Published at Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge in April 2019 When salespeople become managers, they often do a horrible job. Four key steps can help them—and all soon-to-be managers—make the shift, says Frank V. Cespedes. This sad scenario plays out at many...
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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.
Sales Managers Must Manage
published in Top Sales Magazine, February 2019 Probably the most common complaint I’ve heard throughout my career from C-level executives about their sales colleagues concerns the latter’s ability to manage, not sell. As one senior executive puts it, “I want sales...
Assembling the Sales Team
published in Top Sales Magazine; August, 2018 Assembling the right sales team has always been crucial. As the old saying goes, “You hire your problems.” But recruitment and selection are now even more important. Data and analytical tasks have lengthened...
4 Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing
by Frank V. Cespedes and Russ Heddleston (Harvard Business Review, April 2018) In the past decade, content marketing has become a widely established practice. Companies have hired writers and Chief Content Officers to run departments, create blogs and other materials,...
Effective Sales Training: What Are the Foundational Elements?
Frank V. Cespedes (Top Sales Magazine, April 2018) Someone once told me that many companies maintain their equipment better than their people. If so, they get what they don’t maintain. This is especially true in sales. Across industries, turnover in sales averages...
How a Fast-Growing Startup Built Its Sales Team for Long-Term Success
by Frank Cespedes and David Mattson It’s common for leaders of sales teams to focus almost exclusively on short-term tactics and current operations while failing to think and act in a way that supports the longer-term needs of their businesses — and it’s hard to fault...
CEOs Should Get Personally Involved in Talent Development
Chief Executive, August 31, 2017 Frank Cespedes, Jay Galeota, and Michael Wong Korn Ferry recently estimated that, globally, human capital has a value about 2.3 times that of physical capital.[1] This difference is likely to widen in increasingly service economies....
Find the Right Metrics for Your Sales Team
Harvard Business Review (site) by Frank V. Cespedes and Bob Marsh “What gets measured gets managed” is a longstanding business aphorism. But today’s sales technologies enable companies to measure almost anything, which leads many managers to try to measure everything....
Sales Productivity, Not Just Sales Technology
Frank V. Cespedes, for Top Sales Magazine, August 2017 There is lots of buzz about big-data and “Sales Enablement” (SE)—the current catch-all term for attempts to increase sales productivity via technology. There are now hundreds of vendors of such tools, and SE is...
The Four Stages of Becoming An Excellent Sales Manager
Frank Cespedes Front-line sales managers hire reps, organize and allocate sales efforts across market opportunities, conduct performance reviews and reinforce good behaviors (we hope!), and in most firms are the core means by which linking strategy and sales is or is...
