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- February 2025
- Case
Managing Complexity at mymuesli
By: Thomas Graeber and Stacy Straaberg
In April 2009, direct-to-consumer e-commerce muesli brand mymuesli faced a flood of customer questions. The breakfast cereal startup enabled users to order personalized muesli on its website by choosing from 75 organic ingredients for a total of 566 quadrillion... View Details
- January 2025
- Supplement
Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams (B)
By: Tatiana Sandino and Samuel Grad
In January 2025, Modi reflects on the past decade of Go Mobile and looks ahead to new growth strategies. View Details
- November 2024
- Article
Leadership and Plumbing
“Leadership” is a growth industry. Amazon lists over 60,000 books on the topic. Most focus on emotional intelligence, charisma, avoiding narcissism (usually someone else’s problem, according to these authors, not their problem) and other personality traits. But as... View Details
Keywords: Leadership Development
- September 2024
- Case
Xendit: Hiring for Growth
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Steve Castano, Quoc Anh Nguyen and Claire Wu
In 2019, Xendit, a growth-stage Southeast Asia (SEA) fintech venture based in Jakarta, was looking to hire a Head of Sales and Head of Product to lead its next phase of growth. Founded by Moses Lo and Tessa Wijaya, Xendit provided payment infrastructure, modeling... View Details
- September 24, 2024
- Article
4 Steps That Can Optimize Your Sales Process
By: Frank V. Cespedes, Scott Peterson and Daniel Weinfurter
Sales is a performance art where outcomes matter, so most advice here focuses on closing the sale. But a close is the result of actions and choices that occur earlier in the process: how much time and effort to spend on customer discovery (understanding what and to... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
Sales Coaching and Value Creation
Despite the prevalence of “coachability” in firms’ stated hiring criteria, managers over-estimate the amount of time they actually devote to coaching their people. For example, research indicates that only 15% of sales managers even spend as much as 25% of their time... View Details
- June 2024 (Revised September 2024)
- Case
Driving Scale with Otto
By: Rebecca Karp, David Allen and Annelena Lobb
This case asks how startup founders make scaling decisions in light of their priorities for their business and for themselves. Otto was a technology company that applied artificial intelligence technology to sales. It deployed natural language processing to find sales... View Details
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence; Natural Language Processing; B2B; B2B Innovation; Scaling; Scaling Tech Ventures; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Finance; Sales; Business Strategy; Growth and Development Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Information Technology Industry; United States; Cambridge; New York (city, NY); Spain
- May 2024
- Case
Pernod Ricard: Uncorking Digital Transformation
By: Iavor Bojinov, Edward McFowland III, François Candelon, Nikolina Jonsson and Emer Moloney
This case study explores the opportunities and challenges of the digital transformation journey of French wine and spirits company Pernod Ricard. As part of the transformation, the company launched four key digital programs (KDPs) aimed at using data and artificial... View Details
Keywords: Business Organization; Business Divisions; Talent and Talent Management; Global Strategy; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science; Digital Transformation; Digital Strategy; Advertising; Sales; Organizational Culture; Product Development; Decision Making; Technology Adoption; Alignment; Expansion; Food and Beverage Industry; France; Europe
- May 2024
- Supplement
HubSpot and Motion AI (B): Generative AI Opportunities
By: Jill Avery
The technologies driving artificial intelligence (AI) had progressed significantly since HubSpot’s acquisition of Motion AI in 2017. Generative AI was the newest major development. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies such as HubSpot were analyzing how generative AI... View Details
- March 7, 2024
- Article
Integrating Digital Tools into Every Stage of Your Sales Strategy
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Georg Krentzel
In their growth and customer-acquisition activities, most companies now face twin challenges: understanding and responding to omni-channel buying behavior and doing that without inadvertently decreasing sales productivity. Thirty years ago, Peter Drucker noted that... View Details
- December 2023
- Article
Looking Forward – To Better Strategy-Sales Coordination
Business decisions are about tomorrow, not yesterday. A key to looking forward in most firms is the annual strategy meeting, where linking sales efforts with strategy is vital for implementation and profitable growth. But according to surveys, less than half of... View Details
- November 2023 (Revised April 2024)
- Case
Celsius Network Inc.: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in the Brave New World of Crypto Bankruptcy
By: Stuart C. Gilson and Sarah L. Abbott
In July 2022, Celsius Network filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. CEO Alex Mashinsky acknowledged that Celsius had grown its assets “faster than the Company was prepared to deploy [them]” and as a result had made “certain poor asset deployment decisions.” Two months after... View Details
- October 2023
- Case
Driving Sustainability at AB InBev
By: Ethan Rouen and Antonio Manuel Oftelie
It was the height of the summer in 2022, and Michel Doukeris, the CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), and Peter Kraemer, the company’s Chief Supply Officer, gazed across the vast desert surrounding Zacatecas, Mexico. They were visiting their Grupo Modelo Brewery,... View Details
- June 2023 (Revised January 2024)
- Case
Siemens AG: A Private Equity Approach within an Industrial Corporation?
By: David J. Collis and Haisley Wert
In July 2022, Horst Kayser, Chairman of Siemens AG Portfolio Companies (POC), was reflecting on the advice he could offer Roland Busch, Chief Executive Officer of the parent company Siemens AG, about whether and how to operate a private equity-like approach inside the... View Details
- May 3, 2023
- Article
What Top-Performing Sales Managers Do Differently
By: Mike Schultz and Frank V. Cespedes
Sales managers hire reps, influence their training, provide (we hope) feedback and so reinforce good selling behaviors, and are key in the execution of growth and change initiatives. In a study of more than 1,000 sales managers and sellers across industries, we found... View Details
- April 6, 2023
- Article
A New NFT Launch Strategy: The Wave Mint
By: Scott Duke Kominers and 1337 Skulls Sers
In an NFT project, the mint—the process by which tokens are initially allocated—largely determines who your community is and how they and the broader market view the project going forward. In this piece, we review a new minting strategy recently introduced by 1337... View Details
- April 2023
- Technical Note
An Art & A Science: How to Apply Design Thinking to Data Science Challenges
By: Michael Parzen, Eddie Lin, Douglas Ng and Jessie Li
We hear it all the time as managers: “what is the data that backs up your decisions?” Even local mom-and-pop shops now have access to complex point-of-sale systems that can closely track sales and customer data. Social media influencers have turned into seven-figure... View Details
- March 2023
- Case
Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (A)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new... View Details
- March 2023
- Supplement
Innovation at Google Ads: The Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL) (B)
By: Linda A. Hill and Emily Tedards
In 2018, Ana Owczarzak was appointed to lead Google Ads' new innovation and accelerator team - the Sales Acceleration and Innovation Labs (SAIL). The purpose of SAIL was to offer testing and incubation services for individuals within Google Ads who were developing new... View Details
- January–February 2023
- Article
External Interfaces and Internal Processes: Market Positioning and Divergent Professionalization Paths in Young Ventures
By: Alicia DeSantola, Ranjay Gulati and Pavel Zhelyazkov
We explore how the initial market positioning of entrepreneurial ventures shapes how they professionalize over time, focusing specifically on the development of functional roles. In contrast to existing literature, which has presumed a uniform march toward... View Details