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...
Media
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 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...
Selling to Customers Who Do Their Homework Online
By Frank V. Cespedes & Jared Hamilton Alfred P. Sloan, GM’s CEO from the 1920s to the 1940s, and the architect of the U.S. auto distribution system, summed up the car buyer’s challenge well: “The automobile…is a highly complex mechanical product. It represents a...
The Dialogue That Rarely Happens
The Dialogue That Rarely Happens Frank V. Cespedes Originally published in Top Sales magazine (February, 2016) In any organization, influence is bestowed as well...
Hiring Star Salespeople Isn’t the Best Way to Grow
By Frank V. Cespedes and Jacco van der Kooij You see Pareto’s Principle applied to sales all the time — the top 20% of a sales force produces 80% of a company’s revenues and margins — and it’s applicable in a variety of sectors. In B2B contexts, for example, rep...