Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Just finished one of our two and a half day Sales Management Boot Camps, and right now I'm in the zone of somewhere between exhausted and excited.

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales management coach, sales effectiveness, sales management training, sales boot camp, sales enablment

 
Spectacular fall weather for selling and marketing stuff which also helped both my mind and body in completing the annual "Vermont Big Clean" last weekend.  Fueled by a small army of local high-school boys armed with rakes and a full array of mechanical things, we managed to clear out the summer gardens, rake up mountains of leaves and cut, split and stack a whole bunch of trees, bringing my theory of "a clean forest is a happy forest" to completion, once again. The picture above was taken up on the ridge in my woodlot after six trees were felled, sawed, hauled and split on Saturday morning.  Everything, neat and tidy-kind of the way that I think about a good end to a Sales quarter:

Tags: sales coaching, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp

 Fall is more than in the air in Vermont.  It's in my  aching back from last weekend's hauling, cutting and  splitting three huge trees which fell in my woodlot as a  result of the big blow two weeks ago.  It's also been in  my head all this week as a result of my unexpected  discovery just before I left Vermont on Sunday of  three more equally big trees that had fallen out of    sight on the other side of the ridge.  As a result, in my  never-ending quest of "a clean forest is a happy  forest",  I'll find myself back in VT tomorrow, crack of dawn, up on the ridge, steam billowing from the tractor in the 40 degree air, the sound of the chainsaw ripping through the stillness and focused on "gettin' her done" since the seasons in VT and its inevitable snow wait for no one.  

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp

 Middle of September.  Definitely frost on the pumpkin this morning and, with
 the leaves already beginning to turn both in Vermont and on the beach, I  realized as I was driving into Boston today, the music switch inside my head
 had selected Donovan's '60s hit song, "Season of the Witch" to let me know
 that Halloween, the first of the fall holidays, was right around the corner.   Yea, good rhythm and mystical lyrics, but more importantly for me that "announcement" in my head was telling me that the fall selling season is well underway.  

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales optomization, sales training, sales management boot camp

Living on the beach and in Boston, I see a fair amount of Mercedes' SMART cars. Cute, clean, fun, and head- turning, many SMART owners go on to accessorize their cars with their personal brands through vanity plates.

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement

Here in Vermont today dealing with yet another contractor issue. Had to take the day off from work, deal with Vermonters (said he lovingly being a 7th  generation Vermonter), and drive 6 hours back and forth. It is what it is, but the trip up late last night did remind me of this summer's hotly debated "Battle of the Winhall River" in the town.  

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales plan process, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp

It's been a really great summer !

Lots of work, lots of time to do "field research", and lots of time to think about the upcoming four months of Sales and Marketing activities between now and the end of the year. 

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp

 

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp

 
 We're all squeezed for time. 

  No new news here.  We continuously balance our work and 
  personal time commitments.  We endlessly shuffle our
  schedules cutting off 15 minutes here and there to be able to 
 squeeze in another call, another meeting or just maybe a vacation day here and there.  We know that there is no such thing as Work-Life Balance except in the fantasy world of academics, and what always loses out in trying to create that balance is that over-rated sleep thing. 

Up at 4:00 yesterday, after a 2 hour trip, I found myself at a customer's at 8:00 and then spent the afternoon in Providence at a quarterly board meeting.  The company is doing great, and perhaps not coincidentally the meeting began and ended with comments from the senior management in this high-performing business about the fact that they were more stressed for time than ever before.  They commented that there customers' demands for their time were accelerating at a quicker pace and that those same customers were constantly being pressured themselves by their customers and the new normal of their retail markets for even quicker deliveries and faster design cycles. 

Arriving back in Boston just before a customer dinner at 7, I managed to squeeze in a few minutes with my friend Brian, a long term EVP at one of our customers.  With 5 weeks of vacation every year, he proudly told me that the only way that he had figured out how to use any of that time was to put himself on a regimen of taking Friday's off.  Cute idea, but in the reality of Brian's unforgiving schedule, let's see just how many weeks that works...as in NEVER!

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales planning, closing sales, sales boot camp, sales management boot camp

  If it's summer, then it's time to do the annual rewrite of our
  free ebook-Writing the Winning Business Plan 

Tags: Sales Best Practices, sales, sales management boot camp, business planning, business plans, how to write a business plan, writing a business plan