Faculty Name(s)

Lou Shipley, Senior Lecturer

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=936677

Dianne Ledingham HBS ’90 – Executive Fellow

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianneledingham/

Ed Boyajian HBS ’90 – Executive Fellow

https://www.linkedin.com/in/edboyajian/

Overview:

B2B Sales and Distribution will focus on the primary components of managing a large company sales organizations and focus on B2B businesses.

Career Focus:

If you are going to manage or invest in large companies, you will need to understand how to manage your top line, your sales organization. This course draws heavily although not exclusively on technology companies and is essential if you plan to be a CEO, General Manager or Chief Operating Officer or Chief Revenue Officer.

Educational Objectives:

This course is designed for students who would like to gain an understanding of the complexity of managing large sales and go-to-market organizations. There are three main themes to the class – people, go-to-market strategy and operations and analytics. The people section will address how to hire and manage first line sales managers, define a sales culture and create scalable compensation systems. The go-to-market design module will address how to choose an appropriate sales model to achieve growth and profitability and compare and contrast direct, indirect and other sales models. The operations and analytics module will focus on how AI and a sales operations tool stack give visibility into sales activities and drive sales forecasting accuracy.

Course Content and Organization:

There are live cases and traditional cases to reinforce the three core themes of the class. We have six live cases where senior executives from SalesForce.com, Samsara, IBM, Infor, Workday and EnterpriseDB will join us to grapple with actual sales management challenges they are currently experiencing. Five classes will be HBS published case studies on Microsoft, Qualtrics, ABB and Optigen.

Grading / Course Administration:

Theer is no final paper for this class. Grading will be 70% on class participation and 30% on the two experiential assignments,

Experiential assignment one: Write and submit a paper: You will find a salesperson on your own, interview them about how they are compensated, and write a two-page summary of your conversation.

The second experiential assignment is an opportunity to experience real sales management issues and conduct a role play in class. Topics for the role play include changing a salesperson’s compensation plan, reducing a reseller’s gross margin, managing an unhappy major account and integrating your sales organization into an acquiring company’s sales organization. Each student will be required to submit their strategy for handling management issues ahead of class.

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