Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,072)
- Faculty Publications (129)
- 2018
- Working Paper
Need for Speed: The Impact of Website Performance on Online Retail
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
The share of e-commerce sales is rapidly increasing and so are the associated losses generated by website outages and slow websites. We leverage novel retail and website performance data to investigate the impact of website performance on online sales. This question is... View Details
- September 2018
- Case
OYO: Creating Effective Spaces
By: Das Narayandas, Sunil Gupta, Rachna Tahilyani and Mahima Rao-Kachroo
Twenty-four-year old Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of India-based online hotel branding network OYO Rooms, has tackled the issue of unreliability in India's highly fragmented budget hotel industry. In 2018, OYO branded 8,500 properties across 200 cities and managed... View Details
- August 2018
- Teaching Note
Magpie: Developing and Using Buyer Personas
Teaching Note for HBS No. 818-013. Magpie is a startup with a platform that allows publishers to natively tag the products discussed in their content and thus allows consumers to purchase those products without needing to leave that publisher’s web page. A key aspect... View Details
- June 2018
- Teaching Note
Meridian Systems (Brief Case)
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Michael J. Roberts
Teaching Note for HBS No. 918-533. The key issues discussed in the Meridian teaching note concern sales force deployment: decisions about how to focus sales efforts with respect to territories, customers, and products. The teaching note explains the strengths and... View Details
- May 2018
- Article
The Changing Craft of Selling
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Tiffani Bova
This article draws on two surveys: one with more than 3,100 sales professionals about trends affecting the role(s) of sales in their companies, and the other with over 7,000 consumer and business buyers about their expectations when dealing with sales people. The... View Details
- April 2018
- Article
Consumers Avoid Buying from Firms with Higher CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios
By: Bhavya Mohan, Tobias Schlager, Rohit Deshpandé and Michael I. Norton
We document a novel driver of consumer behavior: pay ratio disclosure. Swiss corporation performance data gathered during a legally mandated pay ratio referendum reveals that salient high pay ratios are associated with decreased firm sales (Pilot Study). An... View Details
Keywords: Pay Ratio; Wage Fairness; Purchase Intention; Customers; Wages; Fairness; Consumer Behavior
- April 2018
- Article
Effective Sales Training: What Are the Foundational Elements?
Across industries, turnover in sales positions averages about 25–30% annually. This means that, at many firms, the equivalent of the entire sales force must be replaced and trained every four years or so. No other function has an ongoing talent management task of that... View Details
- February 2018 (Revised October 2019)
- Case
HubSpot and Motion AI: Chatbot-Enabled CRM
By: Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh
HubSpot, an inbound marketing, sales, and customer relationship management (CRM) software provider, announced that it had acquired Motion AI, a software platform that enabled companies to easily build and deploy chatbots, fueled by artificial intelligence, to interact... View Details
Keywords: CRM; Sales Management; Customer Service; Artificial Intelligence; B2B Vs. B2C; Business Marketing; SaaS; Marketing; Marketing Strategy; Brands and Branding; Customer Focus and Relationships; Sales; Salesforce Management; Technological Innovation; Applications and Software; Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Technology Industry; Service Industry; United States; North America
- December 2017
- Article
Discordant vs. Harmonious Selves: The Effects of Identity Conflict and Enhancement on Sales Performance in Employee-Customer Interactions
By: Lakshmi Ramarajan, Nancy Rothbard and Steffanie Wilk
Across multiple studies, we examine how identity conflict and enhancement within people affect performance in tasks that involve interactions between people through two mechanisms: role-immersion, operationalized as intrinsic motivation, and role-taking,... View Details
- September 19, 2017
- Article
After Equifax Breach, Companies Advised to Review Open-Source Software Code
By: Ben DiPietro and Lou Shipley
It doesn’t make much sense: At a time when high-powered automated trading systems can execute stock sales in real time, some companies that rely on open-source software to help to run their businesses track their open-source use on spread sheets on paper.
Lou... View Details
Lou... View Details
- September 12, 2017
- Article
What's the Right Kind of Bonus to Motivate Your Sales Force?
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
Companies typically compensate their sales force by using some combination of salary, commission, and bonuses, but executives are often unsure which incentives provide the best motivation. Should bonuses be tied to quotas or should they be given unconditionally? Is it... View Details
- Article
Channel Integration, Sales Dispersion, and Inventory Management
By: Santiago Gallino, Antonio Moreno and Ioannis Stamatopoulos
We study the effects of the introduction of cross-channel functionalities on the overall sales dispersion of retailers and the implications of these effects for inventory management. To do that, we analyze data from a leading U.S. retailer who introduced a... View Details
- August 2017 (Revised July 2018)
- Case
MannKind Corporation: Take a Deep Breath, This Time Afrezza Will Work
By: Elie Ofek and Amanda Dai
In June 2014, MannKind Corporation announced that after years of development and billions of dollars in expenses, the FDA had finally approved its drug, Afrezza. MannKind would thus be the only company with an inhalable insulin on the market. As an alternative to... View Details
- August 2017
- Article
Incentives versus Reciprocity: Insights from a Field Experiment
By: Doug J. Chung and Das Narayandas
We conduct a field experiment in which we vary the sales force compensation scheme at an Asian enterprise that sells consumer durable goods. With variation generated by the experimental treatments, we model sales force performance to identify the effectiveness of... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
What Do Measures of Real-Time Corporate Sales Tell Us About Earnings Surprises and Post-announcement Returns?
By: Kenneth A. Froot, Namho Kang, Gideon Ozik and Ronnie Sadka
We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including approximately 50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (within quarter) and the period between that quarter's end and the... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Lessons Unlearned? Corporate Debt in Emerging Markets
By: Laura Alfaro, Gonzalo Asis, Anusha Chari and Ugo Panizza
This paper documents a set of new stylized facts about leverage and financial fragility for emerging market firms following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Corporate debt vulnerability indicators during the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) attributed to corporate... View Details
- May 2017
- Article
When Discounts Raise Costs: The Effect of Copay Coupons on Generic Utilization
By: Leemore S. Dafny, Christopher Ody and Matt Schmitt
Branded pharmaceutical manufacturers frequently offer “copay coupons” that insulate consumers from cost sharing, thereby undermining insurers’ ability to influence drug utilization. We study the impact of copay coupons on branded drugs first facing generic entry... View Details
- April 2017
- Article
How Sales Can Wield Its Most Effective Weapon: Pricing
This article discusses certain core ways that sales people can use, but sometimes abuse, pricing authority and the implications for effective sales management. View Details
- March 2017 (Revised July 2019)
- Case
Interline Brands: Don't Stop Believing
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Ricardo Andrade
Interline Brands, a leading distributor of residential housing maintenance and repair parts and equipment in the U.S., had just held its November 2014 board meeting. The meeting had been productive but not without some soul searching for both the company’s management... View Details
- January 2017 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
X Fire Paintball & Airsoft: Is Amazon a Friend or Foe? (A)
By: Feng Zhu and Angela Acocella
Three years after launching his brick-and-mortar store, X Fire Paintball and Airsoft, Steve Herbert Sr. and his sons began selling products on Amazon.com’s third-party Marketplace, and online sales expanded rapidly. Over time, X Fire noticed that products of which it... View Details