Spark-Incubate-Accelerate: Learn the Science of Entrepreneurship!

Back-in-the-day, working in corporate healthcare at Becton Dickinson, I didn’t know how to spell the word, “entrepreneurship”.  Even though three prior generations of my family had built businesses, that word would have been confusing at best since all that was talked about around the kitchen table was “the stores”.  It was the stores, open six days a week and Friday nights where my grandfather, father, mother, and me and my brothers worked.  It was never thought to be anything special. 


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Tags: entreprenurial, sales and marketing best practices, The Competitive Edge, Tufts Gordon Institute, Tufts internships, Tufts ELS, entrepreneurship, jack derby professor at Tufts, Tufts Entrepreneurship

Intersections, Connections, & More Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Wed, Nov 01, 2017

I live & work at the intersections of...

  • The Company:
    At the firm, we work diligently to bring 25% jumps in Sales and Marketing productivity to our clients.
  • Tufts University:
    Teaching the science, tools, technology and metrics of Marketing and Sales.
    Most importantly, the teaching content of these courses is wound around 16 projects from real companies each year:  6 Marketing Plan projects in the spring, and 6 in the fall, plus 4 Sales Plan projects in the spring.  As a result, I am always looking for new companies, which is the purpose of this blog...more in a couple of paragraphs
  • Jobs Creation: 
    Connecting Tufts students to great jobs and opportunities!

    This service began when a few students (Emerging Jumbos) would get hired by their marketing and sales project companies during the semester.  Then, this process of creating connections easily expanded and quickly multiplied because I was able to open doors at companies like Hubspot, Brainshark, Fidelity, Amazon, Google, LinkedIn, Silicon Valley Bank, Facebook, Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft, and tens and tens of other "Great Places to Work". 

    Of course, that initial seeding of my alums into those companies has over the years led to lots of semi-annual calls from me that start with "Hi, I need a favor and could you give some guidance to one of my current students." 
  • Everyone of my alums knows the deal when they get that first job...it's time to pay back, and at some time, they will get "I need a favor call".

    The whole process works, and it has two wonderful consequences. 

    1.  It opens doors that would otherwise be closed or, at best, would be very difficult to open. 

    2. It keeps me in constant contact with my alums in their career journeys

    So, I was very pleased to receive last week, from Emani Holyfield, who now works in HR at Google (and is one of "My Personal Best Tufts Team" !) this video on The 8 Laws of Branding by Brian Tracy.  

    Brian Tracy (just a bit slow in his speech, but the guy is a genius and is well worth listening to for the full 8 minutes) focuses not on the generalities of "branding", but brings the meaning of this complex marketing word down to the street level of just what it takes for each of us to create great "Personal Brands". 
    This is just an excellent framework for anyone:  student, intern, upcoming 2018 graduate, and also for the more experienced salesperson or manager looking to open that next chapter in their journey.

    Ok, so now "The Pitch" 

Remember those 10 companies I need for the upcoming spring semester? 
6 Marketing Plan projects and 4 Sales Plan projects! 

This is a picture of our 2017 "Art & Science of Sales" Team, held only in the spring. (I teach at MIT in the fall and can't juggle three courses).  They totally knocked the cover off the ball this year!

What's the Value for You?
We're looking for complex marketing and sales projects from real companies in a variety of markets.  What you receive is a trained consulting team of five or six juniors and seniors working for 13 weeks to provide everything from full marketing or sales plans with detailed research and implementable recommendations to whatever sub segments of a full plan that you might need for 2018. Some smaller companies come to us for full marketing or sales plans, while others want to focus on a specific product or a new market. 

What's the Value for the Students? 
- They learn "on the job", and at the street level, the realities of Marketing and Sales
- They take classroom academics and apply that content to the reality of increasing sales  
- They interface frequently with management which builds their skills and confidence

So, if you are at all interested, just email me at jack@derbymanagement.com, and I will send you the detailed instructions on how to apply. 

It is a superb opportunity with hundreds of satisfied companies and graduate!

