Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Sales Management That Works, Aligning Strategy and Sales, as well as other books and articles.
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Online book discussion site Goodreads just released its list of recently published books for its users this month. As it has done for the past few months,National Jeweleragain has sifted through the virtual stacks to find a handful of recent releases that may be...
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