Fusilier Technology is in disarray. Its vice-president of sales is leaving, the company's new growth strategy to sell customized business solutions has stalled, and sales have been flat for five years. Bill MacLeod, Fusilier's CEO, has to choose between two very different candidates for the top sales job: a veteran sales director who has excelled under the old order and a brash outsider who has experience selling solutions but doesn't know the industry. With an outside board director pressuring him to accelerate the pace of change, MacLeod ponders which candidate can best help the company make the transition. Fusilier's new solutions strategy has made the decision that much more difficult. Under this model, the company must revamp its incentives, training, and processes for deploying the sales force. Historically, compensation has been based largely on an individual rep's results, and sales training has focused on product features and cost-performance advantages, not on the business issues facing customers. Now salespeople need to understand, promote, and select from an entire portfolio of products and services offered both by Fusilier and its business partners. What's more, they need to collaborate with Professional Services, the new consulting unit whose mission is to jump-start the solutions-centric approach. Whom should MacLeod hire for the top sales job, and what should he do to put Fusilier back on a growth track? In R0607A and R0607Z, four experts comment on this fictional case study: Alston Gardner, founder of OnTarget, a sales training and consulting firm; Steve Kerr, a managing director and the chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs; Randall D. Kelley, a partner of the executive search firm Spencer Stuart; and Andrea L. Dixon, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati.

Fusilier Technology is in disarray. Its vice-president of sales is leaving, the company's new growth strategy to sell customized business solutions has stalled, and sales have been flat for five years. Bill MacLeod, Fusilier's CEO, has to choose between two very different candidates for the top sales job: a veteran sales director who has excelled under the old order and a brash outsider who has experience selling solutions but doesn't know the industry. With an outside board director pressuring him to accelerate the pace of change, MacLeod ponders which candidate can best help the company make the transition. Fusilier's new solutions strategy has made the decision that much more difficult. Under this model, the company must revamp its incentives, training, and processes for deploying the sales force. Historically, compensation has been based largely on an individual rep's results, and sales training has focused on product features and cost-performance advantages, not on the business issues facing customers. Now salespeople need to understand, promote, and select from an entire portfolio of products and services offered both by Fusilier and its business partners. What's more, they need to collaborate with Professional Services, the new consulting unit whose mission is to jump-start the solutions-centric approach. Whom should MacLeod hire for the top sales job, and what should he do to put Fusilier back on a growth track? In R0607A and R0607Z, four experts comment on this fictional case study: Alston Gardner, founder of OnTarget, a sales training and consulting firm; Steve Kerr, a managing director and the chief learning officer of Goldman Sachs; Randall D. Kelley, a partner of the executive search firm Spencer Stuart; and Andrea L. Dixon, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati.

Procter & Gamble has long been regarded as a major power of the marketing world and a prime training ground for marketers. But in the summer of 2000, with half of P&G's top 15 brands losing market share and employee morale in ruins, company executives realized that the marketing organization was in trouble. In an attempt to rebuild P&G's marketing strength, James Stengel, the heir apparent to the chief marketing officer position, began working with University of Cincinnati professors Chris Allen and Andrea Dixon on a new training program to fix the weaknesses in the marketing organization. But when the two professors began interviewing P&G senior executives, they discovered that the plans in motion for mapping out the marketing group's recovery were based not on data but on the intuition of a few individuals at corporate headquarters. So began the most comprehensive internal research endeavor in P&G marketing's history. Using the company's existing process for consumer research, Allen and Dixon shadowed employees, conducted one-on-one interviews, held focus-group sessions, and surveyed 3,500 members of the marketing staff to learn what the company was doing right--and wrong--and what mattered most to its people. The results led to the most sweeping redesign of P&G's marketing organization in 60 years.