I trust that everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend and enjoyed the perfect spring weather, fun family gatherings and a special time to reflect.
On this Easter Sunday, I found myself on the NH beach at sunrise realizing once again that in the environment surrounding me, the only opportunities I can personally impact are those where I can take specific actions to impact specific change. I like to make the complex simple, which is difficult, so I bring it down to my own points of interest where I can personally make a difference.
What I certainly cannot do is to impact the tide coming in or the sun rising. Similarly, I can't impact geopolitics or make any meaningful difference to the general economy, tariffs or political infighting. That being said, what I can do is take immediate action right now to impact revenue growth in my own company! What I know from a lengthy list of unexpected disasters, recessions and global wars over decades of running businesses is that now is the time to take action to grow revenue and not retrench and hunker down.
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Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Yesterday was the last content class in my Science of Sales course with 12 final presentations now scheduled for that course and my Marketing course during the next two weeks when the senior management comes to Tufts for 2-hour presentations on the final projects. The students work with management each week and then management provides 40% of the team grade for these complex semester-long projects.
There are no excuses in Sales Rule
These courses are based in formal processes, detailed tools, HubSpot software, and more than a few important "Jack Rules", one of which is that if you're late to class, and you have not previously notified your TA, you owe the class pizza fund $5.00.
It's actually been a no-incident semester in my Sales course until last week when one of our very active and most engaging students, whom I know very well from this and another course, was 5 minutes late. Having some fun with him...while taking his $5.00...I asked him if he would update the archaic "But, the dog ate my homework" excuse that I grew up with, and here's what he came back with:
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Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
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Could not ask for a more Spring-like day in New England than this: a rainy, clingy, cold and windy Saturday morning. Spring in New England!
Here at the NH beach, it's just wicked grey rain at 8:00 AM.
In VT, it's either snowy rain or rainy snow according to my Ring camera, but whatever it is, it's not doing much to get rid of the heavy snow still out by barn.
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Sales Management Best Practices,
best sales practices;,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Is it just "the older me", or did others of you grow up with the following little poem that is right now rattling through my head this cold and rainy classic Vermont Spring morning?
Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the birdies is.
They say the birdies on the wing, but that’s absurd.
I always thought the wing was on the bird.
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Sales Management Best Practices,
Sales quota,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
My teaching in both my Marketing and Science of Sales courses provides a laboratory for my work with my students and with our management consulting practice building sales and marketing processes.
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2024 Sales Planning,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
With the last selling day for February today, I thought that it might be interesting to share what we've been seeing changing all through 2024 and now into the first two months of 2025.
12 years ago, I asked Tufts if I could develop a new course titled "The Science of Sales" to match up with my Marketing course. Today it's one of the core requirements for a minor in entrepreneurship which provides lot of opportunities to experiment and measure results while developing detailed research and comprehensive sales plans for six companies and another six of marketing plans over the course of 13 weeks.
What follows is a combination of what we're seeing in these projects, what we're observing using HubSpot's data since we use their software tools and findings in both courses plus the backbone of a recent McKenzie blog.
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Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Arrived here in Vermont late last night to discover everything was just wicked cold...and totally frozen...even though I had been watching the plow guys and shovelers on my Ring for the last two weeks. Right now, I'm in my downstairs office but not able to see out the window which is covered with 4 feet of snow. One has gotta' love living in Vermont, but then my family has been here in this valley for 7 generations, so every once in a while, I trick myself into thinking that I'm used to constant snow and temps below 0...but not really. My great grandfather, Horace, lived up the road a piece in Poultney and (according to my grandfather) talked about 9 months of winta', 1 of summa', 1 of mosquitos and 1 of damn poor sleddin'".
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
finding sales jobs,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
At 8:30 this morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the employment report. My guess is that it's going to show that hiring slowed in January while the unemployment rate was flat. Nothing unexpected there since I've been listening carefully to our clients since October with a steadily increasing number of comments of "let's see what happens with the elections", and much more loudly in January: "let's see how the new Trump directives shake out". Since one of our mantras with our customers is to only focus on those things that you yourself can control, and since most of us cannot control these larger events, what does come to mind this morning is an opportunity during this graduation season to hire the best seniors coming out of the universities that surround our companies:
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Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
