Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Actually, the origins of Friday, the 13th are complex, a mix of both realities and myths:

The date itself is an extension of the fear of the number 13, known as paraskevidekatriaphobia, which was heavily popularized by fiction writers back to the 19th and 20th centuries and extending, of course, by our own love of the 1980 horror flick, Friday the 13th...and its many haunting extensions. 

The date is shrouded with many myths...or at least unknowns.  There's the actual number 13 traced back to several sources such as Judas who supposedly was the 13th guest at the Last Supper before betraying Jesus. In medieval times, the actual day of Friday was thought to be an unlucky day to begin any important work.   

The reality is evidenced in events such as that on Friday, October 13, 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered the mass arrest of the Knights Templar. Hundreds of these powerful medieval knights were imprisoned and many were later executed.

With that as background, and since, in fact, it is Friday, the 13th, let me shift to the many myths surrounding the profession of Sales since most of these end up costing salespeople unnecessary time, but more importantly are on the wrong side of the equation for building trust and value creation with the prospect.  

This morning after a 95-degree day in Boston where I was yesterday doing booth duty with the DurraPanel team, one of our new very exciting investments, I was thinking in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, as to the various interpretations as to when the summa' begins:

It was a picture-perfect day two weeks ago for Tufts' Commencement!  Perfect weather!  Perfect timing!  Perfect Goodbyes!   Always a memorable time of happiness and thanks, certainly tears of joy and separation, and always a bit of fear balanced by the excitement of the unknowns for both those graduates who have jobs and more so for those who have not yet landed that perfect mix of work, location and compensation. 

Gotta hand it to the Celtics for their hard work, their athleticism, their perseverance and just true grit, but with Friday night's final score, we're on the sidelines watching the rest of the playoffs.  Playing the game to win is the very nature of every sport, and it's also the core essence of every activity that we engage in as professional salespeople. 

You want to win, you gotta' play to win which means that if you're behind right now halfway through the quarter, you may want to think about changing up your baseline drills for success. 

Here's a few simple, but directly impactful ideas to try out this beautiful Monday morning: 

• Every month: Update your written team playbook by getting everyone on the team directly involved.
  A playbook is not your annual sales plan that you architected last December. This is a living, breathing document that's frequently revisited and updated with the team at the beginning of every month. We've been insisting on these now for a few years, and the direct impact has been amazing.  
  
• Every week:
  -Hold one-hour early AM training drills on one or two specific tactics.
  -Personally connect for 15 minutes with 1 successful person who inspires you.
  -Read 1 technical article written in 2024-2025 on what it takes to be successful in Sales.
  
  
• Every day:
  -Think like a customer first, not a salesperson selling anything.
  -Focus on what you can do to drive direct business value for your customers.
  -Begin each day by verbalizing out loud why you're the best salesperson.
  -Start with activities that energize you-maybe it's exercise or listening to a podcast on the drive.
  -Dig into tracking the math in detail: every play, every conversion and every score. 

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:

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. 

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.

This has been a wonderfully busy week of events and busy sales schedules!

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. 

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'".