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Tags: sales and marketing best practices, sales plans, Tufts marketing projects, Tufts ELS program, Tufts Gordon Institute, marketing plans, jack derby professor at Tufts

Think of Sales Activities as a Balance of the Old & the New

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, May 05, 2017

I was on the Acela yesterday morning on the way to NYC, when I started to write this.  Took the 5:05 out of the Back Bay and ended up at Penn Station perfectly on time, only to fight my way out on the street to get to my account.  Thank God for Uber, which made the logistics of the day a perfect blend between "Old & New" !
The Acela run is always one of my favorite trips since I love trains, and I always look forward to working with this particular client on their very challenging long-term strategies. 

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Tags: sales and marketing best practices, sales management boot camps, improving sales productivity

Plan for Success in Sales:  Teach, Coach & Certify

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, Apr 21, 2017

 

It all comes down to 50 minutes

In life, in Sales, and in teaching, there are always deadlines. 

Wednesday, one of those deadlines was evidenced in 50 minute final exam presentations days at Tufts.  After 12 weeks of content in the brand new Sales course and in the nine-year-old Marketing course, Wednesday was the day when the first two teams of Sales students and the three teams of Marketing students presented their findings, reams of research and their detailed sales and marketing recommendations to the management of their project companies. 

We'll do the same thing to the same rhythm next Wednesday, and then another semester will be over.  During the summer, I'll spend a big chunk of time on the beach refining and re-calibrating for the fall semesters at Tufts and at MIT, where I've had the privilege of working with Professor Chun for almost 20 years.  For me, all of this is a lot of fun, a fair amount of hard work and always some level of anxiety, which keeps me on the competitive edge, which is exactly why I teach...since I continue to believe that I'm just a student of the very exciting worlds of sales and marketing.

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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales training

U Gotta Love U for the Next 20 Hours

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Thu, Mar 30, 2017

Here we are in the final 20 hours of the quarter. Maybe 10 today, certainly 10 tomorrow, and then it's over with the turn of the digital page as we rush into April on Monday morning

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Tags: Sales Management Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, improving sales productivity

108.6...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, Mar 20, 2015

Monday's Boston Globe:  Just after 7 Sunday evening, with 2.9 more inches of fresh snow blanketing Boston, the National Weather Service announced that the city had notched its snowiest winter since records started being kept in 1872.

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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales planning, sales management training, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity

How do you Rank? ...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Tue, Mar 03, 2015

Here we are at the beginning of the last month of the quarter, and as managers and sales professionals, we're consistently reviewing ....

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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales, sales management, sales plan process, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, sales management training, sales management boot camp

What's Important...and Sales?

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Thu, Jan 22, 2015

What's Important?

Two weeks ago, I underwent bypass surgery at MGH. "Big Success" is all I wanted to hear, and those were the exact two words scribbled boldly across my discharge papers.  What's ahead are a few weeks of recovery and exercise, and then, just as I have heard from hundreds of blog readers and Facebook friends, "better than before".  That phrase by itself raises a lot more questions, and one of the most important of those to be answered is that of "What's Important?".

See, I thought that I was already "better than before", and have always exercised every day, and snowboarded and surfed on the weekends.  Couple those activities with relatively good diets, and I should be the postercild for "Healthy (older) Boy" of the year. 2014 didn't seem to end that way, but o
n the very positive side of all of this, 2014 is now way back in the rear view mirror.  

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Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, sales optomization, sales management boot camp, sales culture

Want to be One of the Cool Kids?...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Wed, Dec 10, 2014

Ever been on the other side of the Team?

  • Not included by the Cool Kids? 
  • Left out of the really important front-office activities? 
  • Relegated to "those people back in the factory"?

How did not being on the Team feel?  
...Not so good , I expect.

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

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Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales training, sales producitivity, how to write a business plan, improving sales productivity

Punched in the face...and Sales

Posted by Jack Derby, Head Coach on Fri, Dec 05, 2014

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”                   -Mike Tyson

If your last image of Iron Mike chewing off the ear of Evander Holyfield was a bit too graphic, then maybe some of the following highly positive quotes might be more representative of the reasons for careful planning...just so that you don't get punched in the face.

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Tags: Sales Best Practices, sales and marketing best practices, sales planning, sales plans, business tools, business planning, business coaching, business plans