What does it take to be effective? What does it take to be effective at the right time? How to get sales results that link to strategy?
These are the question Frank V. Cespedes explores in his recently published book Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling, a new book I want to bring to your attention, and recommend it, especially for those of you in sales. The book provides key insights to optimize your company’s customer management activities, and a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any company.
Aligning Strategy and Sales will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action. What I liked the most about the book is that is written well for organizational managers as much as for small business owners. You will appreciate Frank V. Cespedes’s effort to make selling meaningful for those who struggle to organize sales.
New research indicates a big gap between strategy and field execution in Sales, which it’s a real-and a huge vulnerability. Poor alignment of strategy and sales creates direct costs with a negative impact on the company’s growth potential.
So, what’s the problem?
One big problem is that sales and strategy are treated as separate worlds. One of the reason of poor alignment, it’s the classical “one-way communication”, as Frank V. Cespedes explains, because in many companies, sales departments get involved in strategy formulation only once in a while. Unfortunately, in these companies, strategic directions are set by C-level executives who are far removed from the sale realities.
The tendency of sales departments to focus almost exclusively on tactics and daily operations, while failing to think or act strategically is another reason. Lastly, most companies treat strategic planning process as a quarterly or annual event rather than an ongoing process, which causes many problems. “Even if the output of planning is a great strategy (a big if), the process itself often makes it irrelevant to sales executives, who must make important decisions throughout the year in accord with external buying rhythms and selling cycles at multiple accounts”, Frank V. Cespedes says.
What is the Solution?
The Harvard Business Professor argues that linking sales efforts with strategy is vital for profitable growth and must be a “two-way street”: “in any business, value is created or destroyed in the market with customers, not in conference rooms or planning meetings”. Sales staff can provide valuable insights about current customer behaviour, hence helping to keep business strategy relevant. Strategic direction is the key to improving sales efficiency, he says, and proposes a multilevel framework to make this work.
According to Frank V. Cespedes, sales people will “sell to anyone willing to pay a certain price”, if there is no clear strategic direction; therefore, the first step is to understand the customer and market characteristics to help you know where and how to compete.
In the second step, the strategic choices need to be translated into specific sales tasks and measurable objectives. So ask yourself, what skills your sales staff should have in order to deliver value to customers and, to extract value from customers?
The last step is to ensure that the actual behaviour of the sales staff is in line with the defined sales tasks; therefore, hiring sales people with the right experience and skills, excellent training and development opportunities for sales staff (people work harder but not necessarily smarter), continuous measuring and reviewing of sales performance and organizational structures, appropriate compensation and incentive systems, and cross-functional communication and collaboration, are very important for achieving alignment.
Frank V. Cespedes enhances the idea of saying “no” to achieve something, and what a “no” should do for a sales strategy, especially when sales affects your whole organization. Without clarity about “no” as well as “yes”, there is no strategy, he says. He makes a great distinction on when meaningful strategy activity really begins. All along the way, there are figures and charts that highlight the processes that are encountered and, according to the professor, must be managed.
Bottom line, this book will help guide your company’s sales strategy and highlight the tactics, which will leverage that strategy effectiveness to best select the sales support activities. Strategy stands out, but the focus is on alignment; don’t you find it interesting?
Since Harvard puts focus back on sales, you may be also interested in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education program Aligning Strategy and Sales, designed to help senior managers explore ways to successfully synchronize strategies and field-sales activities. It is appropriate for executives who define and communicate strategic direction, manage sales and distribution, recruit and develop sales talent, provide pre- or post-sale service, and budget for these activities. The executive education program examines the critical relationship between business strategy and sales activities.
What can you expect?
You’ll discover how to establish and communicate sales initiatives that support corporate objectives, build and nurture the right sales channels, develop company wide alignment, and implement the operational infrastructure, processes, and cultural values critical to long-term revenue growth; in other words, new ways to increase revenues.
Enjoy this video from Harvard Business Review on how to connect what your people sell with your business goals.
Featured image courtesy of Ron Porter