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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Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Sales Management That Works, Aligning Strategy and Sales, as well as other books and articles.
How to Give Performance Reviews: A 3-Step Action Plan
You know they’re important. HR is on your case about getting them done. But, they’re time consuming, uncomfortable, and disorganized. And as a manager, you have more important things to focus on right now. We’re talking about the dreaded performance review. They’re...
Sales Slump: 3 Tips for Implementing Strategic Compensation Plans
An estimated 85 percent of companies in the United States use incentive plans, accounting for approximately 40 percent of total sales compensation. That’s a lot of money and managerial effort. Yet in a recent survey of 700 firms by CSO Insights, 20 percent reported...
Books We Trust: Interview with Frank Cespedes
This week sees the publication of a new book I want to bring to your attention. It’s by Frank Cespedes, a professor at Harvard Business School, and an old friend from our mutual consulting days. The book is called Aligning Strategy and Sales, and it might have been...
The Strategic Way To Hire a Sales Team
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...
MarketingSherpa Weekly Book Giveaway
That gap between your company’s sales efforts and strategy? It’s real – and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book. In Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors...
What You Don’t Know About Sales Can Hurt Your Strategy
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...
4 Steps to Identifying – and Engaging – Your Core Customers
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...
The Importance of Aligning Strategy and Sales
Every year, U.S. companies spend more than $900 billion on their sales forces, but typically see only 50 to 60 percent of the financial performance they're promised. The problem, Harvard Business School Professor Frank Cespedes says, is the "disconnect between selling...
How to Shrink the Gap between Sales and Strategy—An Interview with Frank Cespedes
For a business to grow, it must have a strategy and that strategy must be aligned with sales. The problem is often companies don't have a strategy, or if they do, there's a gap between that strategy and what their sales teams are doing. "Research shows relatively few...