Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

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.  

Welcome to the Summa! 

Just a superb holiday period last week, as I took unfair advantage of the fact that I live on the NH beach by lugging my book-filled beach bag out the door every afternoon and laying claim to my time-tested perfect location of sand and surf.  

- Perfect for catching up on my long list of required reading assignments
- Necessary for the final edits to the fall syllabus which went out on the 5th
- Relaxing from being at the tip of the spear for the last quarter.

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 ...

Last Sunday I began my own rhythm of "The Summa' of '23" with my first official beach day.  Whenever I'm working out of the home office at the NH beach, days like today begin with a beach run of a couple of miles, but pure beach time is simply doing little to nothing except reading and walking the beach. 

There's a planned rhythm to my own process of pulling out the special beach blanket, unpacking the new spray cans of Trader Joe's Sunscreen, and packing the canvas beach bag with my i-Pad, articles I've printed out during the week. and survival snacks and a beverage. And all of that prep came together to a point of perfection on the perfect beach weather day last Sunday! 

All it took was a bit of planning, prep, a bit of process, and having the rhythm of having various right tools in the right place at the right time.  

Today with only 12 selling days left in the Q, the most successful salespeople have perfected their own selling rhythm to these 12 weeks of the quarter, the 20 days of June and the planned flow of the next 12 days.  

• There's a prep time over the weekend to fine tune the details for the upcoming week
• There's email and calling patterns to "the money hours" of every day
• There's scheduled online and F2F meetings with detailed prep already planned

Every successful salesperson is hyper attentive to their own time availability and matching that to the limited time of their customers.  One key Covid takeaway is that we know at every level that we all have very limited available time.  We also learned very successfully that well planned 30-minute zooms both in terms of personal efficiency and customer effectivity easily replaced the waste of two-hour drive times.  None of us, especially in today's financially cautious world, have any "extra" time, and by simply taking 15 minutes on a daily rolling basis looking out a week ahead of time to plan out the upcoming week and the balance of the month pays huge dividends...especially now halfway through the last month of the Q.  

Sales Process

If creating that daily/weekly/monthly rhythm creates a level of sales success by leveling out our 10-12-hour days, there is nothing more impactful in sales success than adopting the rhythm of one defined sales process which becomes "The Way" we sell. 

"The Way" then becomes the religion of how we sell. Every successful salesperson has their own sales process.  It's one of the reasons that they're successful, and they have honed that process over their years of selling. 

What's much more impactful for the entire company is taking those individual best practices of sales success and adopting a formal rhythm into a unified sales process for the entire sales team from BDRs to AEs to management as "The Way":

• Same process with the same 6-7 steps from Qualify to Close
• Same email, content, and presentation tools for specific steps
• Same required fluency in CRM use, analytics and immediate access to tools
• Same required skills training consistent among everyone on the team
• Same pride and culture of being on a winning team that has a rhythm and a plan 

Sounds too formal and too much work?   Check out our sales process tools since the math says otherwise with results of 20%-25% sales productivity improvements in just 9-12 months. 

HAVE A GREAT DAY SELLING TODAY!!!

Just some thoughts for tuning up your own rhythm ! 

2023 SALES PLANNING 

Check out our updated sales productivity site page.  Just page down to get our new edition of Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023.  Or you can just email me, and I will send you a free copy.  Connect with me at any time for some quick ideas and feedback. There's never a cost for a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about Sales & Marketing.   

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.

What??? 

Jack, "The Planning Guy", who relentlessly talks about planning, making a religion about planning everything, every process, every marketing and sales activity now headlining today's blog about not planning results?  Maybe just a bit too much sun on the NH beach over the long weekend!  What gives?

what gives is that none of us, including the Celtics, can "plan" results.  

• We can define the results we want, and hope for those results.
• We can create sales and marketing strategies which are only initiatives and directions.
• We can detail objectives, metrics and KPIs, often in way too much detail.

But when it comes down to the men and women who are at the tip of the spear specifically as salespeople, who are on the phone, on the street, and in their offices touching and reaching out to real customers and prospects, although "strategies" and KPIs may be important guidelines, they are somewhat meaningless without a 30-60-day action plan.  

• I can talk about, hope and pray for results.
• I can use objectives and KPIs as boundaries. 
• But I can only plan actions!

Too often, we surround our salespeople with too much.  Good intentions, all aimed at the common objective of making our number, but too often we leave out the requirement of action planning at the detail level. 

We attempt to teach them about strategy, and too often end up just creating confusion.  We surround them with sales theories, new systems and out-of-date sales books.

We love to have weekly team meetings, which are important, of course, but then waste 50% of that time telling them stuff that could have been better handled in a pre-meeting video prepping everyone for a more productive meeting to discuss go-forward 30-day action plans and sharing best practices. 

In our own work, we ask for week-by-week 30-day plans for 60 days built on a uniform, easy-to-complete template which then becomes part of our tool set kept in our Hubspot CRM so that there is only one source of truth.  This also makes everything accessible by everyone since what we are really looking for is the sharing of best practices and best tools among all of the sales team whether that's 5 or 50 people. 

One of our very best and most successful heads of sales that we've worked with, Colleen Honan simply calls it "Planning the Plan".  We term it "30-60's" where we want to see the following bullets in a template that should take 30 minutes a week to complete and discuss with the manager.

• Weekly schedules for 2 weeks
• Weekly KPIs on the critical sales process numbers of calls, visits, discoveries and closed deals
• Short action-based text of a paragraph or two related directly to that month's objectives
• Additional resources in people or expense that are needed to meet the objectives 

HAVE A GREAT DAY SELLING TODAY as we kick off June!

2023 SALES PLANNING 

Check out our updated sales productivity site page.  Just page down to get our new edition of Writing the Winning Sales Plan for 2023.  Or you can just email me, and I will send you a free copy.  Connect with me at any time for some quick ideas and feedback. There's never a cost for a call or two, plus I love listening and talking about Sales & Marketing.   

www.derbymanagement.com  
Derby Entrepreneurship Center@Tufts.

In the profession of Sales, everything is about connections and the ability to bring real value to real people!
In the science of Sales, this then becomes the calculated rhythm and the resulting math and metrics of 

Today is the last of the 11 Marketing and Sales project presentations for the semester.  Should be very interesting considering the team is mostly engineering graduate students, and they have been hard at it for 13 weeks in our Science of Sales course stretching beyond the confines of building out the details of a sales plan to the rounding out of a fuller business plan.  

With the results of Q1 left in the dust of last week, we're already reworking new sales plans for this quarter, hiring and changing a few new team members and taking apart, piece by piece, those perfectly planned lead generation tactics conceived in the dark winter of last January.  Some worked, many did not, but blogs and video continue to be clear winners.  Certainly, social, but so much of it falls under the classification of "It depends..."

"Spring is nature's way of saying, 'let's party'" -Robin Williams

Teaching in my Science of Sales course last Thursday afternoon, only hours before the official start of Spring Break was in a word, "interesting", but with the help of visiting instructor and prior student, Erica Veino, senior Account Exec at BitSight, we worked through the fundamentals of her sales process.  For me, nothing is better than bringing back to Tufts alums from my courses who are now experienced sales professionals to teach exacting details in terms of process steps, sales tools, and sales models.  The mastery of those details experienced the prior week from alums Frank Yandrisevits and Shannon du Pont transitioned concepts into the practicality of how to model, train, manage and compensate salespeople.