Every company needs a strategy—a forward-looking plan for the future—and every company needs to keep that bottom line growing through sales. But all too often, the folks devising the grand plan and the folks sealing the deals are not on the same page.
In his new book, Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling, Frank V. Cespedes laments the fact that sales and strategy rarely make a joint and complementary appearance in MBA classrooms or academic journals. Professors stick safely to the realm of publishable strategy theories; the sales side is left in the hands of consultants and trainers. This, he says, is just the start of a larger problem: the inability of businesses to tie their sales practices to their overall strategy.
