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

309 pages, Kindle Edition

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).

Reviews

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an enjoyable read. I believe a lot of companies fail at aligning sales with business strategy. They just assign quotas based on arbitrary information. Great diagrams and I can apply learnings to my current role. Recommend.

[Ralitsa · Rating 2 out of 5]

So disappointed by this book. It literally doesn’t say anything new, doesn’t provide any insights or best practices but let’s the reader going in circles without any conclusion. Unbelievable that is was supposedly written by an university professor.

[Alvin Soh · Rating 4 out of 5]

To drive sales tasks, there are 3 strategic areas to manage:
1. Business strategy and market choices
2. Market and customer characteristics
3. Selling behaviours.

This book focuses more on #3. To drive selling behaviours, there are 3 areas to manage:

1. Sales force control systems: organisational structure, performance measurement, compensation and incentives

2. Sales people: experience and competencies, hiring criteria and processes, training and development

3. Salesforce environment: sales management, performance reviews, cross-functional communication

[Greg Hawod · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aligning Strategy and Sales is like the missing piece to forge a new kind of weapon in the arsenal of our managers. It has full of insights and very sound pieces of advice that traverse not only sales and strategy but also people management. The insights not only work for those who are on sales but for those who are in customer service.

Written by one of the esteemed Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes, this book is not like the other business books on sale. It is well-written and well-researched piece of work.

I highly recommend this book as a source of new ideas in management.

[Brian Finifter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Drier and more of a slog than I was expecting. Also less universally applicable than I was hoping, geared more towards sales teams of established companies as opposed to lessons applicable to the single entrepreneur.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

An snappy, quick, and effective read -- he has good insights into how one should think about hiring people (not just for sales jobs!) and thinking about compensation.

[AISV6 SENIOR LIBRARY]

PTI DL026636

[Delhi Irc]

Location: PTI IRC
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[Theodore Kinni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best sales book of 2014 for its big picture perspective on effective selling

[Alejandro Ricco Sarky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book for Sales Managers

Excellent. One of the best books for sales managers I have ever read with real advices for everyday situations and long term results.