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And thanks for listening. Welcome to the HBR ID Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green.

I'm talking today with Harvard Business School Professor Frank Cessides, author of the article Putting Sales at the Center of Strategy and

Sales.

Frank, thanks so much for talking with us today.

My thanks to you, Sarah.

My pleasure to be here.

Excellent. thank you.

I'd like to start today by just defining the problem.

What does it look like when strategy and sales aren't in sync

and why does this happen in the first place?

Well, as with most significant business issues, there's not just one cause of the problem.

There are typically multiple reasons why this happens in a company. but here's what I would cite as the usual suspects.

First, many companies really do not have a strategy.

They confuse their vision or their mission statement or their

values with a strategy. Those are different things. Strategy involves

explicit choices about where to play in a market, where not to play who are and

are not our customers, and how we propose to win in the areas where we choose to play. And this must be explicit because it's

obviously difficult if not impossible for people to execute a strategy that

...