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- 2021
- Book
Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing
Selling is changing, but the impact on sales of megatrends like ecommerce, big data, and AI is often misunderstood and not supported by empirical data. Managers who fail to separate fact from hype will make decisions based on bad assumptions and, in a competitive...
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- October 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
Digging for Gold: Paulson & Co.'s Activism in the Gold Sector
By: Suraj Srinivasan and Jonah S. Goldberg
The case describes the efforts of hedge fund Paulson & Co to influence corporate governance and improve performance in the gold industry. In an innovative move, the hedge fund led the creation of the Shareholder Gold Council, a consortium of large investors in gold...
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- Fall 2020
- Article
Christo and Jeanne‐Claude: The Negotiation of Art and Vice Versa
Over the past two decades the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON) has named thirteen people as Great Negotiators. The project, directed by my colleague Jim Sebenius, has given us the opportunity to commend our honorees’ outstanding work and to learn from...
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- July 2020
- Teaching Note
Shindigz
By: Frank Cespedes
Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 819-010. Shindigz sells party and celebratory items through its branded direct online channel, third-party retail and wholesale channels, and online marketplaces. Shindigz has for decades successfully executed a premium-priced branded...
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- May 2020 (Revised June 2020)
- Case
TransDigm's Acquisition and Integration of Arkwin Industries
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel W. Fisher
In May 2013, TransDigm, a company that manufactured a wide range of highly engineered aerospace parts for both military and civilian aircraft, announced it was buying Arkwin Industries for $286 million in cash (3 times Arkwin’s sales of $91 million). Having acquired...
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- February 2020 (Revised January 2021)
- Case
Anomalie
By: Jeffrey F. Rayport and Thomas O. Jones
In early 2019, the founders of Anomalie, an online direct-to-consumer provider of bridal gowns, have just agreed to an $13.6 million Series A investment from a Silicon Valley VC. They are considering three major initiatives as they move forward. (1) To scale their...
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- September–October 2019
- Article
How Purchase Probability Scales Can Shed Light on Consumer Purchase Intentions
By: Rene Befurt and Alvin J. Silk
Market researchers generally, and survey experts specifically, study consumers to learn about their behavior: What are consumers’ opinions, attitudes, thoughts, and actions at the various stages of the buying process? Especially in litigation cases, these and other...
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- August 2019 (Revised April 2021)
- Case
Zillow Offers: Winning Online Real Estate 2.0
By: Luis Viceira, Marco Di Maggio and Allison Ciechanover
Founded in 2005, Zillow had become the leading online real estate and home-related marketplace. The brand was recognized as a trusted resource for players in the real estate market, providing information and transparency on home prices. Revenue, which was historically...
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- 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...
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- June 2018 (Revised February 2019)
- Teaching Note
Home Nursing of North Carolina
By: Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff and Ahron Rosenfeld
In 2011, immediately after graduating HBS, Ari Medoff began a self-funded search for a small firm to buy and run as its CEO. After just three month of searching, he identified Home Nursing of North Carolina (HNNC), a home care agency based in Greensboro, NC, as a...
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- April 2018
- Teaching Note
InsideSales.com (A) and (B)
By: Frank Cespedes
Teaching Note for HBS Nos. 817-018 and 817-042. InsideSales.com (ISC) has been successful selling its software to small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB). But for various reasons, the founders see “the next stage of growth” as building a scalable sales and service...
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- December 2017 (Revised May 2018)
- Case
Amazon Buys Whole Foods
By: José B. Alvarez, David Lane and Joni Coughlin
The June 2017 news that e-commerce giant Amazon was paying $13.7 billion for organic supermarket chain Whole Foods precipitated a broad sell-off in the shares of grocery retailers and suppliers. Behind the precipitous declines lay recognition that Amazon’s bold move...
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Keywords:
Amazon;
Whole Foods;
Grocery;
Grocery Delivery;
Mergers ＆ Acquisitions;
E-commerce;
Business Models;
Food Value Chain;
Agribusiness;
Mergers and Acquisitions;
Operations;
Competitive Strategy;
Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry;
Retail Industry;
Web Services Industry;
Food and Beverage Industry;
United States
- July 2017
- Case
Magpie: Developing and Using Buyer Personas
The founders of a start-up platform for publishers have developed preliminary personas of target customers and are evaluating the implications for initial target buyers, messaging, and marketing programs. The case is useful for discussing the process of developing...
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- May 2017
- Teaching Note
Promontory, Inc. (Brief Case)
By: Frank V. Cespedes and Amy Handlin
Teaching Note for HBS No. 917-535. The Promontory teaching note covers a) how and why buying processes in Promontory’s market generate the array of selling approaches illustrated in the case; b) the impact of incremental sales increases on the firm’s cost structure and...
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- January–February 2017
- Article
Buying Your Way into Entrepreneurship
By: Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff
An increasingly popular route to success as a small business owner is “acquisition entrepreneurship”—buying and running an existing operation. If you’re considering such a path, the authors offer practical advice for each stage of the process. Think it through. Do you...
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- Article
Selfishly Benevolent or Benevolently Selfish? When Self-interest Undermines versus Promotes Prosocial Behavior
By: Julian Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
Existing research shows that appeals to self-interest sometimes increase and sometimes decrease prosocial behavior. We propose that this inconsistency is in part due to the framings of these appeals. Different framings generate different salient reference points,...
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- October 2016 (Revised April 2018)
- Case
DataXu: Selling Ad Tech
By: Frank V. Cespedes, John Deighton, Lisa Cox and Olivia Hull
DataXu served marketers by buying digital advertising for brands using its demand-side platform. It sought a way to build a more predictable revenue stream in the very transactional media marketplace, and hoped that two new marketing analytics products would give it a...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
Build It, Buy It or Both? Rethinking the Sourcing of Advertising Services
By: Alvin J. Silk and Marta M. Stiglin
This paper provides an update on the current state of in-house agencies. Whereas traditional consideration of internalizing advertising services was framed as a binary choice of build or buy, today's advertisers frequently pursue hybrid policies of build and buy to...
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- May 2015
- Case
Venture Republic, 2011
By: W. Carl Kester and Mayuka Yamazaki
In December 2011, the founders of Venture Republic, a Japanese developer and operator of on-line search engines for shopping and travel, faced a decison about whether or not to take the company private in a management buyout transaction just three years after an...
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- Article
Aligning Strategy and Sales
Much current opinion asserts that strategy is less important (and may, in fact, be an impediment) in an era of constant change. This publication discusses why claims about business change are often overstated and misunderstood, why strategy is even more important as...
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