Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

• 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

I trust you had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  Family, friends and a bit of well-deserved time off not complicated by gifts and pressured only by Mom's Rule of no politics at the dinner table.   Always a great holiday, plus this past weekend seems to indicate very solid retail performance.

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.   

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Sales quota, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning

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.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales quota, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

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.

Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

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!

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

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'."

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

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:

Tags: Sales Management Best Practices, SEO, Inboound, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

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.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Sales quota, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

Rhythm

Most everything in business has a definitive rhythm.  Every quarter is marked by various events of annual planning, budgeting, sales kickoffs, trade shows, and of course...summa' vacations, which no matter how carefully we plan around them, they always seem to impact our sales forecasts with delays.  

Tags: entreprenurial, Sales Best Practices, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Teaching entrepreneurship, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, Derby Entrepreneurship Center

The Dog Days of Summa are here in full force, and what are we already hearing since last week's turn of the calendar page? 

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, best sales practices;, business planning meetings, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus, Teaching at Tufts University, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans

In both my Marketing course and in my Science of Sales course, the process is to involve six real-life companies in each course who have a need to develop either a detailed sales or marketing plan.  Six juniors and seniors, with balanced experience, are assigned to each project prior to the semester beginning with specific assignments to be read and Hubspot certification to be completed prior to the first class.  Then for the period of the next 13 weeks, there is content supplied by me, by my TAs and especially from my alums who have over the years now moved into sales or marketing management positions and come back to class to instruct.  The teams work with their management on a weekly basis with guidance from me and our instructors producing a final detailed plan around the objectives of their manager who ends up providing 40% of their overall grade. 

• It's deeply detailed, 
• It's complex as we teach a new language, technology and math
• It's a heavy time commitment with 2x-3x more time spent outside the classroom than in
• Most importantly it's real life where the experience of Sales changes constantly
• And then, there's the side benefit that the students are often offered jobs

The syllabus and the six projects go to the students on July 5th and choices will be made within the following 48 hours, and I have been working through the syllabus with my TAs for the fall, I thought about one of the more impactful presentations made at the very beginning of this past spring's semester, which was done by Brian Bresee, Director of Sales for Hubspot's NA Partner Program and an alum from this course.  To give applause and superb thanks to my other 10 alum instructors, everyone did a superb job !!! of instructing digging deep into processes, roles, technology, and compensation planning!  What Brian provided in that second class was to give a framework of basic simplicity to what is one of the new rules of the Science of Sales: Prioritization, Personalization and Persistence!  Three critical words to think about today as we now are on the final countdown for the end of the Q on Friday. 

 

Ever since the Harvard Business Review woke up 10 years ago to the fact that there's basic science in the world of Sales and that buying decisions are not made as the result of sports tickets and Dunkin' delivered by JoeyBagaDonuts, there's been a wave of sales terms of Sales Optimization, Sales Enablement, Customer Journey Mapping, Social Selling, Omnichannel Sales, and now, of course Sales AI.  All of these new phrases simply come down to the basics that as a sales manager, I simply want to provide my team with improved productivity and efficiency while providing our customers with improved value.  Higher productivity on one hand and higher value on the other!   

Just a couple of short comments this morning as we stare down the end of the Q in two days!

Good selling today!

 2023 SALES PLANNING 

Check out our updated sales productivity site page.  Just page down to get our new edition of Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023.  Or you can just email me, and I will send you a free copy.  Connect with me at any time for some quick ideas and feedback. There's never a cost for a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about Sales & Marketing.   

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.

 

 

 

 

Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans