In a recent podcast, I ask Frank V. Cespedes, a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Unit at Harvard Business School, some final advice to those sales leaders that are developing and implementing sales strategies. Frank’s latest book is Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Sales Strategies with Frank Cespedes
Joe: Is there any summary or final advice to sales leaders who are developing and implementing sales strategies?
Frank Cespedes: Let me break it down into 2. First advice to the folks doing strategy and then the sales people, I’ll get back to what I said earlier, many companies confuse strategy with things like purpose, vision, values, goals. Don’t do that. Don’t confuse those things. They’re very, very different, and when you confuse those things, that’s bad news. It’s bad news for your firm and ultimately for your career. It’s the responsibility of those who formulate a strategy to be aware of and insist on those distinctions. The strategy is about how we’re going to get from here to there.
As I said earlier, it begins with the external marketplace. It doesn’t begin with the way we think about ourselves. It doesn’t begin with who we are or hope to be. It begins with the people who will or won’t spend money on your products and services. That’s the realm of strategy. Purpose, vision, those are other things, they’re important, but they’re not strategy.
For sales people, I’d offer them 2 chief summary bits of advice, Joe. The first again is about people. It gets me back to the earlier good question you asked. Start there. You need discipline hiring that’s linked to your strategy. You’ve got to develop people. Somebody once said to me earlier in my career that many companies maintain their equipment better than they do their people. Unfortunately, that’s true, and ultimately you will get what you don’t maintain. So, you need development. You need training and that training has to be focused and customized to your goals. Again, because markets change, it’s not the responsibility of the market to understand and be nice to your company’s strategy. That has to be an ongoing process.
The second thing that I would emphasize to sales leaders is performance reviews. In my experience, performance reviews are still, in most companies, the most underutilized lever for influencing behavior. A busy manager, especially in sales, tend to treat performance reviews as a quick drive by conversations that are really about compensation, not about review, evaluation, and development. But, so much of strategy in sales alignment is only visible and manageable through ongoing account and performance reviews. Doing performance reviews effectively, giving effective feedback, coaching, that is a trainable skill, and there’s lots of room for improvement in most sales forces when it comes to conducting performance reviews, and it’s usually well worth investing in that. So, those would be my summary of advice.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Sales Strategies with Frank Cespedes
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