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...
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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.
Your Sales Training is Probably Lackluster. Here’s How to Fix It
by Frank V. Cespedes and Yuchun Lee U.S. companies spend over $70 billion annually on training, and an average of $1,459 per salesperson — almost 20 percent more than they spend on workers in all other functions. Yet, when it comes to equipping sales teams with...
How Sales Can Wield Its Most Effective Weapon: Pricing
Quotable, April 2017 Frank Cespedes, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and author of Aligning Strategy and Sales Pricing builds or destroys value faster than almost any other business action. Warren Buffet said it well: “The single most important decision in...
Getting Your Money’s Worth: Improving Sales Compensation
In a previous article (“Rethinking Sales Compensation,” Top Sales Magazine, February 2017), I examined three common but false assumptions about money, motivation, and management in sales compensation practices. The message was that the purpose of any sales comp plan...
How the Water Industry Learned to Embrace Data
by Frank V. Cespedes and Amir Peleg The water industry is using digital technologies and analytics to derive more value from its physical assets. The need for this sector to change and evolve could not be greater: The organizations that manage water...
Rethinking Sales Compensation
Compensation is probably the most discussed aspect of sales and the biggest chunk of the $900 billion that U.S. companies alone spend on selling. An estimated 85% of companies use incentive plans which, on average, account for about 40% of total sales compensation....
What Senior Executives Should Know About Sales
Business is more complex, data more abundant, and more specialists are needed to stay up-to-date with functional best practices. As a senior executive, you can worry all you want about disruption, but you need a salesforce aligned with strategy to do something about...
To Increase Sales, Get Customers to Commit a Little at a Time
Most sales models include a conversion funnel in which reps try to convert a marketing-generated lead into a prospect and then a customer through sequential steps. In this model, sales people are expected to make the process as friction-less as possible for the...
Interview with Harvard University professor and author of this year’s best sales book Frank Cespedes
By: Kim Mi-yeon Frank Cespedes teaches at Harvard Business School. His new book, Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling (Harvard Business Review Press) has been called “the best sales book of the year” (Strategy +...
More Universities Need to Teach Sales
By Frank Cespedes and Daniel Weinfurter For decades, Sales and Academia remained worlds apart and the business world did fine. But Sales is changing, Academia is out of touch, and this is bad for business and the academy. Compared to professions like engineering or...