Sales Strategy & Enablement by Revenue.io

1062: Adapt to Survive the Looming Recession, with Frank Cespedes

May 31, 2022

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Frank Cespedes is a Senior Lecturer at the Harvard Business School and author of several sales books including Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing. There is a recession looming right now and Andy and Frank discuss what organizations can realistically do to prepare for it, especially amidst the growth-at-all-costs backdrop. Frank discusses the role of sales leaders in hiring for fit, coaching, and doing performance reviews. He also comments on stagflation and the increasing importance of customer selection, flagging bad customers, and closing deals.

HIGHLIGHTS

Preparing for recession: Going for volume vs profitable value
Customer selection, sales leadership, and performance reviews
Search for fit and make your own luck
Selling is still about people buying from people
C-suite is siloed amongst specialists

QUOTES

Frank: "Sales is increasingly, for lots of reasons that are not going away, increasingly a cross-functional activity, so selling is more intimately connected now with those other areas that inflation makes more difficult. Then, when it comes to recession, the basics apply: if you cannot articulate your value proposition and the outcomes crisply and to the point, you're not well-prepared for a recession."

Frank: "I think the people running sales have to be prepared for that. There's a difference between simply going for volume and going for profitable value. There's a big difference there."

Frank: "So much of the important information required for customer selection, required to develop the capabilities of salespeople does not reside in the CRM system. It resides in the skulls of the individual account managers, etc and you only get it, you only make it visible and actionable when you do good performance reviews and coaching."

Frank: "So many other resource allocations in the business depend on sales forecasts and the ability of the salesforce to meet those forecasts. And that's why, in sales, we have these metrics that focus on what are you doing by month, by quarter, annually, etc. When the metrics reinforce that, salespeople focus on that, and the danger is that even when the market changes, they stick with the devil they know. They avoid the transition cost."

Find out more about Frank in the link below:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankcespedes/
Website: https://frankcespedes.com/
Amazon book link: https://www.amazon.com/Sales-Management-That-Works-Changing/dp/1633698769