Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

"Time goes on. So whatever you're going to do, do it. Do it now. Don't wait"
--Robert De Niro

I have the privilege of living and working in a few interesting places in New England

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. 

The Rhythms of Life...and Sales

This time of year, that phrase of "What's up for the summa'?"  jumps into our vocabulary whether we want it to or not.  It's the natural rhythm of the seasons, and, right now, with the catalyst of hotter weather and the kids being out of school, that rhythm pushes us into figuring out exactly what we're going to be doing over the next 10 weeks. 

You finished Q1 either on (or not) plan.  Congratulations in either case !

Let's spend detailed time this week or next figuring out why and then rebalance Q2

Probably the last time you looked at your 2017 Sales Plan was January, and maybe even last December at the time the board approved the company's business plan.

Then you jumped into the deep end of the pool with your January sales meeting after which everyone hit the road and their desks totally focused on execution.  

It's been a blazing hot and exhausting Q1, and Q2 promises to be more of the same. Certainly, nothing is going to slow down.

Here we are in the final 20 hours of the quarter. Maybe 10 today, certainly 10 tomorrow, and then it's over with the turn of the digital page as we rush into April on Monday morning

I used to have a cat named "Bean", and when I was spending a lot more time at the house in Vermont, she and I would go walking in my woodlot, Bean following dutifully behind me as the afternoon light filtered into the perfectly manicured woods.  For 40 years of living in this valley where I come from six generations of Vermonters living there before me, my motto always has been... "A clean forest is a happy forest".

I've found that there are two types of managers who work in our profession of Sales...

Back-in-the-day... MRP, ERP, Quality Circles, ISO900, DFM, KANBAN, and a myriad of other manufacturing productivity improvement tools and technologies were the structural keys to the success of the resurgence of quality and manufacturing superiority in the U.S.  

In the '70's and '80's, as a direct result of the new-age religions of processes, standardized tools, technologies and metrics preached by the High Priest, W. Edwards Deming, and national activities such as the Malcolm Baldridge Award, U.S. manufacturing steadily pulled itself back to worldwide superiority in such diverse markets as cars, appliances, in semiconductors and general electronics.  This refocus to massive productivity and quality gains, resulting in much higher levels of customer satisfaction, took a national call-to-action spread over a couple of decades, and it worked, and it continues to work today with US manufacturing productivity output doubling over the last 15 years.

And Yet, Sales Productivity in too many companies Sucks...

• In the last 10 years, selling costs rose faster than revenues.
• In the last 5 years, SG&A costs have increased 12.5% (Alix Partners 2013)
• According to Sales Benchmark Index, in the last 3 years, sales productivity declined for the world’s largest sales forces.  Only 41 of the SBI 100 companies increased sales productivity per employee.
• There's been an average productivity decline of 2.5 % over the last three years.

Joe Gusfaston, Chairman of Brainshark, the industry leader in Sales Readiness, who consolidated many of these stats, noted in an article published by Forbes that "Sales enablement is about how to improve productivity of sales by squeezing out inefficiencies and maximizing effectiveness,”    

Leaders like W. Edwards Deming, back-in-the-day, for manufacturing, and guys like Joe Gustafson today for Sales Readiness & Enablement, understand the sales productivity crisis and are actually doing something about it.
 

which is Why We've Teamed Up with Hubspot on March 20th For...

"Constructing a Winning Blueprint for 2017"

Most of us in our firm grew up on the manufacturing floors and in the engineering labs of our prior companies until we came to understand the reality of the simple business credo that..."Success in business is about just two things: Sales ! and other stuff" (Professor Howard Anderson, Harvard Business School).

We've also been devotees about everything Hubspot since the company was founded.  We use their tools, they are customers of ours, and we of them. 40+ of my Tufts alums (very happily) work there.  The Hubspot technologies are the backbones of my course in Marketing, and most recently my new course "The Art & Science of Sales".  Many of my class lecturers are my alums now working (very happily) at Hubspot.  All of this is very symbiotic, the process works perfectly and everyone benefits.

As a result of that partnership, we decided to co-host with Hubspot this "Constructing a Winning Blueprint for 2017" event on March 20th at the Hubspot headquarters in Cambridge, which is focused directly at the senior leaders (CEOs, and Heads of Marketing and Sales) of manufacturing companies. Kicking off with an introduction by Hubspot co-founder, CTO, and tech visionary, Dharmesh Shah, this unique event will outline the intersections of systems, processes and metrics between the rapidly evolving worlds of Sales & Marketing productivity and the productivity improvements being made on the factory floor.

The Agenda:

• 11-12 PM -Lunch & Networking
• 12-1 PM-Welcome and presentation from Dharmesh Shah, CTO and Co-Founder of HubSpot
• 1-2 PM Manufacturing CEO Panel, facilitated by Jack Derby
• 2-3 Q&A, Discussions and Networking

Questions?  

Just connect with me at jack@derbymanagement.com or with my partner, John Routhier, who, with Hubspot, is in charge of this event at john@derbymanagement.com, and we'll fill in the details.

Have a great day selling today! 

Head Coach  

I just pulled the plug on my ISP.  

Big firm, terrible connectivity, and consistently poor service, so I finally made the decision to pull the plug last week since I just couldn't be held hostage anymore.  Lee Drake, superb tech CEO, at his IT support firm, OS Cubed, had been telling me to do this for the years, but I didn't want to go through the pain of disruption. Finally the pain of staying connected outweighed the fear of the pain of disruption. The move happens next week, the process will be transparent, and I could not be happier. The point of this introduction is that when I looked up our background with the ISP, I discovered that we had been with them for 20 years !!  

20 years?!?

20 years ago, the World Wide Web had just been invented.  We moved to WWW using Mosaic from Arpanet where we had stuck it out for years using arcane commands, slow speeds and calling people on our landline telephone to ask if they did in fact receive the email (although it wasn't called email, we did not have html, nor did the words that came through on the screen look like any email that we know today).   

Which brings me thinking about the 2017 concept of "Day 1", and the adoption of faster change in our business, in our sales development, and in my teaching Marketing, and, with this semester, a new course in Sales.  I should have made this ISP switch five years ago, and for some wacko reason, I just stuck it out piling up one wasted hour after another.  2017 is about every day being Day 1 and initiating more rapid change that brings more value to our customers' businesses.