I trust that everyone had a wonderful Easter weekend and enjoyed the perfect spring weather, fun family gatherings and a special time to reflect.
On this Easter Sunday, I found myself on the NH beach at sunrise realizing once again that in the environment surrounding me, the only opportunities I can personally impact are those where I can take specific actions to impact specific change. I like to make the complex simple, which is difficult, so I bring it down to my own points of interest where I can personally make a difference.
What I certainly cannot do is to impact the tide coming in or the sun rising. Similarly, I can't impact geopolitics or make any meaningful difference to the general economy, tariffs or political infighting. That being said, what I can do is take immediate action right now to impact revenue growth in my own company! What I know from a lengthy list of unexpected disasters, recessions and global wars over decades of running businesses is that now is the time to take action to grow revenue and not retrench and hunker down.
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Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
I have the excitement of living on the NH beach, working in Boston, teaching at Tufts and spending time in Vermont. If it weren't for the NH-Boston commute, the daily rhythm would be perfect, but it is what it is, and even the length of the commute has a seasonal rhythm of its own with the fall being the worst. At least the drive is a good time for podcasts.
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning
I'm a highly-committed snowboarder who just loves the summer!
Sitting here in our Boston office this AM, with the temps to reach 90 and real-feel of 100, I'm loving the idea of the drive back to the NH beach tonight in the red summer car. A month from now...BANG!...we're all accelerating from August's flip flops to real shoes, sports jackets, starched shirts and whatever cruising speed fits your work habits.
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Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2024 Sales Planning
For a cold Friday morning at the end of a very busy and shortened week, hopefully the title of this morning's blog gets some attention...because it should. Terrible news with what has occurred over the last two weeks regarding Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's complications from his prostrate surgery. He has already stated that there are actions he should have taken that would have provided better communication and better met protocols.
And unfortunately, given the current Washington environment of rabid finger-pointing and heightened political back-stabbing, there are now calls for his resignation.
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Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2024 Sales Planning,
2024 Business Planning,
2024 Marketing Planning
The first time I heard the phrase "business plan" was when I was purchasing manager of a division of Becton Dickinson. That exercise given to me by the Controller was actually to just set prices on 10,000+ components for the year ahead.
Click HERE for the 2024 edition of Writing the Winning Business Plan
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Sales Management Best Practices,
Making Tough Choices,
Teaching at Tufts University,
2024 sales and marketing best practices,
2024 Sales Planning,
2024 Business Planning
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".
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HubSpot Tips,
how to write a marketing plan,
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how to write a sales plan,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts,
Teaching entrepreneurship,
2023 Business Planning,
2023 Sales Planning,
2023 Marketing Plans
With the end of the Q just eight days away (don't plan on anyone working on the 30th before the July 4th weekend/holiday week), it's time to plan the second half of the sales year in terms of strategic focus and where I'm going to focus my management time and my limited budget. Do I focus on ...
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Making Tough Choices,
4th of July,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts,
2023 Business Planning,
2023 Marketing Plans
15 plus years ago, I learned the details of a new concept called "Inbound Marketing" from a young startup called Hubspot. Since I had known co-founders Brian and Dharmesh, I started to explore their website that first summer just after we moved to the NH beach. I was amazed that they were making all of their detailed content about these very different strategies to be used in Sales and Marketing available on their site for free. I actually kept wondering when Hubspot would email me with a large invoice for all the content i was using, and then I discovered that providing free expert content itself was one of the pillars of Inbound.
At the time, It made no sense to me to be giving away these jewels of expertise, but I would spend a couple of hours reading with the sun just coming up on the horizon at our new ocean house. I would then print everything out, load it into my beach bag and head out to the sand to devour what for me was an entirely new approach to sales and marketing than what I had learned as a salesguy.
Process, Tools, Technology & Math seemed to me to be much more practical than just "stopping by and bringing Dunkin' & Doughnuts"
Piece by piece over the next year, I began to put these theories into hard practices coupled with Hubspot technology and realized that we could dramatically increase sales productivity for our customers...assuming that they wanted to learn and practice the science...and the discipline...of Inbound.
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HubSpot Tips,
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Inboound,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts,
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Like many of you, I hunkered down for the past three weeks mostly working, plus I fully realized that anything I had to say in a business blog among a well-meaning tsunami of cards, emails and social posts focused on wonderfulness, warm wishes and joyful times would be not important in an important personal time.
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Making Tough Choices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts,
2023 Business Planning,
2023 Sales Planning,
2023 Marketing Plans
