Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling

by Frank V. Cespedes

"The best sales book of the year" — strategy+business magazine 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.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Management

336 pages, Hardcover

First published August 12, 2014

About the author

Frank Cespedes teaches at Harvard Business School. He has written for numerous publications, and is the author of six books including Aligning Strategy and Sales (Harvard Business Review Press) which was cited as “the best sales book of the year” (Strategy & Business), “a must read” (Gartner), and “perhaps the best sales book ever” (Forbes). His newest book is Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing (Harvard Business Press, 2021).