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The equivalent of an entire sales force is replaced at many firms every four years, so it’s critical that go-to-market initiatives remain tied to strategic goals. Frank Cespedes explains how in his book, Aligning Strategy and Sales.

Too often, there’s a huge gap between a company’s overall business strategy and the way its salesforce operates in the field. In fact, says Frank V. Cespedes, articles and books about strategy rarely take sales into consideration at all.

“Everybody talks about the importance of talent management,” says Cespedes, a senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management unit at Harvard Business School. “But far fewer confront a basic fact: Companies typically spend much more money and hire many more people, annually, in their sales function than they do anywhere else in the firm. At Google and Groupon, for instance, a higher percentage of employees work in sales than engineering or data mining. And at Facebook the salesforce’s ability to translate ‘likes’ into advertisers will make or break that company’s valuation and fortunes going forward.”

Read the full article and an excerpt from Aligning Strategy and Sales on Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.

The goal of strategy is profitable growth, meaning economic value above the firm’s cost of capital. There are basically four ways to create that value: (1) invest in projects that earn more than their cost of capital; (2) increase profits from existing capital investments; (3) reduce the assets devoted to activities that earn less than their cost of capital; and (4) reduce the cost of capital itself.

In my experience, most CEOs, CFOs, and other C-suite executives involved in strategy formulation know these finance basics. (Or, they learn fast after a few investor meetings.) But far fewer understand and operationalize the core sales factors that materially affect each value creation lever.

Read the full article on Harvard Business Review.

In the first decade of the 21st century, less than half of all startups in the U.S. survived beyond three years. And of the nearly 44,000 companies founded in 2000 and listed in the Capital IQ database, less than six percent achieved more than $10 million in revenues by 2010. As venture capitalist David Lee once said, “It’s never been easier to start a company and never harder to build one.”

One of the main reasons for this failure rate is entrepreneurs don’t identify their target demographic correctly. Without clarifying your core customers, selling is ultimately a function of individual, heroic efforts in the field, not a scalable platform for growth.

The following four steps can reverse this downward trend…

Read the full article on Entrepreneur.com.

One of the best books ever written about selling is David Dorsey’s The Force. Dorsey turns a year in a Xerox sales district in Cleveland into a riveting drama about people, accounts, the operatic highs and lows of the sales cycle, and the triumph of making quota. Dorsey focuses on Fred Thomas and his sales team and the sometimes strange but effective motivational techniques of his district manager, Frank Pacetta. It’s a great ethnographic study of B2B selling for capital goods.

But even as Thomas and Pacetta make their sales, Xerox is missing the larger strategic point, although the facts are staring at them in every office where Thomas and his team make sales calls: more and more copies are being handled by printers linked to personal computers, not by copiers. Thomas is doing his best to maintain Xerox’s share in copiers. But the disconnect between sales and strategy (in this case, a lack of strategy to deal with a technology that is redefining the market and customer behavior) is the hidden subtext of the book.

Even Dorsey, as great an observer as he is, misses it. Instead, he explains that by the mid-1990s Xerox competed with Canon, Kodak, Minolta, Ricoh, Savin, and other copier manufacturers, without mentioning HP, Brother, and other makers of computer printers that were eating Xerox’s lunch. It makes Dorsey’s summation of his story a non sequitur: “A once-thriving American business loses share to the Pacific Rim, gets scared, adopts TQM practices, raises productivity, and begins to win back business. The way the Cleveland district sells copiers illustrates . . . this comeback.” No. How could it be when selling, however clever and creative, is divorced from the main strategic reality facing the firm?

Read the article on Harvard Business Review.