A warm day for spring planning

Although not the best snowboarding season, this winta' has been easy on the shoveling, my fuel bills and other than last weekend's frozen pipes (-33.1 F ambient at the top of Stratton) in the VT house, it's been a relatively smooth kickoff for the new year. 

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Tags: Sales Best Practices, best sales practices;, 2022businessplansuccess, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Marketing Plans

The 10 Must Do's in your Job Hunt

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!

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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

Back to the Rhythm of Everything

 

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Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, best sales practices;, business planning meetings, 2022 business planning, 2022 sales planning, 2022businessplansuccess, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts

Always a tough Tufts question..."So, just what is marketing?

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/

 

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Tags: sales planning, marketing effectiveness, HubSpot Tips, Tufts marketing projects, free marketing projects from universities, marketing plans, marketing planning, 2020 sales plans, 2022 sales planning, 2022businessplansuccess, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts

Gearing up for September at Tufts

Somewhere deep in the rhythm of the lives of all of us are the memories which awaken around this time of year of "back to school" whether that results from buying clothes and supplies for our own kids or the anxieties that came in our own lives with major shifts into a new building or going off to college as a freshman.  The rhythm of operating our businesses, especially as it relates to our employees, is often in sync with the rhythms of the school year.  

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Tags: free marketing projects from universities, marketing planning, social entrepreneurship, 2022businessplansuccess, Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts

The sky is falling! Recession! Inflation! OMG!

As an "older" salesguy, I've seen it all:

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Tags: sales coaching, sales tools, best sales practices;, sales success, how to write a sales plan, sales effectivness, writing sales plans, 2022businessplansuccess

It's all about the celebration!

  • Let's celebrate the end of the Q!
  • Let's give it up for finally moving into the official summa'!
  • Let's celebrate the freedom that we have which is the true meaning of the 4th!
  • Let's kick back this weekend and just relax and dial it down a bit!

Needless to say, it's been more than a bumpy ride over the past six months, and I could list 10 points below that we are all very frustrated with and are complaining about, but I won't since I want to leave you with just one thought this Friday AM which is to simply to celebrate our freedoms and have some well-deserved fun...at least for a day or three.  

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Tags: sales effectiveness, sales tools, business coaching, how to close sales, best sales practices;, how to write a sales plan, writing sales plans, planningsalestodayinacovidworld, effective blogging, 2022businessplansuccess

The Vermont Roof & Trust

I'm on the NH beach this weekend for a couple of reasons:

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Tags: sales coaching, sales effectiveness, sales planning, sales tools, improving sales productivity, how to write a sales plan, writing sales plans, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022businessplansuccess, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus

Successful Entrepreneurship = Successful Sales

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".

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Tags: how to close sales, free marketing projects from universities, entrepreneurship, how to write a sales plan, sales management productivity, sales effectivness, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022 sales planning, 2022businessplansuccess

Don't just remember, do something!

Nothing I can write in my normal Friday blog about business, entrepreneurship or my even beloved Tufts is important today, as we head out for the long Memorial Day weekend and the kickoff of the summa of '22.  I would ask that all of us do something to not just remember, but to take some tiny action that brings reality to the lives of millions of veterans who have given us the freedom of democracy and protected the lives that we have today. 

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Tags: sales effectiveness, entrepreneurship, how to write a sales plan, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022businessplansuccess