In August 2016, Manish Goyal, a student in his second year of the two-year MBA program at XLRI Jamshedpur, India, had to make career-related choices about which industry, company, function, and role to pursue after his MBA. He had limited previous work experience to rely on, but rather than choosing the first job that came his way or trying to join one of the more popular firms among MBA students, Goyal sought a job that best aligned with his own career objectives. Accordingly, he sought advice from three classmates on career options in the investment banking, management consulting, and fast-moving consumer goods industries. He realized that while his friends' input was valuable, ultimately he had to make his own decisions.

In August 2016, Manish Goyal, a student in his second year of the two-year MBA program at XLRI Jamshedpur, India, had to make career-related choices about which industry, company, function, and role to pursue after his MBA. He had limited previous work experience to rely on, but rather than choosing the first job that came his way or trying to join one of the more popular firms among MBA students, Goyal sought a job that best aligned with his own career objectives. Accordingly, he sought advice from three classmates on career options in the investment banking, management consulting, and fast-moving consumer goods industries. He realized that while his friends' input was valuable, ultimately he had to make his own decisions.

Sophisticated sales organizations now have the ability to combine, sift, and sort vast troves of data to develop highly efficient strategies for selling into micromarkets. While B2C companies are typically adept at mining the petabytes of transactional and other purchasing data that consumers generate as they interact online, B2B sales organizations have only recently begun to use big data to both inform overall strategy and tailor sales pitches for specific customers in real time. Micromarket analyses involve five steps: defining the optimal micromarket size; determining the growth potential for each; gauging market share in each; understanding the causes of variation in market share across them; and prioritizing high-potential markets to focus on. Exploiting new-growth hot spots will be successful only if salespeople have a solid understanding of how micromarkets work and the simple tools for selling into them. Sales leaders must coach their teams in developing sales "plays" for groups of structurally similar micromarkets. That requires cross-functional collaboration--in particular, between sales and marketing. To sustain early wins, companies also need to change their approach to sales force management in three ways: They must rethink performance management, open new channels between sales and marketing, and invest in talent development.