Every company needs a strategy—a forward-looking plan for the future—and every company needs to keep that bottom line growing through sales. But all too often, the folks devising the grand plan and the folks sealing the deals are not on the same page.

In his new book, Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, Systems, and Behaviors that Drive Effective Selling, Frank V. Cespedes laments the fact that sales and strategy rarely make a joint and complementary appearance in MBA classrooms or academic journals. Professors stick safely to the realm of publishable strategy theories; the sales side is left in the hands of consultants and trainers. This, he says, is just the start of a larger problem: the inability of businesses to tie their sales practices to their overall strategy.

It starts at the top, with big-picture strategists supported by $100 billion spent annually on management consulting and training. Yet that message doesn’t always get to the people who need it most: fewer than half of public-facing employees are well versed in these grand strategic ideas when it comes to the companies they’re representing. And the sales folks aren’t without blame. Because of their need to be on-the-ground, in-the-moment thinkers, it can be difficult to get them to look beyond the next handshake and sealed deal.

To combat this, Cespedes has written Aligning Strategy and Sales as a kind of methodical how-to book for business leaders who need to align their in-the-moment thinkers with the big picture and their strategists with practical day-to-day sales operations. But you don’t have to take Cespedes’s word for it—though he does head HBS’s executive program on this very topic and has led the Strategic Marketing Management Program for senior executives at HBS. Aligning Strategy and Sales is full of voices and stories from top firms, business leaders, and educators who offer valuable lessons through their experiences—both their mistakes and their ability to bridge that gap Cespedes so hopes to close.

Quoted

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“It is so much more efficient, it is so much more powerful than the normal academic method of doing research that I will never do that again. Every time I do research, I am going to do the crowdsourcing from our alumni.”
—Professor Clayton Christensen, detailing his experience working with 150 alumni of the Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise course via the OpenIDEO platform to write “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” published in Harvard Business Review

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“It’s a steamy summer night in New Orleans in 1990. I’m 21 years old and gunning an ambulance down Bienville Avenue, toward Charity Hospital. My uncle is president of the United States and my cousin will take over the same job in a decade. Big things are expected of me. But I’ve always had troubles succeeding along traditional Bush family lines. Surrounded by a brother and cousins who are outstanding athletes, I have trouble throwing and catching. I’m also dyslexic and struggle at school. I fidget in classrooms, and my mind wanders. So now, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I’m exploring a new path. It involves doing good by running red lights and crashing through windshields to rescue people. I love it.”
—An excerpt from Where Does It Hurt? An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Fixing Health Care, by Jonathan Bush (MBA 1997)

What I'm Reading

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“This book is about how we find work that not only engages us and makes the world better but also uses the gifts we were given. Stephen Cope uses great examples from the lives of Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Susan B. Anthony, and Jane Goodall, mixed with contemporary cases today of people looking for the great work of their life. It’s not a how-to book, but it contains many insights that are widely applicable. A very satisfying, motivating read for anyone who finds themselves at a crossroad in their life or those who know they are close but haven’t quite reached their New Jerusalem.”
—Professor Nancy Koehn, on The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling, by Stephen Cope

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“Brilliant and puzzling, and indeed very beautiful, it’s the story of ‘an almost perfect crime.’ Set in a monastery in the Quebec wilderness, Chief Inspector Gamache—one of my favorite detectives in crime fiction—is one of the few outsiders allowed in this community of silence.”
—Elizabeth Muir (HRPBA 1958) on The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny

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