As I write this on a 14-degree sunny Saturday morning, I'm just in from snowblowing deep in the woods of Winhall (or Bondville) Vermont (pop.647). Known by the State of Vermont, the town of Winhall is-according to the Feds-also the village of Winhall in the town Bondville. Or maybe it's the other way around. Hard to figure.
After 40 years of living here-sometimes as a Vermonter and others as a Flatlander, plus five generations before and one after me, I know one thing by now about living in Vermont. It's wicked hard work, and I also love Vermont. Absolutely no "but" in that sentence!
Take the weatha' in the last 24 hours:
-death-defying driving Thursday in "wintery-mix"
-pouring rain all night even though it was in the 20's
-sheet ice Friday morning with white knuckle driving
-blinding snow Friday afternoon dropping 6" in 4 hours.
-3 more inches overnight
Not much is "easy" in Vermont until you hit July and August, but even then the tough sleddin' of the winta' is replaced trying to avoid the blood-lust of angry mosquitoes just when all you want to do is to soak in the beauty of Vermont .
Working Hard into February...
Working hard in a Vermont winta' in February has to do with keeping warm, driving super carefully and walking daily out to the woodshed avoiding ice, snow, rain, and roaring winds...and that's on a good day.
Working hard in Sales in quota-critical Q1 is about Checklists:
Sales Plan written, presented & accepted
Sales Meeting completed, territories & quotas aligned
New hires onboarded and assigned to coaches
Marketing aligned & new SLAs & MQLs agreed to
Travel schedules planned out for March & April
The January numbers are already posted on the scoreboard. All of us are already out in the field doing February deals, traveling way too much and constantly on the phones rounding out our weeks and weekends.
Just one more thing you could be doing...
Attend our 1st Derby Sales Management Boot Camp for 2020- April 9th
As part of our Sales Management Consulting, we've been running two to three boot camps a year for 20 years. Held in partnership at MIT with other leading experts focused on dramatically increasing sales productivity, enablement and readiness, this intensive one day highly-engaged camp brings together CEOs, Presidents and Sales Managers from a wide diversity of industries.
- We actively engage everyone in our exclusive strategy of "Process-Tools-Technology & People".
- We dive deep into real-life tactics that you can start using immediately in Q2 with your sales team.
- We focus on developing street-level playbooks of Activity Plans that will impact Q2 and the balance of 2020 revenue.
Our partners and guest speakers have deep expertise learned from years of being salespeople, managers and presidents of both large corporations and mid-market companies covering a wide range of markets.
- We've sat in your seat!
- We've sold on the street and in the boardroom!
- We've won and lost some hard-fought games, and we've been to the Super Bowl of Sales many times.
The primary coaches will be George Simmons and me, and our guest speakers will include the head of sales from a well-known highly successful mid-market company plus senior sales executives from Brainshark and Hubspot, two of the most widely used sales enablement and readiness technology platforms in the business of sales productivity improvement.
As part of this day, we will comfortably and quickly sort through the complexity of tech sales tools providing you with the ability to make the best choices at the lowest cost that deliver the highest values both for your sales team and most importantly, for your customers.
Click here for more details and then just connect directly with me next week for any questions at jack@derbymanagement.com, and I'll set up a call with you right away to talk through the logistics
Right now, I'm off to do some field research in a few minutes here at Stratton.
Jack
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackderby/
Please stay connected!
jack@derbymanagement.com
Head Coach, Derby Management, experts in...
-Sales & Marketing Productivity
-Business and Strategic Planning
WHAT WE DO AT DERBY MANAGEMENT
Professor of the Practice, Tufts Entrepreneurship Center
-Entrepreneurial Marketing
-The Science of Sales
