Some rules don't change in the rhythm of business or being a professor at Tufts!
The 4 Rules of Jack to his students
Tags: how to write a business plan, how to write a marketing plan, how to write a sales plan, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2025 Business Planning, 2025MarketingPlanning, 2025SalesPlanning
What it's like teaching Marketing & Sales.
Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, how to write a business plan, HubSpot Tips, business planning meetings, how to write a sales plan, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2025 Business Planning, 2025MarketingPlanning, 2025SalesPlanning
The Rhythm of the Seasons
Surprise! Surprise!
The leaves are falling in Vermont!
When I was in in Vermont last weekend cranking up the leaf blower, I realized that the natural rhythm of the Fall was well underway. 30% early color in my woodlot and lots of buses full of leaf-peepers. Stratton's ad this morning featuring this picture marketing the fall festival next weekend and early discounts on ski passes made it official for me.
In the very unique state of Vermont, 25% of the annual tourism dollars happen in the next two or three weeks with busses from Ohio rolling in daily filled with seniors waiting to buy tiny, overpriced jars of maple syrup. Right now, the rhythm of the seasons in Vermont is all about marketing as it should be!
Tags: sales and marketing best practices, how to write a business plan, improving sales productivity, how to write a marketing plan, how to write a sales plan, Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts, 2025 Business Planning
Myth: If you build a better mousetrap, they will come.
We've all heard the adage about the better mousetrap and buyers beating a path to the door. In fact, the U.S. patent office over the years has issued more than 4,400 patents for "better" mousetraps, and my guess is that over my years of owning houses, my choices always seem to come down to two: the old-fashioned, dangerous, lose-your-finger, spring traps and the myriad of make-you-cringe newer glue traps. 4,400 ideas reduced to just a couple of choices and actual buying decisions typically being made in the aisles or on the websites of Home Depot and ACE based on colors, brand names, fonts, images of dead critters, and anonymous reviews citing "better, "faster" and "more humane".
Tags: HubSpot Tips, how to write a marketing plan, Making Tough Choices, how to write a sales plan, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, Teaching entrepreneurship, 2023 Business Planning, 2023 Sales Planning, 2023 Marketing Plans
Gotta have Rhythm!
I've always loved music of any kind! I grew up on 1940's jazz, I love classic 60's rock (never missed a U.S. Stones concert), I tolerated disco, love early rap and have a special place in my head and heart for soul and funk.
Tags: sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales tools, marketing effectiveness, how to close sales, sales success, how to write a sales plan, marketing planning, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022 business planning
The sky is falling! Recession! Inflation! OMG!
Tags: sales coaching, sales tools, best sales practices;, sales success, how to write a sales plan, sales effectivness, writing sales plans, 2022businessplansuccess
It's all about the celebration!
- Let's celebrate the end of the Q!
- Let's give it up for finally moving into the official summa'!
- Let's celebrate the freedom that we have which is the true meaning of the 4th!
- Let's kick back this weekend and just relax and dial it down a bit!
Needless to say, it's been more than a bumpy ride over the past six months, and I could list 10 points below that we are all very frustrated with and are complaining about, but I won't since I want to leave you with just one thought this Friday AM which is to simply to celebrate our freedoms and have some well-deserved fun...at least for a day or three.
Tags: sales effectiveness, sales tools, business coaching, how to close sales, best sales practices;, how to write a sales plan, writing sales plans, planningsalestodayinacovidworld, effective blogging, 2022businessplansuccess
Runnin' out of time...
We're always constrained by time...or more accurately, the lack of it and the accompanying pressures of the lack of time!
We think about it! We plan everything around it! We're constantly checking our phones, our watches, our calendars and everything else that defines our digital and analog worlds, and it always seems "there's never enough" and that we're "runnin' out of time"... all the time!
