Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

• The Days are now only 17 real selling days left in the year.  
• The Road is a choice to focus on either new logos or upsell/crossell.
• The Rubber is getting to Quota & President's Club

Unless I'm deep in the lower half of my sales funnel with deals I've been working on since late September and October, right now, I'm totally focused on upselling existing customers with additional solutions. 

For me, it's a simple equation built around having only 17 available days and being a trusted partner or strategic advisor to our existing customers.  

A fun example of upselling occurred with me on TDay morning when I showed up exactly at 10:30 at the country club as instructed to pick up the mostly cooked bird and the 6 sides of vegetables, potatoes, and everything else down to the butter and the cranberry sauce.  Greeting me was the club manager, the chef and two other smiling employees who were there to load everything into my car, which I thought was "very nice" of them to do.   Then the manager asked me:  "We also have a very nice wine selection to go with your wonderful dinner", as he pointed to a table of various wines grouped by price at $20, $30, $40 and $50 a bottle.   

Just about 40 days!

Here we are already at the end of September! 

 "The A-Team" shows up at 7:00 AM tomorrow for the first of the fall "Big Cleans" in Vermont.  A team of four to six men and women now in their late 20's who began this tradition with me when they were students at Green Mountain College up the road a piece in Poultney. 

Very coincidentally, Green Mountain has come up numbers of times in my Vermont life.  Decades ago, it was my first college teaching gig long before MIT and Tufts. 

Poultney is a classic example of a picture-perfect small Vermont town, and it's where my father, grandfather and GGF and GGGF lived for generations of being entrepreneurs.  It's in the blood!

With the leaf peeping season well underway, Saturday's A-Team will be back again at the end of October to do the final clean-up in the woodlot and stack the three cords that will get me through the winta'.  In Vermont, the winta' comes early, and as my grandfather used to say, "there's 9 months of winta', 1 of mosquitos, and two of just bad sleddin'."

Fall officially starts tomorrow, but in my trip to Vermont house last weekend, it was obvious that the rhythm of the seasons was in full cycle which is great since the fall season provides 25% of the tourist income for the state.   Vermont is absolutely in full rhythm for the fall:

Results, Results, & More Results!

Ok, a good way to think on a rainy Tuesday morning as I head out to a day of meetings in Boston in a wicked busy week. 

Finished my intro business planning class at MIT yesterday and while I'm thinking about my second class at Tufts tomorrow which is all about market research, today's focus is 100% on sales, and where I need to be by the end of December...only about 100 workdays away.

It's been a great summer! 

Sure, like you, I've had way too much work, a couple of speedbumps here and there, the cancelled long-planned August trip back to Tanzania, and, of course, today the reality of the seasonal rhythm that shuts that door hard on the summa of '23!  Different from my buddy, Red, whose comic strip I read whenever I can, the fall is a great time to be back at work and at school, to be healthy and looking forward to the busiest time in any business year, 

The Dog Days of Summa are here in full force, and what are we already hearing since last week's turn of the calendar page? 

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.

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.