Extended Sales Cycle - Publications - Faculty & Research

25 Aug 2003
Research & Ideas

Why IT Does Matter

tracked the number of MIPS or CPU cycles on the network from 1990 to 2002. Even using a log scale on the vertical axis would be barely enough to tilt a vertical straight line enough to create something resembling the curves of the other... View Details

Keywords: by F. Warren McFarlan & Richard L. Nolan

10 Oct 2011
Research & Ideas

Retailing Revolution: Category Killers on the Brink

increased at an impressive pace in the early 2000s even though Internet sales in the United States grew dramatically. Retail sales advanced from $2.87 trillion to almost $4 trillion between 1999 and 2007.... View Details

Keywords: by Rajiv Lal & Jose B. Alvarez; Retail

16 Aug 2022
Op-Ed

Now Is the Time for Entrepreneurs to Play Offense

For the past six months, there has been a lot of handwringing about the market downturn. Most everyone has been advising entrepreneurs to marshal their capital, cut costs, and extend their runway. In essence, play defense. Many investors... View Details

Keywords: by Jeffrey Bussgang

31 Jul 2017
HBS Case

It’s Hard to Fix the Family Business Without Offending the Family

course was completed.) In their initial efforts to boost Pho Hoa’s revenues, increasing lackluster alcohol sales seemed a good place to start. But Raiche and Zhu quickly saw the problem: The servers (largely recent Vietnamese immigrants)... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Food & Beverage

28 Apr 2003
Research & Ideas

Supply Chain Risk: Deal With It

risk, Raman explains, has been through inventory. But "for numerous reasons, inventory became very expensive." Shorter product life cycles contribute to higher expenses, for example, in the personal computer market, where the... View Details

Keywords: by David Stauffer

10 Nov 2003
Research & Ideas

Globalization: The Strategy of Differences

Unfortunately, "local" didn't seem to be any better a description of Coke's market space than "global." On March 7, 2002, the Asian Wall Street Journal announced: "After two years of lackluster sales the... View Details

Keywords: by Pankaj Ghemawat

08 Sep 2008
HBS Case

The Value of Environmental Activists

There are many methods, most financial, to measure the success of companies in meeting goals. But the question becomes a lot harder at Harvard Business School when MBAs are challenged to measure the efforts of environmental organizations like Greenpeace and the World... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Energy; Utilities

16 Aug 2004
Research & Ideas

Luxury Isn’t What It Used to Be

refreshing their product lines and extending their brand to more affordable items. Pressure to innovate is intense, says HBS professor Nancy F. Koehn, a business historian and author of Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna; Consumer Products

23 Jun 2008
Research & Ideas

Innovative Ways to Encourage Personal Savings

States. Yet to roll out lottery-linked products in an efficient way, we need to address the legal and regulatory barriers. Q: Can these ideas for savings vehicles be extended to households with higher incomes too? A: The work that I do... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Financial Services

05 Nov 2024
Book

Building the Road to 'Small Business Utopia' with AI and Fintech

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from chapter one of Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream, written by Karen G. Mills, senior fellow at Harvard Business School. The second edition was published in 2024 by Palgrave Macmillan. The View Details

Keywords: by Karen G. Mills; Financial Services

04 May 2020
Research & Ideas

Predictions, Prophets, and Restarting Your Business

and recovering from a crisis, increasing close rates, the efficiency of a sales model, and its segment focus are strategic issues, not only sales management tasks. Consider: when commerce resumes, what’s the... View Details

Keywords: by Frank V. Cespedes

03 May 2010
Research & Ideas

What Is the Future of MBA Education?

hospitals teach tutorials and lead clinical rotations, and in that sense are considered faculty. The same notion of an extended faculty could apply to business schools, where the 10,000 might include alumni such as local business leaders,... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Education

15 Nov 2010
Lessons from the Classroom

Connecting Goals and Go-To-Market Initiatives

and development initiatives aimed at aligning selling behaviors with market realities. Q: How can companies deal with these issues and overcome obstacles to set a strategic foundation for sales success? A: First, as the performance... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

18 Oct 2016
Op-Ed

Why Business Should Invest in Community Health

more pressing crisis management activities. Local sales organizations, which are often tasked with local-level implementation of community health activities, prioritize product sales, supply, and distribution issues first. Target is... View Details

Keywords: by John Quelch, Howard Koh, and Pamela Yatsko; Health

12 Jun 2019
Research & Ideas

Investors Have More Than Money to Offer Entrepreneurs

financial management advice. But startups often run into issues outside those categories, everything from what to ask potential hires in a job interview to analyzing sales funnels. Experienced investors have likely run into those issues... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Austin

01 Jul 2014
First Look

First Look: July 1

short-term debt against the refinancing risk implied by the need to roll over its debt more often. We then extend the model to allow private financial intermediaries to compete with the government in the provision of short-term,... View Details

Keywords: Carmen Nobel

29 Mar 2016
First Look

March 29, 2016

healthcare—i.e., patient-centered outcomes achieved per healthcare dollar spent—can define quality and unify performance improvement goals with health outcomes of importance to patients across the entire cycle of care. We describe the... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

04 Oct 2016
First Look

October 4, 2016

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51680 forthcoming Journal of Financial Economics What Do Measures of Real-Time Corporate Sales Tell Us About Earnings Surprises and Post-announcement Returns? By: Froot, Kenneth A., Namho... View Details

28 Oct 2014
First Look

First Look: October 28

October 2014 Quarterly Journal of Economics Waves in Ship Prices and Investment By: Greenwood, Robin, and Samuel G. Hanson Abstract—We study the link between investment boom and bust cycles and returns on capital in the dry bulk shipping... View Details