Selling - Publications - Faculty & Research

08 Nov 2016
Blog Post

Alumni: Where Are They Now? Featuring: Phil Strazzulla

product roadmap. How has having an MBA impacted your career? We're a startup most of our future customers have never heard of. HBS gives me credibility when selling to larger companies. While HBS helped shape the way I think about the... View Details

Keywords: Technology

01 Jun 2007
News

Delta’s Flight from Bankruptcy

service levels to the top of the industry,” said Whitehurst, noting that before the restructuring Delta’s once-loyal employees were disaffected and didn’t trust management. Whitehurst, who spends a great deal of his time selling the... View Details

Keywords: Air Transportation; Transportation

John C. Bogle

public by selling directly to them and eliminating load fees or sales charges. Over the course of two decades, Bogle built the second largest fund company in the world. View Details

Keywords: Finance

Richard W. Sears

After having much success selling a small order of watches he had come across while working as a telegrapher, Sears entered the merchandising business full time and devoted his business to rural, relatively poor farmers. Though Sears was... View Details

Keywords: Retail

Ralph Folz

named one of the best places to work in Boston. Currently, Ralph sits on numerous Boards and is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School, mentoring MBA students on their startups. Go To Subjects: SaaS, Digital Advertising, SMB, buy and View Details

01 Sep 2012
News

Markets’ Moral Limits

Limits of Markets. At an HBS panel discussion in April with University Professor Rebecca Henderson and HBS associate professor Karthik Ramanna, Sandel said that “the buying and selling of a non-material good changes its meaning.” For... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

Abe Plough

In 1908, with $125 borrowed from his father, Plough formed Plough, Incorporated by selling Antiseptic Heating Oil door to door. Over the next 65 years, Plough transformed his company from a small manufacturer of toiletries to a... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare

Alfred C. Fuller

Fuller developed a new, unique brush for household use and employed salesmen, called independent “dealers,” to sell his brushes directly to the consumer. Fuller grew sales of his firm from $40,000 in 1910 to $12 million in 1924. By 1930,... View Details

Keywords: Personal Care & Home Products

Carl C. Icahn

Tappan Company in 1979, Icahn went on to reap huge financial rewards through proxy fights with such notable firms as Texaco, Phillips Petroleum, TWA, and US Steel. In the nineties, Icahn earned huge sums of money by short selling... View Details

Keywords: Finance

01 Sep 2020
News

Good Odds

manufactured goods go to waste in the production process, Philip Behn says, because items come out too thick, too thin, or otherwise not perfect. “So we put our own private label on them and now we sell broken pretzel bits.” As much as 15... View Details

Keywords: Jen McFarland Flint; food industry; Food Manufacturing; Manufacturing

Harry F. Sinclair

After ill-fated attempts to make money by buying and selling oil leases, Sinclair entered the refining business in 1906, acquiring several companies that were eventually consolidated into Sinclair Oil. Once the larger venture was created,... View Details

Keywords: Utilities & Energy

01 Dec 2008
News

The Next Chapter

because it not only markets and sells directly to customers, it also possesses enormous amounts of information about their buying and reading habits. “There’s never been anything like it,” he said. View Details

Keywords: Publishing Industries (except Internet); Information; Management; Retail Trade

24 Apr 2014
News

Creating a more just and celebrated multicultural world

a celebration of togetherness, diversity, and understanding, just the opposite of a civil riot. “Social change is embedded in our business model,” says Endline. “Every unit we sell impacts a farmer, a plant worker, or an artist. It’s a... View Details

17 Oct 2016
HBS Case

Business Solutions That Help Cut Food Waste

As much as 40 percent of food grown in the United States for human consumption is wasted. Source: Eivaisla After decades of wasteful food practices, where perfectly good food is discarded even as poverty keeps many families hungry, solutions are starting to come... View Details

Keywords: by Dina Gerdeman; Food & Beverage

01 Mar 2010
News

Eric Schiffer

time. Yes, that’s right — we have to sell a huge number of items to generate that figure. Our average price works out to be about 80 cents because we also price many items at well under a buck, so we sell... View Details

Keywords: Julia Hanna; Miscellaneous Store Retailers; Retail Trade

Donald H. Rumsfeld

After Daniel Searle had all but run his family’s company into the ground, Rumsfeld took over and began cutting costs across the board. After selling off the majority of Searle’s non-pharmaceutical business with the exception of the Pearle... View Details

Keywords: Healthcare

06 Jul 2015
Research & Ideas

Money and Quotas Motivate the Sales Force Best

than 14 million people employed in personal selling in the United States alone represent about 10 percent of the entire country's labor force, according to the US Department of Labor. In addition, companies spend on average 10 percent of... View Details

Keywords: by Roberta Holland; Retail

Roger Milliken

Deering, Milliken and Company was founded in 1865 and had primarily been a selling house for cloth producers in the south. When Roger Milliken inherited the business in 1947, he changed the focus of the company, buying numerous mills and... View Details

Keywords: Fabric & Apparel

Reuben Mark

When Mark took over in 1984, the consumer goods giant was in the midst of trying to reinvent itself. The company had grown tremendously in the 70s through a series of less than stellar acquisitions and one of Mark’s first tasks was to View Details