Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,072)
- Faculty Publications (129)
- Article
Selling After the Crisis
Like perishable goods in grocery stores, sales models have a sell-by date. As product standards evolve and new entrants emerge, buyers have more choices and demand more in terms of quality and performance across vendors. Firms that fail to adjust to changing customer... View Details
- Article
New Sales Realities
Business leaders need to understand that it’s the fit of People, Process, Pricing, and Partners that drives sales effectiveness. As firms confront new buying processes, required sales competencies affect hiring, training, and development (People). Without a coherent... View Details
- Article
How Real Sales Learning Happens: In the Flow of Work
By: Yuchun Lee, Mark Magnacca and Frank V. Cespedes
Most learning in sales is through peer learning in task-specific contexts, and the effects are cumulative because modeling behavior is a big driver of how salespeople develop. This is very different from the experience in most training seminars, especially if the... View Details
- January 2021 (Revised February 2025)
- Teaching Note
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
- September 2020 (Revised June 2021)
- Case
Gong: Resonating Conversational Insights
By: Alison Wood Brooks and Trevor Spelman
In 2015, Amit Bendov was struck by a realization about a new technology that might be able to transcribe musical notation in real-time, which eventually became known as Gong. Gong’s business proposition was simple: provide software that automatically captures,... View Details
- September 2020
- Article
Customer Supercharging in Experience-Centric Channels
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
We conjecture that for online retailers, experience-centric offline store formats do not simply expand market coverage, but rather, serve to significantly amplify future positive customer behaviors, both online and offline. We term this phenomenon “supercharging” and... View Details
- Article
Get Ready to Sell
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Bud Hyler
Time-to-market measures the time to have a product ready to ship. But that’s not revenue and cash. Many firms with superb R&D functions lack an understanding of what’s needed to be ready-to-sell. Meanwhile, relevant tools are increasing in scope and decreasing in cost.... View Details
- August 2020
- Article
Workplace Knowledge Flows
By: Jason Sandvik, Richard Saouma, Nathan Seegert and Christopher Stanton
We conducted a field experiment in a sales firm to test whether improving knowledge flows between coworkers affects productivity. Our design allows us to compare different management practices and to isolate whether frictions to knowledge transmission primarily reside... View Details
- May 2020
- Teaching Note
Shiseido: Reinvesting in Brand
By: Jill Avery
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 519-026. Shiseido was in the midst of a six year corporate turnaround, trying to reverse the effects of decades of under-investment in R&D and marketing that had led to a vicious cycle of declining customer support and brand value. Would... View Details
- 2020
- Working Paper
Anchors Aweigh: Analysis of Anchor Limited Partner Investors in Impact Investment Funds
By: Shawn A. Cole, T. Robert Zochowski, Fanele Mashwama and Heather McPherson
This note describes results from a survey of “anchor investors” in impact funds. Anchor investors
are described as “generally the first investor to make a substantial capital commitment to a fund,”
(according to the Global Impact Investing Network, “GIIN”) and their... View Details
- April 2020
- Case
Promoting Land and Nature Jerky
By: John A. Quelch and Katherine B. Hartman
Kathy Ayers, Vice President of Marketing and Communications for Land and Nature (L&N) Jerky Company, needs to make a recommendation about L&N's 2020 promotional spending. L&N's CEO, Tim Ryan, wants her to calculate different scenarios using historical data to determine... View Details
- March 2020
- Article
Do Fire Sales Create Externalities?
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We develop three novel measures of how much of the price impact of their trading different mutual funds internalize. We show that mutual funds that internalize more of their price impact hold larger cash buffers and use these buffers more aggressively to accommodate... View Details
- 3 Feb 2020
- Interview
Lou Shipley: [How to Build a Culture of Enablement]
By: Lou Shipley
This episode of Reveal brings Lou Shipley, investor, lecturer, and previous CEO of Black Duck Security. Lou details sales enablement's role in delivering sales excellence and an effective new hire onboarding experience. View Details
- November–December 2019
- Article
Making Sense of Soft Information: Interpretation Bias and Loan Quality
By: Dennis Campbell, Maria Loumioti and Regina Wittenberg Moerman
We explore whether behavioral biases impede the effective processing and interpretation of soft information in private lending. Taking advantage of the internal reporting system of a large federal credit union, we delineate three important biases likely to affect the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Effect of Payment Choices on Online Retail: Evidence from the 2016 Indian Demonetization
By: Chaithanya Bandi, Antonio Moreno, Donald Ngwe and Zhiji Xu
The Indian banknote demonetization in 2016 was one of the most significant international events of that year. Overnight, 86% of Indian currency in circulation was declared invalid unless exchanged for new bills. The sudden and unexpected demonetization constituted a... View Details
- April 2019 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Clear Link Technologies, LLC: Driving Sales with Peer Effects
By: Christopher Stanton, Richard Saouma and Olivia Hull
The importance of a good peer or coworker is widely discussed, but understanding the glue that makes coworkers valuable is less understood. This case sheds light on the importance of peers and the practices and environments that make a group greater than the sum of its... View Details
Keywords: Talent and Talent Management; Interactive Communication; Experience and Expertise; Decision Making; Training; Design; Compensation and Benefits; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Sharing; Human Capital; Working Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Outcome or Result; Performance; Performance Improvement; Research; Sales; Salesforce Management; Motivation and Incentives; Telecommunications Industry; Utah; United States
- Article
Sales Managers Must Manage
A common complaint from C-level executives about their sales colleagues concerns the latter’s ability to manage, not sell. Nearly every firm has examples of successful salespeople who are poor managers because they persist in their behaviors as reps rather than... View Details
- January–February 2019
- Article
Case Study: When Two Leaders on the Senior Team Hate Each Other
By: Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly Baden
In this fictional case, the CEO of a sports apparel manufacturer is faced with an ongoing conflict between two of his top executives. Specifically, the head of sales and the CFO are at each other’s throats and the tension is having a ripple effect on their teams and... View Details
- December 2018 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Shiseido: Reinvesting in Brand
By: Jill Avery and Nobuo Sato
Shiseido was in the midst of a six year corporate turnaround, trying to reverse the effects of decades of under-investment in R&D and marketing which had led to a cycle of declining customer support and brand value. Would the CEO’s VISION 2020 plan, centered on four... View Details
Keywords: Brand Management; Brand Value; Turnaround; Brand Portfolio; Brand Communication; Global Brands; Digital Marketing; Return On Investment; Marketing ROI; Internet Marketing; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Value; Growth and Development Strategy; Investment Return; Consumer Behavior; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Japan; Asia
- November–December 2018
- Article
Online Network Revenue Management Using Thompson Sampling
By: Kris J. Ferreira, David Simchi-Levi and He Wang
We consider a network revenue management problem where an online retailer aims to maximize revenue from multiple products with limited inventory constraints. As common in practice, the retailer does not know the consumer's purchase probability at each price and must... View Details