Ok, so we all know that time itself is finite. It might be too long or way too short, but it's always going to be bound by nanoseconds, days, months quarters and years. I have on a very visible shelf of my bookcase here in the office, a fossilized Nautiloid that is approximately 400 million years old just so that I can be frequently reminded to put into perspective the contributions of a 100-year life and my 18-hour workdays. Most importantly, what I've come to realize about time is that I and you need to love what I do, and at this advanced time in my life, I simply love to work, to teach and to build companies.
9 Days
For those of us who sell stuff and manage others who sell stuff, there is always a daily, monthly, and, in the world of most businesses, the all-important quarterly clock that places points on the board. We measure and are measured by others in comparison numbers to our quotas and what we are currently doing balanced against the metrics of last quarter or last year and a long list of other blocks of time. For example, this coming Monday provides us with 9 more days left in the all-important second quarter, which is going to be interpreted by each of us as "just" or "not enough" or "plenty of". I find that each of those words are typically defined by just how well a salesperson actually plans their own time over a longer period, but, in general, unfortunately most salespeople do not plan their time very well!
- We get caught up in the complexities of selling without a formal sales process
- We too often end up doing the job of what Marketing or Service should be doing
- We simply do not take the time to plan out the 20 key selling days in any month
As a test of this, ask any salesperson today to show you their plan for the next 9 days or what their detailed plan looks like for July, and too often the response will be "I'm working on it". This is not because salespeople do not work hard. It's the exact opposite in that too many salespeople simply work without a detailed weekly, monthly and quarterly workplan.
A 30-60-90 Day Plan
Right now, all of us are focused on finishing the Q and then most probably our primary focus will be on what we're going to be doing for the 4th! Next weekend, on the 25th, is actually a perfect time to rough out the architecture of what a broad outline of your 90-day sales plan would look like.
- How many actual selling days will there be in each month?
- Then, subtract your own vacation days
- Then, subtract days immediate to the 4th and Labor Day
- Be realistic about Fridays in the summer
- Blend in your business travel schedules for July and August
- Take out time for sales training and standard weekly/monthly sales meetings
Now plan out what you have left around your own quota and specific sales objectives for the quarter. That's the easier part. Then take what's left and break that available time down into weekly plans based on your specific monthly quota objectives. That's where the rubber hits the road! For more details, click on our "Writing the Winning Sales Plan in 2022", or just connect directly with me at any time for some quick pointers of how to do this.
To put work/life balance of time into perspective, here's an interesting article from the WSJ this week:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-have-only-so-much-time-are-you-using-it-right-11655043558
Have a great day selling today and a superb Father's Day Weekend!
After a three-hour dead-stop traffic jam on Route 2 late Wednesday afternoon trying to get to Vermont, I simply gave up, turned around and headed back to Boston, so it's the NH beach this weekend and not the VT hills.
At any time, if you want to discuss your own sales and marketing planning for the next 30 or 90 days or the rest of this year, just connect with me for some quick ideas and feedback. There's no cost to a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about this rapidly changing world of Sales.
www.derbymanagement.com
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.
Tags: sales effectiveness, sales tools, how to close sales, improving sales productivity, best sales practices;, sales success, how to write a sales plan, 2022 business planning
The Vermont Roof & Trust
Tags: sales coaching, sales effectiveness, sales planning, sales tools, improving sales productivity, how to write a sales plan, writing sales plans, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022businessplansuccess, entrepreneurshipfortherestofus
Successful Entrepreneurship = Successful Sales
Working at the intersection of what I do at the firm, what I do as a venture investor, plus I do at Tufts both as a professor and at the Center, I see, listen to, comment on and mentor 1,000+ business plans each year.
As an example, as I write this, I just finished a 7:00AM call with one of my MIT alum entrepreneurs sorting through various business model options.
BTW, when I asked him to define entrepreneurship for me, his response was... "creating something new that didn't exist before and building an organization around that".
Tags: how to close sales, free marketing projects from universities, entrepreneurship, how to write a sales plan, sales management productivity, sales effectivness, Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts, 2022 sales planning, 2022businessplansuccess