Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Happy Valentine's Day!

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, Sales Hiring Perfectly, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2025 Business Planning, 2025MarketingPlanning, 2025SalesPlanning

Every week, I shuffle between living on the NH beach, working in Boston, teaching at Tufts and spending weekends in Vermont.  Lots of miles on the car, a good time for customer and student calls, and always an opportunity to think about planning ahead.  In a month like January  when we're kicking off sales meetings and working through the details of territory plans, account plans and commission plans, since I'm a planning kinda guy, I thought I'd have some fun this morning and introduce you to the art and science of what it takes to plan ahead when one heats their house with a woodstove which is what I do in Vermont. 

Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2025 Business Planning, 2025MarketingPlanning, 2025SalesPlanning

Just as in all sports, nothing is more measurable than our end of year scorecards for how we did overall in our businesses and especially in our measurements of revenue and bottom line.  Everything is on some sort of a scoreboard, and whether it's the Celtics, Bruins and Patriots, or it's in our yearend results to our shareholders and investors, or it's in the semester's grading for my students, there's no sense in playing any game, studying in any course or working in any company without a scorecard!  It would be like playing tennis without a net.

Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2025 Business Planning, 2025MarketingPlanning, 2025SalesPlanning

With the Yankees showing up tonight at Fenway at 7:10 to take on the Sox, let me shift away from my last Friday's blog comparing being half way through the baseball season to being half way through the Sales year and focus on the Patriots on this superb summa' morning.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, The Competitive Edge, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2024 Marketing Planning

This afternoon's Finals of the Tufts $100K Business Plan Competition started with 100s of February applications and countless hours of expert advice from hands-on-coaches which then moved to 30 Semi-Finalists three weeks ago and today will come down to the judging of 15 finalists for all of the marbles.  Along that path, our distinctive expertise in applying our own brand of "Entrepreneurship for the Rest of Us"is the uniqueness that we provide at The Derby Entrepreneurship Center.

 

Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

On a particularly cold, wet and gray Vermont morning as I look out at the remnants of the two feet of snow earlier this week in addition to it being the last selling day of the quarter on Good Friday before Easter Sunday, I've was thinking a lot about "rhythms" on the drive up from Boston last night.  Take Easter for example since everyone including me has been commenting on "how early Easter is this year", the simplest way to explain the date of Easter is that it falls on the first Sunday after the full moon that follows the spring equinox.  Bottom line is that it's more complicated than that, but the simple fact is that there is a definitive rhythm to setting the date of Easter.  Next time it will be on March 31st btw will be 2086. 

Tags: HubSpot Tips, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning

An extraordinary day last Friday at The Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts watching, listening, reviewing and commenting on the semi-finals for our annual $100K Business Plan Contest.  Just as college basketball ramps up for March Madness, so do we accelerate for the biggest event on the Tufts campus for The Finals on April 5th.

Tags: Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, Derby Entrepreneurship Center, 2024 sales and marketing best practices, 2024 Sales Planning, 2024 Business Planning, 2024 Marketing Planning

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

In the profession of Sales, everything is about connections and the ability to bring real value to real people!
In the science of Sales, this then becomes the calculated rhythm and the resulting math and metrics of 

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

Today is the last of the 11 Marketing and Sales project presentations for the semester.  Should be very interesting considering the team is mostly engineering graduate students, and they have been hard at it for 13 weeks in our Science of Sales course stretching beyond the confines of building out the details of a sales plan to the rounding out of a fuller business plan.  

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, HubSpot Tips, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, Derby Entrepreneurship Center