Gotta hand it to the Celtics for their hard work, their athleticism, their perseverance and just true grit, but with Friday night's final score, we're on the sidelines watching the rest of the playoffs. Playing the game to win is the very nature of every sport, and it's also the core essence of every activity that we engage in as professional salespeople.
You want to win, you gotta' play to win which means that if you're behind right now halfway through the quarter, you may want to think about changing up your baseline drills for success.
Here's a few simple, but directly impactful ideas to try out this beautiful Monday morning:
- Every month: Update your written team playbook by getting everyone on the team directly involved.
A playbook is not your annual sales plan that you architected last December. This is a living, breathing document that's frequently revisited and updated with the team at the beginning of every month. We've been insisting on these now for a few years, and the direct impact has been amazing.
- Every week:
-Hold one-hour early AM training drills on one or two specific tactics.
-Personally connect for 15 minutes with 1 successful person who inspires you.
-Read 1 technical article written in 2024-2025 on what it takes to be successful in Sales.
- Every day:
-Think like a customer first, not a salesperson selling anything.
-Focus on what you can do to drive direct business value for your customers.
-Begin each day by verbalizing out loud why you're the best salesperson.
-Start with activities that energize you-maybe it's exercise or listening to a podcast on the drive.
-Dig into tracking the math in detail: every play, every conversion and every score.
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Sales Hiring Perfectly,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Nothing is more definitive than the scorecard at the end of the season for any professional sport. Right now, with the wicked one-point loss for the Celtics to the Knicks on Wednesday night, they're in a tough come-from-behind situation for Saturday afternoon's game at MSG. The absolute metrics of the losses are bad enough, but the giving up of 20-point leads in both games says that there's something terribly wrong with the team. Metrics tell it all...all the time!
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Sales Optimization,
Sales Management Best Practices,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Could not ask for a more Spring-like day in New England than this: a rainy, clingy, cold and windy Saturday morning. Spring in New England!
Here at the NH beach, it's just wicked grey rain at 8:00 AM.
In VT, it's either snowy rain or rainy snow according to my Ring camera, but whatever it is, it's not doing much to get rid of the heavy snow still out by barn.
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Sales Management Best Practices,
best sales practices;,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Is it just "the older me", or did others of you grow up with the following little poem that is right now rattling through my head this cold and rainy classic Vermont Spring morning?
Spring is sprung, the grass is riz.
I wonder where the birdies is.
They say the birdies on the wing, but that’s absurd.
I always thought the wing was on the bird.
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Sales quota,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
Arrived here in Vermont late last night to discover everything was just wicked cold...and totally frozen...even though I had been watching the plow guys and shovelers on my Ring for the last two weeks. Right now, I'm in my downstairs office but not able to see out the window which is covered with 4 feet of snow. One has gotta' love living in Vermont, but then my family has been here in this valley for 7 generations, so every once in a while, I trick myself into thinking that I'm used to constant snow and temps below 0...but not really. My great grandfather, Horace, lived up the road a piece in Poultney and (according to my grandfather) talked about 9 months of winta', 1 of summa', 1 of mosquitos and 1 of damn poor sleddin'".
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Sales Best Practices,
Sales Management Best Practices,
finding sales jobs,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
2025SalesPlanning
A very Happy New Year! 2025 promises to be a year of solid business growth, but as usual, a number of unexpected speed bumps as we speed along the highway. In addition to making personal new year resolutions while formalizing our business sales and marketing plans, it's also a time when many managers at all levels begin to think about possible job or career changes. It's just the normal rhythm of the year and planning out the year ahead. As a result, those individuals do the normal thing and reach out confidentially to their friends and business colleagues, dust off their resume and send an email vaguely worded as "if you see something, please keep me in mind." The absolute worst waste of time in trying to market yourself!
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Tags:
Sales Management Best Practices,
Sales Hiring Perfectly,
Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts,
2025 Business Planning,
2025MarketingPlanning,
DavidMeermanScott,
2025SalesPlanning
