Synopses & Reviews
Its time to address the enormous cost of the strategy-sales gap.The most crucial connection in an organization seeking to grow is between sales and strategy. But if your company is like most, instead of a strong connection there is a widening gap and too little bang for the buck. This book will help turn the tide for your organization.
US companies, for example, invest almost $900 billion annually in their sales forcesmore than three times the amount they spend on all media advertising, and twenty times more than the total spent on digital marketing. Yet research indicates that, on average, companies deliver only about 50 to 60 percent of the financial performance their strategies promise. Thats a lot of wasted money and managerial effort.
Aligning Strategy and Sales will help you close the gap, establish the needed connections, and improve both sales and strategy in your organization. From the authors research, practice, and years of work with firms across many industries, youll learn how to improve performance by:
Articulating strategy in ways that busy people can understand and embrace, and then translating strategic choices into sales tasks that bring results.
Hiring, compensating, and measuring salespeople and performance in ways that are consistent with strategic goals.
Selecting and developing people who can manage as well as sell, and finding practical ways to improve the coordination between sales and other functions required for profitable growth.
Usable, thoughtful, and clear, this book will help you drive performance, evaluate sales numbers, and hire or train the people who deal with your customersfrom sales and functional heads to HR and the C-suite. Informed by the authors experience and research as a business manager, board member, consultant, and professor at Harvard Business School, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides the know-how and tools to do exactly what its title promises.
Review
A great sales book . . . With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Cespedes provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers for effective selling in any organization.”
Sales Pro Insider
the best sales book of the year. I know weve got a few months left in 2014, but Im not too worried that Ill be proven wrongIve been waiting for a sales book like this one for a long time and the odds that another will appear before December 31 are long indeed.”
Aligning Strategy and Sales is well worth the cover price.” strategy+business magazine
With so many books focused on the elevator pitch, closing the sale, or other minute sales techniques, Aligning Strategy and Sales is a refreshing change of pace.” 800 CEO READ
the book is a must read.” Gartner
Frank Cespedes was named one of the Top 50 Sales and Marketing Influencers” by Top Sales World
ADVANCE PRAISE for Aligning Strategy and Sales:
Lou DAmbrosio, Chairman, Sensus; former CEO, Sears Holdings and Avaya Inc.
Finally . . . a business book with real, pragmatic insight about the crucially important, but often ignored, discipline of sales and why its vital to any plausible strategy. Written in an effective and sometimes edgy tone, Aligning Strategy and Sales is a compelling playbook for companies looking to accelerate their growth.”
Jeffrey Bussgang, General Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
You spend a lot on sales. A LOT. Read Cespedes wise words to get a better handle on how to make your sales investments pay off through smart, strategic alignment.”
Charles Wilson, CEO, Booker Group
It often feels like salespeople are from Mars and strategists from Venus. Little wonder so many strategies fail when tested by real-world customer contact. Whether you are in sales, strategy, or a CEO, you should read this book. It addresses thorny issues like culture and compensation, and it will help you get results.”
Mardia van der Walt, Senior Vice President, Middle East and Africa, T-Systems International
The execution of strategy within an organization is dependent on two critical elements: the creation of a culture that enables strategy execution, and the ability of the sales force to execute on the sales tasks aligned to the strategy. And this is what Frank Cespedes manages to do with Aligning Strategy and Sales.”
Jeanne OKelley, cofounder and CEO, Blueprint Technologies
Frank Cespedes has brilliantly captured why aligning strategy and sales is so darn difficult. He walks you through the alignment process in a methodical yet witty manner, reminding you of the nitty-gritty intricacies that will provide the wind in the sails of your strategy. This book should be required reading for all senior executives and sales managers.”
Synopsis
Most firms face a wide gap between their strategic goals and their sales and other go-to-market efforts. Aligning these activities isor should bean important component of competitive advantage for entrepreneurs and established companies. Yet for most, it isnt.
This book will help readers close the gap. It is not another book about strategy formulation or another selling skills manual. This book is about aligning strategy and go-to-market efforts. It starts by explaining why many sales” problems in companies are really strategic alignment issues. It helps managers understand and diagnose both the overt and hidden costs of not aligning strategic goals with sales initiatives, and why getting better at selling” typically requires more than a motivational speech, sales force reorganization, new incentives, or a good training seminar. It outlines a process for articulating strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and in ways that help strategy formulators understand the required sales tasks inherent in strategic plans for the enterprise.
Given a coherent strategy, the book provides a framework for analyzing and managing the core levers available to firms when they seek to align selling behaviors with sales tasks, and examines each lever.
Readers will learn how to synchronize strategy and sales activities across the organization, and get value from improving their firms performance in the following areas:
How to move from a strategic vision to an integrated selling plan
How to build a sales organization to match strategy
How to create and maintain the optimal infrastructure and processes
Practical, thoughtful, clear, and engaging, Aligning Strategy and Sales will give you the know-how and tools to do exactly what the title promises.
Synopsis
"The best sales book of the year" strategy+business magazineThat gap between your companys sales efforts and strategy? Its realand a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book.
In Aligning Strategy and Sales, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes equips you to link your go-to-market initiatives with strategic goals. Cespedes offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth. Without that alignment, leaders will press for better execution when they need a better strategy, or change strategic direction with great cost and turmoil when they should focus on the basics of sales execution.
With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization. It will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action and build a sales effort linked to your firms unique goals, not a generic selling formula.
Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether youre a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firms customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.
About the Author
Frank V. Cespedes is the MBA Class of 1973 Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He has run a business, served on the boards of established corporations as well as start-ups, and consulted to companies around the world. He is the author of six books and many articles in
Harvard Business Review, the
Wall Street Journal,
California Management Review, and other publications.