TEL 074 - Aligning Strategy and Sales with Frank Cespedes Harvard Business School Professor Frank Cespedes sits down with Wade Danielson at The Entrepreneurs Library for a deep dive into "Aligning Strategy and Sales." Read the full interview transcript on...
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Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Sales Management That Works, Aligning Strategy and Sales, as well as other books and articles.
Book Extract: Rethinking sales compensation
Let's consider some common assertions with respect to sales compensation that in my experience, are often false. The fear is that "complex" plans can cause salespeople to spend too much time calculating payoffs instead of selling and taking care of customers....
Reframing Sales Effectiveness
I’m calling it early: Aligning Strategy and Sales is the best sales book of the year. I know we’ve got a few months left in 2014, but I’m not too worried that I’ll be proven wrong—I’ve been waiting for a sales book like this one for a long time and the odds that...
5 Dangerous Sales Compensation Myths Debunked
Sales compensation is a perennial topic at most companies. There are many different ways to pay salespeople, and money is important. Business history is full of firms that got what they paid for (e.g., reps who, responding to their volume-driven incentives, failed to...
ISBM Webinar (November 20)
For most companies, the most expensive part of implementation is aligning sales efforts and investments with strategy goals. Yet, research indicates a big gap. On average, companies deliver only about 50% of the financial performance that their strategies and sales...
How to Select Sales Managers Who Can Actually Manage
Sales leaders face a conundrum when selecting sales managers from the rep ranks. Most firms have examples of successful salespeople who are disasters as managers because they persist in the same behaviors as a manager that helped them excel as an individual...
The Revival of a Salesman: The Importance of Sales and Strategy to Business
Professor Frank Cespedes sits down to talk to Brian Kenny about his new book Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling about why it's imperative that a company's sales force inform its strategy. “The Business” is an...
Do’s and Don’ts For Sales Force Training
Firms in the United States invest three times more in selling than advertising, 20 times more than online media and 100 times more than social media, according to research presented in a 2013 Harvard Business Journal article. In fact, the money spent on sales training...
Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy
For many years Document Security Management (a pseudonym) had a thriving business in retrieving and shredding or securely storing organizations’ documents. Executives and their assistants loved its one-stop-shopping value proposition, and the sales force cultivated...
How to Focus Your Sales Team on the Right Effectiveness Metrics
When CEOs look to the VP of sales for a report on the latest results, volume and growth are the usual metrics discussed. But these two points don’t necessarily link sales with strategy. That requires better metrics, for a variety of reasons. Read the full article on...