums, another is a startup from a very well-known nutrition scientist here at Tufts, and the remaining is a fascinating consumer healthcare product.   

The bottom line of the kickoff on September 7th is that full marketing plans complete with research, strategies, tactics, detailed recommendations and budgets will be presented to their customers for grading during the first week of December.  

The 1st class begins with "So, what is Marketing?"

The class actually begins with a 15-minute, rapid-fire, standup 15 question quiz on one of the summer assignments which is to complete what I call "a beach read" of David Meerman's Scott's iconic, 8th edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. 

That exercise is then followed with my favorite question which I always ask in my kickoff class at Tufts and at MIT.  It's a very simple question, and for me a very simple answer, which I do not provide until the whiteboard is filled with answers from the students which typically include words such, "convincing", "selling", "social media", "ads", "PR", "branding", "lead generation", "pricing" and even a few negative words like "tricking" and so on.

Marketing is Everything!

I always go back to the iconic Marketing is Everything article written by Regis McKenna, one of the most influential marketers in history, and one of the small number of individuals who began what is today known as Silicon Valley.  I find that the underlying premise of this 30-year-old article is even more critical today given the explosion of choices everyone has in their marketing strategies, tactics, platforms, tools and apps, most of which are powered through AI and bots. 

And let's not forget that the hyper-crowded graphic above is only martech and does not include radio, TV, snail mail, billboards or trade shows which continue to have a major role in what we call "marketing"!

The good news is that marketing is everything!  The bad news is that marketing is everything!  And many non-progressive marketers continue to believe that what they did five years ago, or even last year, is still relevant or sales productive today. The reality is that it may be, likely it is not.  

Many of us believe we're pretty good singers in the car or the shower, but only a tiny 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% become paid singers.  It's the same with marketing which is why I teach the subject since it's constantly being updated, and the true job of any good marketer is to figure out the highest impact at a cost that fits into a budget that drives sales qualified leads. The result is as simple as that, which is why we always measure CAC as one of our top three primary metrics.  The complexity comes in the making of the choices.

marketing Success is making choices...and measuring everything!

The exciting part of our course is the ability to learn and experiment in real time.  The students can set in motion the marketing tactics of ads, social channels, PR and which blogs and which events have impact and be able to measure all of that in their Hubspot marketing platforms.  All the incoming students must be certified in Inbound Marketing at the beginning of the semester. 

Just some thoughts for a late Friday morning to think about over what looks like a spectacular summer weekend, which will find me walking across the street to the NH beach. 

At any time, if you want to discuss your own sales and marketing planning for the rest of this year, just connect with me for some quick ideas and feedback. There's no cost to a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about this new rapidly changing world of sales and marketing.  It's nothing like the old days of 2020!  In the meantime, take a look at our 2022 edition of "Writing the 2022 Winning Sales Plan" , or our Writing the Winning Marketing Plan in 2022.

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts. 

https://www.tufts.edu/

Working at the intersection of what I do at the firm, what I do as a venture investor, plus I do at Tufts both as a professor and at the Center, I see, listen to, comment on and mentor 1,000+ business plans each year. 

As an example, as I write this, I just finished a 7:00AM call with one of my MIT alum entrepreneurs sorting through various business model options. 

BTW, when I asked him to define entrepreneurship for me, his response was... "creating something new that didn't exist before and building an organization around that".

On Friday the 13th, and a beautiful spring day here in my tiny (p.769) town of Winhall (the state's name) or Bondville (the fed's name), the wake-up question for this morning is do we create our own luck?

The end of the day on Thursday found me starting to write this morning's blog on a classic VT spring day:

With the beginning of March and just a few short weeks before the end of the Q, life in the world of us in the profession of Sales is totally focused on what we can bring across the finish line by the end of this month. 

Snowing heavily at 6:00 this morning out by the Vermont barn, as I'm sure it is wherever you are here in New England.  Looks like 13-15" on the hill today, but unfortunately for me a packed day of sales calls and zooms.  When it snows, I always worry about the mechanics of dealing with it even with three snowblowers at various houses and a superb plow service from the team at Homestead up the road a piece.  It's just my normal belt and suspenders approach to way overthinking too many details.