by Frank Cespedes | Feb 6, 2015 | Aligning Strategy and Sales, Articles
What does it take to be a good salesperson? There’s a wide range of responses. Most reflect what you’d expect to find in the Boy Scout Handbook, with commonly cited traits like modesty, listening, curiosity, achievement orientation, and lack of discouragement. In pop...
by Frank Cespedes | Jan 28, 2015 | Aligning Strategy and Sales, Articles, Interviews
The gap between a company’s sales and strategy are important now more than ever. While we may or may not be recovering from a lengthly recession, it has been a slippery slope towards recovery for many years. The average S&P company decreased its COGS by over 250...
by Frank Cespedes | Jan 13, 2015 | Aligning Strategy and Sales, Articles
Any strategy lives or dies on the basis of its customer value proposition. There are many typologies relevant to crafting a value proposition, because there are many ways to win customers. But the key issue is always: what is the center-of-gravity in our approach? Do...
by Frank Cespedes | Jan 6, 2015 | Aligning Strategy and Sales, Articles
There’s no question that the corporate marketing function is evolving rapidly to become one of the most strategic functions in the enterprise. And that means the makeup of the marketing teams that leading CMOs must assemble is also undergoing a rapid transformation....
by Frank Cespedes | Dec 9, 2014 | Aligning Strategy and Sales, Articles
It’s that time of year again: the dreaded performance review. While this practice is key to getting teams to set priorities and clarify actions, managers (and employees) often treat it as a make-work task instead of a productive conversation. Perhaps it’s...
by Frank Cespedes | Nov 25, 2014 | Aligning Strategy and Sales, Articles
It’s tough for people to implement what they don’t understand. Communicating priorities to the front line, especially salespeople, is highly correlated with business performance. Conversely, this “middle ground” is where strategy execution often breaks down. Yet, many...
