A summary of things you should know about Aligning Strategy and Sales according to Frank Cespedes: Introduction In this episode Frank Cespedes takes a deep dive into his book AligningRead More
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]]>In this episode Frank Cespedes takes a deep dive into his book Aligning Strategy and Sales where he brings business strategy and sales together in order to make your business scale.
In his book Cespedes teaches you how to bring together your strategy with the behaviors you’re going to need in selling in order to execute that strategy. The goal of the book is to offer 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.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs or CEOs who are looking to scale a new startup or create new sustainable growth of an already established business.
The world needed a book that brings together strategy and sales. My book is not simply a strategy book or a selling tip book but it is about how to bring together your strategy with the behaviors you’re going to need in selling in order to execute that strategy.
Value is created or destroyed in the marketplace not meetings.
I start from an assumption that I think is a pretty darn good assumption. In business value is created or destroyed in the marketplace with customers. The market includes the industry you compete in, the customers segments where you choose to play and the buying processes of the customers that you sell and service. If a company has a strategy, as opposed to a wish list, those factors should inform a strategy and that strategy sales task. From there you need to align actually selling behaviors with the required task and ultimately entrepreneurs, managers and incorporations basically have three levers to do that.
First and most importantly are people; who your sales people are and what they know. The second lever is control systems; the company’s performance management practices. And the third lever is the sales environment; the wider company context in which sales initiatives get developed and executed. I think companies can use this framework to do a few important things. First, make sure in their strategy meetings they are having the right dialog and part of that dialog must include what that strategy means for people in the field. Secondly, if you are a CEO, entrepreneur or an investor I think the framework can save you money and redirect how you spend that money.
The book has four parts. Part one outlines the basic idea and framework in the book and provides examples of what happens if you don’t think these things through.
Part two of the book is Linking Strategy and Sales. This part of the book focuses on the core elements of each side of linking strategies and sales. In this section there is a chapter that looks at the foundational prerequisite which is the presence of coherent strategies. Many companies confuse strategy with their value, mission and purpose and those are all important things but very different.
Another chapter in the book is about communicating strategy which is a very, very big issue because companies are typically very bad at this.
The last chapter of section one provides a step by step process for thinking about how to identify what I call the idea of core customers for your business.
From there I take you into a chapter about hiring, development and organizing sales people. The average American company has a turnover in sales somewhere between 5% and 30% annually. That means that every four years or so the average American company has to replace its sales force. So hiring is a very important issue.
The next chapter is about sales compensation and incentives. You must think about the appropriate compensation system as a necessary but not sufficient cause of getting the behavior that you want.
The final chapter in that portion of the book looks at a key the dimension of sales performance do’s which in my experience is probably the most underutilized lever for effecting behavior in most companies.
The final portion of the book is called closing which is about making connections. The connections I am talking about in those final two chapters are of two sorts. One is developing sales managers that can actually manage. The other is about the cross functional connections that require for effective selling.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:00
“The desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” – John le Carre
I am currently a professor at Harvard Business School. I was a professor at Harvard for 11 years before leaving to run a business for 12 years, sold the business and returned to Harvard about five years ago.
My academic research always focused on go-to market elements including channels and sales management but when I left Harvard and ran a business for 12 years I had to meet payroll and sales. After getting lucky in business and returning to Harvard I taught strategy for a few years. The fact is that despite decades of attention to so called strategic planning there really is remarkably little research about how to link strategy with the nitty-gritty of field execution.
Managing for Results by Peter Drucker
Buy Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes on Amazon today
Visit FrankCespedes.com to learn more about Frank
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hyper Sales Growth by Jack Daly
High Profit Selling by Mark Hunter
The Trusted Advisor by Robert Galford
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Reasons Why Your Sales Skills Suck
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]]>A summary of things you should know about A More Beautiful Question according to Warren Berger Introduction In this episode Warren Berger shares his book A More Beautiful Question whichRead More
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]]>In this episode Warren Berger shares his book A More Beautiful Question which features the principle of asking the right questions. This book is perfect for the entrepreneur interested in the fundamentals of innovation and business through the relationship between asking great questions and coming up with great business ideas.
There are a number of books on questioning but I would say not too many have positioned it directly in terms of innovation. I felt like I was the first one to really position this in terms of innovation and business, to look at the relationship between asking great questions and coming up with great business ideas.
It’s good to read in its entirety in a way because it gives you a full appreciation of the significance of questioning. But I also think it’s a book you can go back to for some of the more practical tips and strategies that are offered in the book.
The most important principle has to do with the value of questions. A lot of us tend to undervalue questions because we think the real value lies in the answers. Questions may be just as important as the answers.
The first section of the book starts by making the case to the reader of why questioning is so important and why it’s such a critical part of innovation and change. I lay out a lot of evidence and stories to give the readers a great explanation of why this is so important.
In the second section of the book I step back and ask why is it that we start out asking so many questions when we are kids but ask fewer questions as we get older. I explore the idea that there is a great questioner inside all of us but overtime we may have gotten out of the habit of asking questions. I give you all the different kinds of reasons for that and also talk about our education system that really doesn’t teach or encourage questioning by students. We have lost some of our questioning skills along the way so I teach you what to do to get better at asking questions again.
The third section lays out my own system of questioning which is the why, what if and how of innovated questioning. It goes deep in terms of showing you the power of the why questions, what if questions and how questions. Each question has a different power and does different things but have an interesting relationship with each other. I explain why it’s so important to get good at asking why questions. I talk about how the what if questions help you come up with ideas and open up your imagination. The how questions are very practical action oriented questions.
The fourth section of the book I zero in on business-questioning in business. This section is all about taking some of the principles I laid out in the second section and asking how it applies specifically to business, your business and why is question so important in business. We zero in on the kinds of questions businesses need to be asking. Questions are so powerful that I think companies should think about having mission questions instead of mission statements. A mission question around a company’s goals is going to be more engaging to people than a statement.
The last section of the book I step outside of business and tie all of this into your daily life. I think all these principles of questioning apply just as much in your life as they do in business. I talk about how you can use questioning to start to deal with some of those issues in your life that maybe you have been avoiding thinking about. I show you how you can use deep and smart questions to deal with the issues in your life. I wrap-up the book by making the case that all of us should have a beautiful question, one big question, that we pursue in our lives.
“Questions are the new answers.” –Silicon Valley
“Knowing the answers will help you in school but knowing how to ask questions will help you in life.” – Warren Berger
I am a longtime journalist and author, I used to write for New York Times and Wired Magazine. I currently write for Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. Along the way I’ve written several books and the last couple of books has had to do with innovation and design thinking. The most recent book I moved from design thinking into questioning and A More Beautiful Question is focused on that aspect of innovation.
The inspiration was that I was studying a lot of entrepreneurs, innovators and business leaders and one of the things I noticed was questioning. I found that a lot of great innovators and business thinkers start with great questions; they are asking the questions that no one else is asking. I wanted to see what it was about questioning, why is it so powerful and why are some people better at it than others.
The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
Give and Take by Adam Grant
Buy A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger on Amazon today
Visit AMoreBeautifulQuestion.com for some exclusive content from the book and to take Warren’s test
Follow Warren Berger on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Go For No by Andrea Waltz | It’s Not The How or The What But The Who by Claudio Fernandez Araoz | EDGY Conversations by Dan Waldschmidt
Relevant advice and tips: 7 Steps To Improve Networking Skills For Entrepreneurs | 7 Reasons Why Your Sales Skills Suck
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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