Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

Dick Ardia is one of my closest friends!. He's a very successful NJ and NY real estate entrepreneur who has built more than a few companies.  A Vermont neighbor, Dick and I spent many years ATVing in the Green Mountain reserve that borders our land, and during those expeditions deep in the mud and winching out of rivers, I learned from him many of the management basics that I continue to apply in my own business and in my classroom.

Every morning I'm up at 4:30. First, I ask Alexa to play WBZ 1030 Radio, so I get my "5 Things You Need to Know" with the local news plus what I really care about which is the traffic and weather to gauge my travel time from the NH beach to Boston.  The traffic is always wicked, so  I'm just listening for the big accidents like..."yet another truck got Storrowed early this morning", which if you live in Boston, you know what this means.

 

I then ask Alexa to "Play Bloomberg News", while I click into my newest edition of the WSJ on my iPad and comb through whatever appeals as interesting articles for the day. Last Tuesday, I stopped on this headline of "Millennials Are Changing What It Takes to Succeed in Sales".  

The next day, I was reminded of the same article when one of my most faithful blog readers and repeated entrepreneurs, Jerry Brecher, sent it to me. I'm going to link the article here, but my expectation is that by clicking on it, unless you're a WSJ subscriber, you will not get past their paywall. If you cannot, I would encourage you to hunt down the article and read it thoroughly.  

 

Me & Millennials

I began teaching at MIT 22 years ago and Tufts 17, so where I started in this wonderful profession was initially working with Xers and then mostly with Millennials.  Exciting, extremely smart, powerful in their statements and curiosity, very energetic, fast-paced and always questioning to move ahead and make an impact in the world!  Clearly in numbers, the largest generation: more than the Boomers who carried that badge since the 1940's.

When I returned from a couple of years in the Peace Corps, it was relatively easy for me to find a job...even given the fact that I had zippo experience in business and only an undergraduate degree from BC with a major in English.  No one really cared about the degree or my skills; they just wanted to hear about the Peace Corps.  One of my primary takeaways from those early years working first at Honeywell in their newly launched memory chip initiative and then at Becton Dickinson in their medtech division was the criticality of time management.   

 

Maybe, it was my inherent drive to make sure that I could stay ahead of the curve working with really bright manufacturing and engineering types, or maybe it's just the way I'm wired, but I've become highly focused and highly protective of my own time and that of the teams I work with both in my consulting role and at Tufts.

Last night in watching the first 5 minutes of the national ABC news, the "I" word was mentioned 9 times

Bloomberg this morning was not much better with everyone focused on today's 8:30 retail sales data.

Technically, given the clinical definition of a recession, we were at that point at the end of Q2, but it was decided to "adjust" the definition a bit.  

 

"Plan A" this morning in Vermont-right at the start of school vacation week-would have been to have blue skies, six feet of snow already on the ground and morning freshies providing the perfect first runs.  Instead, we have...

When Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, took on the job, he was told by Steve Ballmer, the retiring CEO to... "Be bold and be right. If you’re not bold, you’re not going to do much of anything. If you’re not right, you’re not going to be here.”

The final Tufts six presentations from my marketing course were completed last Friday.   Six companies provided individual marketing projects, with five to six students assigned to a team back in July so everyone hit the ground running in September.

• "just extraordinary",
• "over the top",
• "far-surpassed expectations"

...were a few of the phrases voiced most importantly by the senior management of our six host companies. 
Each of the management teams of the six companies actually provide 40% of the overall course grade for the semester. Now, this weekend I and my TAs will work through the very difficult job of grading 32 students.

Being a student or being a salesperson is always about the bottom-line reality of how many points go on the scoreboard.  Right now, before I work through the math of the actual grading, it would appear, based on the customer feedback, that there will be an overabundance of "A"s.  In addition to the actual grading, I am very pleased that two of our project companies this semester have provided job offers to three students.   

During one of the debriefs last Friday following their presentation, I asked the six-person team, who worked on the marketing plan for a $40m company looking at a new market, what defined the success of this project for them, and I was struck by the maturity and the exacting management behavior that they expressed.  So, I thought I would share this this morning for you to assess your work during these final two weeks of the year.

  
"Structure influenced our behavior" 

- "Since no one on the team knew another when we began, we defined up front who would do what and what the team and our individual responsibilities would be."
- "We agreed to strict daily and weekly timelines since we knew the reality to deliver a marketing plan in 13 weeks."
- "Yea, we elected a Team Captain, but we all agreed to complete responsibility for the project as a team."

"We committed to rAPID Group Knowledge"!

• "We agreed to making sure that all six of us knew "everything about everything" so that there were no islands of knowledge. Yes, primary responsibilities were centered in individuals, but we agreed that "Group Knowledge" was most important especially for our research work and for our customer discovery with the company's prospects and customers."
• "We used a strategy of writing down content quickly that we discovered and also we created as "a stream of consciousness" not caring much about making it formal with punctuation or format."
• "We used Google Drive and avoided Slack and Teams because Google was just more personally comfortable and immediate for us individually."  
• "We operated in frequent short sprints with no long meetings until the end" 
  
  

"We created Connective Tissue"

• "Space, time and location were unimportant in our virtual team, and being online virtually actually worked much better than needing to get together physically
• "Time was now...all the time."
• "We formally scheduled customer meetings at the same time every single week"
• "We completed exhaustive discovery up front repeating the same questions again and again until we came to very detailed answers which led to very detailed objectives"

 

As a professor, I always learn as much as I teach! 

I've thought about these comments all week.  The maturity and the sophistication of the basic, but hard things that make a project or one's quota not only achievable, but highly attainable and successful.  This morning as we look out over the remaining 12 days of December, I thought that some of these best practices of managing against the clock and to the project or to your quota might prove useful.  For other ideas, check out our site for tactics at... https://www.derbymanagement.com/sales-productivity

 

Have a great day selling Today...12 days left!

CONFIDENTIAL SOUNDING BOARD

If at any time, you have a need for a confidential sounding board in business planning or for Sales or Marketing, just connect with me at any time.  Text or email me, and I'll quickly set up a call.  I'm a pretty good listener. 

Obviously, no cost for a call or two; just an opportunity to listen intently and make a few recommendations based on decades of experience.

I happened to be talking to a friend of mine, Paul Kelly, President of Berkshire Bank, yesterday about...what else...Sales, of course, and he provided a very interesting perspective to approaching his sales process during these times of unknowns.  Notice I just used the phrase "times of unknowns" since "chaotic" is too depressing and "new normal/abnormal" has become too much of a trite label, All we do know right now is that we will be in this "time of unknowns" for at least the next six and probably twelve months.  Nothing we can do in our day-day-day is going to change the overall environment, but determined and innovative managers like Paul, who focus on positivity, motivation and specific marketing and sales tactics, impact sales at their companies every week. 

Yesterday, I completed my virtual follow-up visit with my cardiologist, Dr. Michael at MGH.  It's hard to even use those words, "my cardiologist" after being diagnosed with "massive heart disease" (another uncomfortable choice of words) five years ago with 100% of one artery blocked and 60% of another. 

The only reason I lived was that I had grown two new arteries which "naturally bypassed" the two diseased arteries. Who knew?  Not me!  Not my Vermont country doc who had incorrectly diagnosed my shortness of breath as asthma and loaded me down with three different scripts for inhalers which I used for years before moving back to Boston and new docs at MGH.