Aligning Strategy and Sales

It's time to address the enormous cost of the strategy-sales gap. The most crucial connection in an organization seeking to grow is between sales and strategy. But if your company is like most, instead of a strong connection there is a widening gap and too little bang for the buck. This book will help turn the tide for your organization. US companies, for example, invest almost $900 billion annually in their sales forces--more than three times the amount they spend on all media advertising, and twenty times more than the total spent on digital marketing. Yet research indicates that, on average, companies deliver only about 50 to 60 percent of the financial performance their strategies promise. That's a lot of wasted money and managerial effort. Aligning Strategy and Sales will help you close the gap, establish the needed connections, and improve both sales and strategy in your organization. From the author's research, practice, and years of work with firms across many industries, you'll learn how to improve performance by: * Articulating strategy in ways that busy people can understand and embrace, and then translating strategic choices into sales tasks that bring results. * Hiring, compensating, and measuring salespeople and performance in ways that are consistent with strategic goals. * Selecting and developing people who can manage as well as sell, and finding practical ways to improve the coordination between sales and other functions required for profitable growth. Usable, thoughtful, and clear, this book will help you drive performance, evaluate sales numbers, and hire or train the people who deal with your customers--from sales and functional heads to HR and the C-suite. Informed by the author's experience and research as a business manager, board member, consultant, and professor at Harvard Business School, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides the know-how and tools to do exactly what its title promises.