...when, just like the snow guns at Stratton in mid-November, and the family's angst over Uncle Ernie, once again, making a fool of himself at Thanksgiving, the pressure's on to submit the perfect 2014 business plan to the board or your boss by December 1st.
Tags: sales coaching, Sales Management Best Practices, sales enablement, how to write a business plan, sales boot camps
30 years ago, during one of my "I think I will once again try to live in Vermont" sojourns, I remember working high on a mountain ridge one cold, wet fall morning pouring cement that we had laboriously carted up by buckets in ATVs for the footings on a microwave tower. It was November and long gone were the colorful fall leaves and smiling tourists visiting the antiques fair down in the postcard-pretty town Weston. It was back to the hardscrabble work of running a commercial masonry company building a series of towers all along the spine of Vermont. That November and December, we worked until the ground froze hard with most daybreaks spent chopping through the ice that had crusted over our water storage from the overnight freeze. It was during that period of what seemed to be a never-ending expedition of increasingly cold, wind-whipped, ugly, steel-gray days that I made a decision that I was moving back to Boston and would do everything I could to avoid November in Vermont.
Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity
In St. John, New Brunswick, Canada this morning where I was a keynote speaker yesterday along with David Meerman Scott for the two day Engage Conference sponsored by the economic development and export trade offices of the Province and St. John.
Tags: sales productivity, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales optomization, Sales quota, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity
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
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
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
For me, the most exciting thing about our Sales Management Boot Camp every six months is the diversity of companies and executive management that we have in these programs. Our 24-30 attendees bridge across every vertical, geography and size that you can think of from fast growth tech companies such as Black Duck Software to Chase Corporation to Kayem Foods to Steinway and every possible combination in between. All of which lends to peer-to-peer engagement and a big boost in the real-life learning processes that go on over two nights and two days.
Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Best Practices, sales, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp
