Featured Video: Sales is Strategy in Action

Does your organization sell what you want, to whom you want, the way you want? Or do you have too many instances of selling whatever you can, to whomever you can, however you can? Too many companies fall into the trap of the latter, wasting time and resources. This isn't just a sales issue—it's a leadership issue. If you rely on a sales team to interact with prospects and customers to drive at least a portion of your revenue and profit, then leaders must consider that sales is strategy in action. Every sales call reflects the success or failure of your strategy, impacting your results in the market countless times each day.

This video is part of my new video series, Lessons from The Growth Leader. Every month for the next year, this newsletter will feature a video highlighting one of the big ideas from the book. If you don’t want to wait or just want to binge watch ☺ the entire series is available on YouTube.

And if you like this video, my recent HBR article on this topic may be of use to you: Winning the Right Customers Isn’t Just a Sales Issue.

Individual Leadership: Improving or Inspecting Performance

How much of your time is spent inspecting performance, reviewing reports, updates, and data about what has already happened? Now contrast that with the time you spend helping people improve, providing clear direction, and elevating performance. If you’re honest, the percentage of time spent in inspection mode may be uncomfortably high. While staying informed is part of any leadership role, it’s not where your impact peaks. Leadership is about improving performance, driving results, and developing talent. In every meeting, ask yourself: am I inspecting or improving? The difference may be subtle in the moment but profound over time. Shifting even a small portion of your attention from consuming information to developing your team can have a significant impact on your results and how people experience your leadership.

Organization Leadership: Does Your Team Understand Your Strategy?

I continue to see a lack of alignment with strategy as one of the most the critical issues leaders must address.

Axios reports a mere 27% of leaders believe their teams are entirely aligned with the organization’s business goals. Only 9% of employees agree.

Part of the challenge is that addressing this issue is not a single “to do item” or meeting or program. Done properly, it requires two broad efforts:

1. Impart a deep understanding of your company’s strategy, priorities, and goals, starting with senior leaders, then extend this knowledge throughout the organization. Don’t underestimate the challenge of getting even 25 leaders to share the same understanding of your strategy.

2. Facilitate frequent conversations among leaders and teams about how their everyday focus, efforts, and actions are contributing to the success or failure of the strategy. A willingness to be candid about what is not working is required for these conversations to be meaningful.

Strategy alignment requires a sustained effort and structured conversations throughout the organization, including honestly answering questions about what you need to do more or better. And what you need to stop doing. 

LinkedIn Live

I’ve extended my break from LinkedIn Live for the rest of July, and I’ll be back in August with a new lineup for the Fall season! Meanwhile, please send along any topics you’d like me to cover in the second half of the year.

In the meantime, this recorded LinkedIn Live event about my HBR article Winning the Right Customers Isn’t Just a Sales Issue, was my most popular of the first half of 2025. So, if you need a bit of inspiration to get you through the dog days of summer, watch or listen to this one. 

Watch this short video to see how I work and the impact it creates.