Harvard Business Review Press
Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors That Drive Effective Selling
Key Metrics
- Frank V Cespedes
- Harvard Business Review Press
- Hardcover
- 9781422196052
- 9.3 X 6.4 X 1.2 inches
- 1.3 pounds
- Business & Economics > Sales & Selling - Management
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
That gap between your company's sales efforts and strategy? It's real--and 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 firm's unique goals, not a generic selling formula.
Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether you're a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firm's customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.
Author Bio
Frank Cespedes is Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit. He received his B.A. from the City College of New York, M.S. from M.I.T. and Ph.D. from Cornell University.
At Harvard, he has developed and taught a variety of MBA and executive courses, led the Strategic Marketing Management program for senior executives, and was co-lead of the Sustainable Market Leadership program for CEOs and their leadership teams. He currently teaches the elective Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing (ESM) course in the MBA program as well as modules in the Owner President Management (OPM) executive program and he heads the executive program on "Aligning Strategy and Sales."
Before joining the faculty, he was a Research Associate at Harvard and worked at Bain & Company, an international strategy consulting firm. From 1995 to 2007, he was Managing Partner at the Center for Executive Development (CED), a firm that won awards in the United States and Europe for its work with companies worldwide. He has consulted to companies in many industries, is affiliated with private-equity investors, and has been a Board member of Evenflo, HALO Industries, start-up firms, and the Education for Employment Foundation (EEF), which provides career training in skills linked directly to job placement with companies in the Middle East and North Africa.
He is the author or co-author of six books, including Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014), Concurrent Marketing: Integrating Product, Sales and Service(Harvard Business School Press) and Going to Market: Distribution Systems for Industrial Products (Harvard Business School Press); as well as articles in Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Strategy and Business, Business Horizons, California Management Review, International Encyclopedia of Business and Management, Journal of Managerial Issues, Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management, Marketing Encyclopedia, Organization Science, Sloan Management Review, and Strategy & Business. He has also written more than 40 case studies about companies and numerous technical notes on various business topics.
Source: Harvard Business School
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