Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at the breakfast counter at the Rye General Store, where I bike most mornings when I’m at the beach, and I looked up from my Globe to see Dottie sitting at the opposite end of the counter. Dottie and I grew up together at the beach pretty much from our earliest childhood years through high school since our parents had cottages right next to one another. After we both bumbled through the normal awkwardness of not having seen one another for 35 plus years, we quickly connected on spouses, jobs, kids and kids’ kids, and then got down to the interesting stuff of what had happened to the pods of kids that we grew up and surfed with.

For years now, I’ve talked, lectured, cajoled and beaten my salesguys into submission with The Derby Law of 3,000. In a nutshell, The Derby Law says that if you work 60 hours a week (I wish that I could find that job!), which is 3,012 hours, you immediately lose 25% due to holiday, vacations, and sick time. Without going into numbing detail, you lose another 40% of the remaining time due to non-sales activities since our data from now thousands of salespeople says that only 57% of thier available time is spent both preparing for and actually making the sales call.  All of this boils down to around 1,300 hours to actually sell…and now my question, as a manager, should be just how effective can I make my time and the time of my salespeople?  It would be great if I could hem 90% effective, which would be perfect, but sadly impossible. If, on the other hand, they’re only 50% effective with the time they have available, then I have a really big problem. 50% would be an impossible situation to resolve.  Might as well resign right away. 

I happenned to be with Mike McEachern, the CFO of Brainshark, one of our favorite customers, the other day, and we got around to talking about plans for the weekend.  Among the countless normal “HoneyDo” tasks that all of us are faced with every weekend, Mike was making sure that he squeezed in sufficient time to put 50 miles on his road bike.  Mike has been a serious biker for a number of years now ever since he started participating in the Pan Mass Challenge, one of the biggest charity rides in the country.  In the winter, when the snow and nasty cold don’t favor his training requirements, he hits the ice every week with a local hockey team.  When I asked Mike why all the physical conditioning, the answer was simply, “Just to stay in shape.”

Balance

We’re heavily experienced sales managers and heads of companies who have sat in the sales management seat numerous times and have been directly responsible for quotas, forecasts and detailed sales plans. We believe in process, metrics, integrated sales tools and detailed sales training through which we can provide 30%-50% increases in the productivity of a sales team.

I remember very vividly when I first began the consulting business…and was not doing that well. I’d been pitching a relatively large prospect on the benefits of my background, processes and systems of what we today would call “lean manufacturing”.  Working my way through the maze of Purchasing, Quality and Manufacturing Managers, I finally engineered a meeting with the CEO for the final pitch.  Although I never did receive an order for manufacturing process improvement, he and I hit it off during that meeting such that we went on to develop a multi year relationship building the business and finally selling it very successfully to 3Com.  I had became his coach, and he had became a very valuable partner.

It’s Wednesday morning, and I, just like every other salesperson, am out on the road focused on sales for the quarter. It actually looks like a very good next couple of weeks with a proposal going out today, numbers of client assignments scheduled plus a deal transaction narrowing down to a close, and a large number of other activities in the funnel to keep me and the boys busy for a while. So, why are there questions about selling rummaging around in my head this morning?

Doc Rivers was quoted on ESPN where he was asked about his career in coaching the Celtics, and he described it as “a miserable joy”, and anyone who has been a student of either pro basketball or became caught up in the most recent excitement of March Madness, knows exactly what this means. The cliffhanger of Duke’s final win in the NCAA championships this year, and the stunning upset of Kansas’ unexpected loss a couple of weeks ago bring all coaches to the point of either tearing their hair out- the misery- or basking in the glory of the final win and its accompanying praise -the joy.

Tuesday, 4:30 AM

The good news is that, as a firm, we’ve had a very busy Q1. With budgets in place, almost every customer we’ve worked with in the first quarter held either business or sales planning sessions to think through and create detailed tactical plans. In some cases, these plans focused on Q1, while the majority of them typically detailed just the first half of the year. Only in a few companies, did we bother to define the second half of the year except to note the general financial plan assumptions that led up to the 2010 budget.