- The Days are now only 17 real selling days left in the year.
- The Road is a choice to focus on either new logos or upsell/crossell.
- The Rubber is getting to Quota & President's Club
I trust you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Family, friends and a bit of well-deserved time off not complicated by gifts and pressured only by Mom's Rule of no politics at the dinner table. Always a great holiday, plus this past weekend seems to indicate very solid retail performance.
Unless I'm deep in the lower half of my sales funnel with deals I've been working on since late September and October, right now, I'm totally focused on upselling existing customers with additional solutions.
For me, it's a simple equation built around having only 17 available days and being a trusted partner or strategic advisor to our existing customers.
A fun example of upselling occurred with me on TDay morning when I showed up exactly at 10:30 at the country club as instructed to pick up the mostly cooked bird and the 6 sides of vegetables, potatoes, and everything else down to the butter and the cranberry sauce. Greeting me was the club manager, the chef and two other smiling employees who were there to load everything into my car, which I thought was "very nice" of them to do. Then the manager asked me: "We also have a very nice wine selection to go with your wonderful dinner", as he pointed to a table of various wines grouped by price at $20, $30, $40 and $50 a bottle.
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Yes, first and most importantly, a sincere expression of thanks for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday! A great time for families and a day or two of decompression before we jump back into the final 20ish days of the year where every point we can put on the board counts. Enjoy the break, have fun, take a walk in the woods and get ready for the final quota crunch. The very good news is that as salespeople, we have a lot to be thankful for.
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In a world... where we were struggling two years ago to figure out what "the new normal" would be, and, just when we thought we had done that, we were hit with ugliness of inflation, the media hype of recession, the invasion of Ukraine and now the tragedy of what is happening in the Middle East. The bottom line of this opening to this Friday's blog is that there's very little right now that any of us can do to change any of these outside influences on our businesses.
What we should be doing is to take rigid control of what we can control and reduce that to the simplicity of selling vanilla ice cream!
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Just about 40 days!
Here we are already at the end of September!
"The A-Team" shows up at 7:00 AM tomorrow for the first of the fall "Big Cleans" in Vermont. A team of four to six men and women now in their late 20's who began this tradition with me when they were students at Green Mountain College up the road a piece in Poultney.
Very coincidentally, Green Mountain has come up numbers of times in my Vermont life. Decades ago, it was my first college teaching gig long before MIT and Tufts.
Poultney is a classic example of a picture-perfect small Vermont town, and it's where my father, grandfather and GGF and GGGF lived for generations of being entrepreneurs. It's in the blood!
With the leaf peeping season well underway, Saturday's A-Team will be back again at the end of October to do the final clean-up in the woodlot and stack the three cords that will get me through the winta'. In Vermont, the winta' comes early, and as my grandfather used to say, "there's 9 months of winta', 1 of mosquitos, and two of just bad sleddin'."
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Results, Results, & More Results!
Ok, a good way to think on a rainy Tuesday morning as I head out to a day of meetings in Boston in a wicked busy week.
Finished my intro business planning class at MIT yesterday and while I'm thinking about my second class at Tufts tomorrow which is all about market research, today's focus is 100% on sales, and where I need to be by the end of December...only about 100 workdays away.
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It's been a great summer!
Sure, like you, I've had way too much work, a couple of speedbumps here and there, the cancelled long-planned August trip back to Tanzania, and, of course, today the reality of the seasonal rhythm that shuts that door hard on the summa of '23! Different from my buddy, Red, whose comic strip I read whenever I can, the fall is a great time to be back at work and at school, to be healthy and looking forward to the busiest time in any business year,
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Rhythm
Most everything in business has a definitive rhythm. Every quarter is marked by various events of annual planning, budgeting, sales kickoffs, trade shows, and of course...summa' vacations, which no matter how carefully we plan around them, they always seem to impact our sales forecasts with delays.
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The Dog Days of Summa are here in full force, and what are we already hearing since last week's turn of the calendar page?
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When I was in junior high school, it was obvious to me and to my parents that I was not doing well in math. As a result, every Saturday morning was spent at the house of Mr. Sampson, the head of the high school math department, who served as my tutor taking me from basic addition to more complicated algebraic formulas resulting in a slow rewiring of my brain. Math Saturdays took place all year including when the family returned from the beach in August, and I still remember walking back and forth to Mr. Sampson's house in the sweltering heat of the summer. To a large degree, the rewiring process worked...although not so well according to my CFO friends.
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