Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

For a cold Friday morning at the end of a very busy and shortened week, hopefully the title of this morning's blog gets some attention...because it should.  Terrible news with what has occurred over the last two weeks regarding Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's complications from his prostrate surgery.  He has already stated that there are actions he should have taken that would have provided better communication and better met protocols. 

And unfortunately, given the current Washington environment of rabid finger-pointing and heightened political back-stabbing, there are now calls for his resignation.   

Most importantly, the best of the best to everyone for what I believe will be an extraordinary growth year in 2024!  My personal chant driving my own planning is "Do More in '24!". 

"Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2024"

Always an interesting time of year in my balancing time between Derby Management customers, Tufts students and this week's final exams, and our portfolio companies.  The simple solution is to sleep less since I've never been convinced that we need all of those hours anyway. [apologies if this recent WSJ article only opens to subscribers]. 

Bottom line:
-get less sleep
-work on the weekends
-only 10 more selling days!

• The Days are now only 17 real selling days left in the year.  
• The Road is a choice to focus on either new logos or upsell/crossell.
• The Rubber is getting to Quota & President's Club

Unless I'm deep in the lower half of my sales funnel with deals I've been working on since late September and October, right now, I'm totally focused on upselling existing customers with additional solutions. 

For me, it's a simple equation built around having only 17 available days and being a trusted partner or strategic advisor to our existing customers.  

A fun example of upselling occurred with me on TDay morning when I showed up exactly at 10:30 at the country club as instructed to pick up the mostly cooked bird and the 6 sides of vegetables, potatoes, and everything else down to the butter and the cranberry sauce.  Greeting me was the club manager, the chef and two other smiling employees who were there to load everything into my car, which I thought was "very nice" of them to do.   Then the manager asked me:  "We also have a very nice wine selection to go with your wonderful dinner", as he pointed to a table of various wines grouped by price at $20, $30, $40 and $50 a bottle.   

Yes, first and most importantly, a sincere expression of thanks for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday!  A great time for families and a day or two of decompression before we jump back into the final 20ish days of the year where every point we can put on the board counts.  Enjoy the break, have fun, take a walk in the woods and get ready for the final quota crunch.  The very good news is that as salespeople, we have a lot to be thankful for.

With around 37 real selling days left in the Q, 90% of our sales and marketing expertise and our rapidly eroding time needs to be spent on pumping, pushing and pulling deals down into the funnel. 

The actual closing process at the end of the funnel should be the easy part; it's the prep and the actual selling of the value that we provide that takes the time over the next 37 days.   

BTW, just in terms of other sales factoids that rattle around in my brain sometimes, did you know that there are more than 30 different B2B closing tactics we could be using? Here's an old video I did back in my sales training days that still has value in its simplicity. My experience is that the very best salespeople are experts in 3 types of closing techniques, and they hone those to perfection all the time!  

To make it more direct (I didn't say "easy"). our work as salespeople needs to be always focused not on us and our products, but on the actual business and personal value we deliver.  To help guide you along that path, I have pasted below excellent advice from last week's blog post from my sales-expert friend, and Fractional CRO, Mike Schumann, to provide you with specific ideas that should get you activated in the science and the math of Sales.  Mike's philosophy and hands-on expertise exactly matches our own at Derby Management, where for over a decade we've built customized detailed sales and marketing methods that follow our underlying mantra of "Process-Tools-Technology-Math & People".   When executed completely, the results are productivity improvements of around 25% in less than a year.

In a world... where we were struggling two years ago to figure out what "the new normal" would be, and, just when we thought we had done that, we were hit with ugliness of inflation, the media hype of recession, the invasion of Ukraine and now the tragedy of what is happening in the Middle East.  The bottom line of this opening to this Friday's blog is that there's very little right now that any of us can do to change any of these outside influences on our businesses.   

What we should be doing is to take rigid control of what we can control and reduce that to the simplicity of selling vanilla ice cream!

Just about 40 days!

Here we are already at the end of September! 

 "The A-Team" shows up at 7:00 AM tomorrow for the first of the fall "Big Cleans" in Vermont.  A team of four to six men and women now in their late 20's who began this tradition with me when they were students at Green Mountain College up the road a piece in Poultney. 

Very coincidentally, Green Mountain has come up numbers of times in my Vermont life.  Decades ago, it was my first college teaching gig long before MIT and Tufts. 

Poultney is a classic example of a picture-perfect small Vermont town, and it's where my father, grandfather and GGF and GGGF lived for generations of being entrepreneurs.  It's in the blood!

With the leaf peeping season well underway, Saturday's A-Team will be back again at the end of October to do the final clean-up in the woodlot and stack the three cords that will get me through the winta'.  In Vermont, the winta' comes early, and as my grandfather used to say, "there's 9 months of winta', 1 of mosquitos, and two of just bad sleddin'."

Fall officially starts tomorrow, but in my trip to Vermont house last weekend, it was obvious that the rhythm of the seasons was in full cycle which is great since the fall season provides 25% of the tourist income for the state.   Vermont is absolutely in full rhythm for the fall:

Results, Results, & More Results!

Ok, a good way to think on a rainy Tuesday morning as I head out to a day of meetings in Boston in a wicked busy week. 

Finished my intro business planning class at MIT yesterday and while I'm thinking about my second class at Tufts tomorrow which is all about market research, today's focus is 100% on sales, and where I need to be by the end of December...only about 100 workdays away.