Description

How do you get the sales you need in today's ever-evolving landscape? Dr. Frank Cespedes graces the Walker Webcast to drop the essential strategies and techniques that you need to maintain a thriving and game-changing enterprise. Frank's vast experience spans his work with many companies on go-to-market and strategy issues, and he has been a Board member at consumer goods, industrial products, and services firms. He teaches at Harvard Business School while serving as Managing Partner at a professional services firm for 12 years. He 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. Willy opens the discussion on how the book covers the lessons on how Jack Welch, considered the greatest leader of his era who took GE from a billion dollars to 10 billion a year of yearly profits, had a horse race to decide his successor. Today finding sales talent is still the hard part for companies. The conversation leads to why Frank emphasizes how CEOs should not only set the foundational conditions for business development in their company but never lose their connection with customers. "Once they become CEOs, the rest of the organization conspires to "protect" them against customers. As a result, they're often making decisions based on an obsolete vision of what's really going on out there. And that's been Frank’s experience that when companies fail in terms of tens and hundreds of billions in shareholder value, you just can't point to one person to take the blame. It's a variety of other factors." Tune in to this new episode of the Walker Webcast — Getting The Sales You Need with Dr. Frank Cespedes, Harvard Business School Professor ▶️ Key Ideas: [00:34] Musings from last week's episode with Jim Courier [02:43] Willy Walker welcomes Dr. Frank Cespedes and reads his bio [00:03:51] What to emulate and not from GE's Jack Welch leadership approach [07:22] Missteps and mistakes of Robert Nardelli as former CEO of Home Depot [10:08] Frank cites his two motivations in writing his new book [12:37] Data on why e-commerce is overhyped [15:14] On car dealerships and how people make purchasing decisions [20:56] Value-based pricing & how to seize opportunities to do that in a whole variety of industries [26:51] How can we find good salespeople? [32:39] The cheat sheet to get great talent in today's market [35:29] The evolution of the buying cycle and the resale cycle changing salespeople's skills [43:53] Why online digital media is a deep pockets big company game [48:47] The data in the CRM system is notoriously noisy [56:05] Culture eats strategy for breakfast, lunch and dinner. ———————————————————————————————— GET NOTIFIED about upcoming shows: » Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: / @walkerdunlop » See upcoming guests on the #WalkerWebcast here: https://www.walkerdunlop.com/webcasts/ RELATED WEBCASTS: Tune in on Wednesdays for fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy, commercial real estate, and more! #WillyWalker hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines.