Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

I drive a wicked amount of miles every year !

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, sales effectiveness, creating trust in sales, selling trust

Be IMPERATIVE, and not just Vanilla !

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales enablement

I've been manufacturing, engineering and selling most of my life....tech products, medical devices, sports apparel, and now consulting services.  It's a wonderful and exciting profession, but make no mistake, Sales is tough work:

• Measurements occur every month and every quarter that totally define your success and income
• Frequent rejections happen all the time due to the necessary waterfall math of any sales funnel
• Positive energy is required all the time, even when you're knocked down once in a while
• There's a requirement to consistently learn new skills, technologies and processes

The Question of the Day: Can Sales be "taught", or is it "just natural"?

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, sales plan process, Sales Hiring Perfectly, how to write a sales plan, sales plans for 2018

Only if you're a Myrmecologist...

11,000 species is a bit of worthless trivia...unless, of course, you're a myrmecologist, a scientist specializing in ants...

...which, of course is a sub-specialist of being an entemologist, who is a scientist who studies the very broad category of all insects. 

So, who cares? 

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, marketing effectiveness, how to write a sales plan, sales personas, sales effectivness

Just to light up your memory banks, way back in August, August 21st to be specific, it seemed that everyone in the U.S. was caught up in The Summer of 2017 Eclipse Fever, when for the first time in 99 years, we underwent a coast-to-coast phenomena.  Pretty basic stuff, but having said that, just as one example, one million people traveled to Oregon for three day just to grab the first view of the first light.  Small towns in the Midwest with populations below 1,000 welcomed tens of thousands of visitors.  Tens of thousands of people overpaid for the special glasses and overnight deliveries. 

And then...just as suddenly...it all ended. We packed up our telescopes and stowed our sleeping bags...and the special glasses...into our campers, and we just as quickly changed back into our workaday lives marking off April 8, 2024 on our digital calendars. 

All of that craziness and hype just follows the predictability of the rhythm of eclipses.  It will be the same in 2024. 

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales plan process, sales planning, improving sales productivity

There's no such thing as a born salesperson

As most everyone knows, I didn't come up the management ladder through Sales or Marketing, but through  Manufacturing and Engineering, and then by luck...or mistake...got promoted to become president of a good size division of a major corporation.  As a result, the first day of my being president was also my first day of running a sales organization.  

Tags: sales productivity, Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management boot camps

Forget "ABC" - "Always be Closing". 

It's old school, offensive and counter to what we should be doing as salespeople, which is to sell value and create trust with our prospects and customers, and not force them to close. 

According to Karen Penticost, VP of Strategic Development at Envision Technology Advisors, who was part of the management team working with us at our Sales Management Boot Camp at the MIT Endicott House last week, we should...

"always be interviewing"

 

When asked why, Karen's responses were...

Tags: Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, improving sales productivity, Sales Hiring Perfectly, Sales Hiring & Onboarding

To scale your business, you have to turn a trickle of sales into a steady, predictable stream of revenue. But that’s much easier said than done.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, marketing effectiveness, HubSpot Tips, Inboound

At Derby Management we are big believers in constant education and focused networking to refine your skills, learn new strategies and grow professionally.  We strive to provide our clients superior service through our own knowledge and experience since all of our team has sat in the chairs-just like you-as CEOs, heads of Sales and heads of Marketing of both startups and middle market companies in a wide variety of industries.  

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales training, business tools, business plans

Saturday morning found me at the Winhall General Store in downtown Bondville, Vermont (pop. 647) talking with Red, who was out reading the Brattleboro Reformer on the front porch bench, along with his yellow lab, Blue. 

Another perfect day in paradise, and for me a perfect day to "get things done".  "Getting things done", is what promoted me on Friday afternoon to load up the car with cats, equipment, bags of Home Depot garden rocks, and, most importantly cases of cheap red wine, and make the trek from the NH beach to the VT mountains. 

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales producitivity