Derby Management's "Competitive Edge" Blog

 

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

Coming off the Thanksgiving break after one too many slices of pumpkin pie, I'm feeling pretty good about sales specifically and business overall right now.  A couple of solid weeks of selling left in the year.  Everyone at the firm is maxed out with work.  January's outlook appears to be reasonably ok.  Teaching at Tufts and MIT are in exam modes. The stock market is humming, and the economy in general seems to be more positive...even though the fundamentals (little things like debt, GDP growth and jobs) aren't that much better.

Tags: sales management effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp, business tools, business planning, business plans, sales boot camps, best sales practices;

Last Sunday, driving from early morning mass and on my way to my personal weekly reward, which is searching out sales at my favorite store, Home Depot, I noticed 20 feet ahead two turkeys feeding on late fall garden scraps on the left side of the road.  As I slowed down, I also noticed this small yellow sign noting "turkeys crossing" over to the right.  And then, as if on cue, 20ish turkeys hopped up on the stone wall, walked across the road right in front of my car and joined the others in the garden.   Which, of course, got me to thinking about Sales...

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales management effectiveness, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp, sales checklists

Just about ready for winta'.  As part of my never-ending "drive-1,000-miles-a-week" travel schedule, late Thursday night and Friday morning found me in the towns of Colchester and Williston, VT.  I thank the inventor of GPS every single trip when I head off with absolutely no idea where I'm going other than... "It's north (or some other direction) somewhere."  A Mobil station dinner and a Hampton Inn breakfast later, I found that the management team at the Colchester and Williston plants were truly engaging, have complex opportunities, and I'm looking forward to our two day planning session in December.

Tags: Sales Best Practices, sales management, sales management coach, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp, sales boot camps, sales checklists

MassTLC (short for Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council) keeps doing everything perfectly! Having run a number of business associations such as SBANE, ACGBoston and the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, I personally know how very hard it is to keep things new, exciting, and constantly refreshed.   Members want to feel engaged, sponsors need to feel loved, and new prospects want to join only if "the cool kids" belong.

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales management, sales enablement, sales planning, sales effictiveness, sales management boot camp, 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

I spend most of every day, most weeks (except a couple on the NH beach and a couple at Stratton snowboarding), every month and every quarter thinking about and working in the professions of Sales & Marketing. 

Tags: sales management coach, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management training, sales training, sales plans, sales management boot camp, sales producitivity

 
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

 Fall is more than in the air in Vermont.  It's in my  aching back from last weekend's hauling, cutting and  splitting three huge trees which fell in my woodlot as a  result of the big blow two weeks ago.  It's also been in  my head all this week as a result of my unexpected  discovery just before I left Vermont on Sunday of  three more equally big trees that had fallen out of    sight on the other side of the ridge.  As a result, in my  never-ending quest of "a clean forest is a happy  forest",  I'll find myself back in VT tomorrow, crack of dawn, up on the ridge, steam billowing from the tractor in the 40 degree air, the sound of the chainsaw ripping through the stillness and focused on "gettin' her done" since the seasons in VT and its inevitable snow wait for no one.  

Tags: Sales Optimization, Sales Best Practices, sales, sales management, sales effectiveness, sales enablement, sales management boot camp