Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

It was a picture-perfect day two weeks ago for Tufts' Commencement!  Perfect weather!  Perfect timing!  Perfect Goodbyes!   Always a memorable time of happiness and thanks, certainly tears of joy and separation, and always a bit of fear balanced by the excitement of the unknowns for both those graduates who have jobs and more so for those who have not yet landed that perfect mix of work, location and compensation. 

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!

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. 

I'm on the NH beach this weekend for a couple of reasons:

Minus 5 right now out by the barn this AM. 

Including today, at the most, there's about 18 selling days left in the year...and that's assuming that your prospect is not leaving for the week after Christmas, which is, of course, classic family vacation time. 

With those precious 18 days on the calendar and with B2B sales cycles currently being what they are, whatever is going to happen between now and the end of the year, is going to occur after your "Discovery" step in whatever sales process funnel and CRM you're currently using.  Other than maximizing every hour you can in your calendar and consistently using your exacting value propositions, there's very little that you can do to collapse time given the need to now build your business cases with multiple stakeholders...except in the critical last step of closing the deal.  

The #1 or #2 issue we hear in all of our 2022 planning sessions this fall is the issue of the difficulty to find and retain talent. 

It is what it is, and we can debate for hours why it's occurring and the surrounding theories of the inflation impact on the economy. but the reality is that...

• it's here, it's been here for 12 months, and we all see and read about it everywhere.
• it's real, not a bubble, and it's not going away in 2022; maybe in '23 when the world flattens a bit.
• this is a fundamental shift in the future of work, what represents "the office" and lifestyle
• we need people now, onboarded and in place in Q1 if we're going to make out '22 numbers

From all of our 2022 planning sessions, what follows below are five non-prioritized tactics that you might want to think about.  Connect with me at any time, and I can walk you through any of the details, or just be a sounding board for best practices.

Summa's over, kids are back in school, vacation days are behind us until the end of the year, and we're back at it moving at 100mph, working hard, fingers in the crankcase oil, making sure the machine works perfectly between now and December.   Different from Red above, for me personally, September through December is always the most exciting part of any year, and especially this year:

1 thing Covid has done is to dramatically change my sleep & work patterns:

• Pre-Covid  it was bed by 8 or 9, up at 3:30, car into Boston, gym at 5, go to work
• Now, bed by 10, up at 5, Peloton downstairs, walk beach, work at 7 at the house

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-worlds-sleeping-habits

Gotta love April !!!   

Hard to believe, but here we are, one year later in a very different spring of positive outlooks and what will become a roaring economy on the back half of this year.  Still a bit stressed, but much less so, and, as sales pros, we're always thinking through what the quarter ahead is going to look like. This is always the excitement and the challenge of being a Sales leader. Just like any  professional athlete, even with consistent training and exacting playbooks, we never exactly know what the end game or the final points on the scoreboard will be.    

Just ask either side on the women's final basketball championship last week between Arizona and Stanford.