Episode description

Frank Cespedes teaches at Harvard Business School and for 12 years was Managing Partner at a professional services firm. He has worked with many companies on go-to-market and strategy issues, and has been a Board Member at consumer goods, industrial products, and services firms. 

He has written for numerous publications, and is the author of six books including Aligning Strategy and Sales 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 Review Press, 2021).

According to Frank, business development and growth are core leadership responsibilities. But the impact on sales activities of new buying processes, e-commerce, big data, and other megatrends is often misunderstood. 

We discuss how to separate signal from noise and the implications for hiring, training, performance management, and relevant sales models.

Key Points of our Discussion

• Examining the non-linear buying process
• The important and often misunderstood changes in sales management
• Selling in the omni-channel buying world 
• The data and metrics we SHOULD be tracking
• Sales hiring and cross-functional interviews
• Specialisation and the division of labour
• The poor ROI of sales training and development
• Leveraging inside sales
• Busting pricing myths. Framing value with pricing

To learn more about Frank, visit his website frankcespedes.com, - where you can also pre-order his new book. For more great insights you can find Frank here on LinkedIn