"It's 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 forces--more 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. That's 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 author's research, practice, and years of work with firms across many industries, you'll 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 customers--from sales and functional heads to HR and the C-suite. Informed by the author's 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.

In this smart, practical, and research-based guide, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes offers essential sales strategies for a world that never stops changing.

The rise of e-commerce. Big data. AI. Given these trends (and many others), there's no doubt that sales is changing. But much of the current conventional wisdom is misleading and not supported by empirical data.

If you as a manager fail to separate fact from hype, you will make decisions based on faulty assumptions and, in a competitive market, eventually fall behind those with a keener grasp of the current selling environment.

In this no-nonsense book, sales expert and Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes provides sales managers and executives with the tools they need to separate the signal from the noise. These include how to:

• Hire and deploy the right talent
• Pay and incentivize your sales force
• Improve ROI from your training programs
• Create a comprehensive sales model
• Set and test the right prices
• Build and manage a multichannel approach

Brimming with fascinating examples, insightful research, and helpful diagnostics, Sales Management That Works will help sales managers build a great sales team, create an optimal strategy, and steer clear of hype and fads. Salespeople will be better equipped to respond to changes, executives will be able to track and accelerate ROI, and readers will understand why improving selling is a social as well as an economic responsibility of business.