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James Gutierrez has started a socially responsible consumer lending company focused on serving the underbanked Hispanic market. The company has gone through a succession of sales directors and Gutierrez has now pinned his hopes on his operations director Sam Ulloa to help stem the tide. Can Ulloa do it? The future of Progreso Financiero depends on it.

This case presents two vignettes from the perspective of Laura White, a newly-promoted manager of the Cook Islands operations for a large Australian bank. In Vignette A, White learns of the existence of an Offshore Banking Unit (OBU) - the source of significant revenue to the Islands' economy - in which the customers' identities are unknown. The bank has just brought on a new CEO who has emphasized the importance of transparency and knowing your customer. Given the context of the CEO's philosophy and White's new role as manager, she must decide whether or not to raise her concerns to her manager regarding the OBU. Vignette B provides further history on White's previous experience with an ethical scandal in the bank. After having been told by her manager that bringing more attention to the Cook Islands' OBU banking operations will only cause more problems, she must decide once again if and how to elevate the issue.

In Part A, Valley Systems, a computer hardware company which manufactures high performance internetworking systems, was six months post-IPO and struggling to make their quarterly earnings. Matt Tucker, the company's CEO, was very concerned about the negative impacts of missing their numbers (especially so closely following their IPO) and evaluated the option of swapping some larger deliveries in the next quarter with smaller deliveries in the current quarter to achieve their target revenues. The students are asked to determine what they would do in Tucker's situation and discuss the implications of their decision on the business, investors and employees. Part B reveals that Tucker and his team did decide to adjust their delivery schedule to meet their numbers. Now, two quarters later, the company is in the same predicament-they were almost certain to miss their numbers resulting in low employee morale and high investor anxiety. Once again, Tucker is faced with the question of how to best manage the situation. He considers the option of optimizing the product delivery schedule based on product mix and profit margin. Students are asked to decide whether this "schedule optimization" strategy is good business or revenue manipulation as well as to consider the implications on sales reps and the overall health of the business.

In Part A, Valley Systems, a computer hardware company which manufactures high performance internetworking systems, was six months post-IPO and struggling to make their quarterly earnings. Matt Tucker, the company's CEO, was very concerned about the negative impacts of missing their numbers (especially so closely following their IPO) and evaluated the option of swapping some larger deliveries in the next quarter with smaller deliveries in the current quarter to achieve their target revenues. The students are asked to determine what they would do in Tucker's situation and discuss the implications of their decision on the business, investors and employees. Part B reveals that Tucker and his team did decide to adjust their delivery schedule to meet their numbers. Now, two quarters later, the company is in the same predicament-they were almost certain to miss their numbers resulting in low employee morale and high investor anxiety. Once again, Tucker is faced with the question of how to best manage the situation. He considers the option of optimizing the product delivery schedule based on product mix and profit margin. Students are asked to decide whether this "schedule optimization" strategy is good business or revenue manipulation as well as to consider the implications on sales reps and the overall health of the business.

An initial public offering (IPO) is the first sale of stock or shares by a company to the public. IPOs are often issued by smaller, younger companies seeking capital to expand, although they can also be done by large privately owned companies looking to become publicly traded. When a company lists its shares on a public exchange it will almost always issue additional new shares at the same time. The money paid by investors for the newly issued shares goes directly to the company (versus later trades of shares on the exchange, in which money passes between investors). Therefore, the IPO provides the company with access to a wide pool of stock market investors who can provide significant capital for future growth. Instead of the company repaying this capital, the new shareholders will have a right to future profits distributed by the company and the right to a capital distribution in the case of dissolution. Once the company is listed, it can continue to issue shares, which again provide it with capital for expansion without incurring debt. This ability to regularly raise large amounts of capital from the general market is a key incentive for many companies seeking to list. Additional reasons for going public include providing liquidity for venture investors, management, and employees, who are typically holders of stock options. In addition, through an IPO, the company gains worldwide prestige with customers, suppliers, and within its local and business communities.

The case opens with Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, calling an all-hands meeting. After a record revenue year in 2007, Jive grew its sales force too quickly and missed its third quarter plan for 2008. Hersh was forced to conduct a massive lay-off, during which 20 percent of the workforce was let go. The company is facing increasing competitive pressure and a difficult economic environment, as well as a venture partner that is growing frustrated.

"Levi Strauss & Co." explores the decision by the famed jeans maker to close a manufacturing facility in San Antonio, Texas in early 1990. The case follows then-vice president of operations Pete Thigpen and his team as they wrestle with the economic and human capital impact of closing the U.S.-based plant and outsourcing the manufacture of the company's Dockers line to a contractor in Costa Rica.

"Levi Strauss & Co." explores the decision by the famed jeans maker to close a manufacturing facility in San Antonio, Texas in early 1990. The case follows then-vice president of operations Pete Thigpen and his team as they wrestle with the economic and human capital impact of closing the U.S.-based plant and outsourcing the manufacture of the company's Dockers line to a contractor in Costa Rica.

"Levi Strauss & Co." explores the decision by the famed jeans maker to close a manufacturing facility in San Antonio, Texas in early 1990. The case follows then-vice president of operations Pete Thigpen and his team as they wrestle with the economic and human capital impact of closing the U.S.-based plant and outsourcing the manufacture of the company's Dockers line to a contractor in Costa Rica.

"Levi Strauss & Co." explores the decision by the famed jeans maker to close a manufacturing facility in San Antonio, Texas in early 1990. The case follows then-vice president of operations Pete Thigpen and his team as they wrestle with the economic and human capital impact of closing the U.S.-based plant and outsourcing the manufacture of the company's Dockers line to a contractor in Costa Rica.

Corey Leibow eased his car back onto Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto, California. As president and CEO of Mercado, a company that provided the search and merchandising technology to power retail web sites, he had just met with another venture capital (VC) firm in an effort to raise a $26-million Series E round of financing. It was June 2008 and Mercado currently offered both on-premise and on-demand or "software as a service (SaaS)" versions of its applications. Despite the fact that revenue from both solutions was projected to grow in excess of 80 percent that year, Leibow found that investors generally pushed back on the company's hybrid approach to distribution. Some VCs wanted Mercado to focus solely on its traditional enterprise business based on a perpetual, on-premise licensing model. Other investors preferred to see Mercado morph into a pure play SaaS company. Leibow knew that he had to make a decision quickly in order to raise the capital the company needed, but he also wondered if it was possible to continue pursuing both angles. The choice he made would significantly affect Mercado's sales force and R&D team as well as which customers the company targeted and how it would attract and retain them.

After significant changes in management, strategic direction and product focus, XenSource, a virtualization software start-up that relies on open source code, faces key decisions regarding the pricing and packaging of its products, a challenge which is compounded by two additional factors: the tension with all of the trappings of open source and the objective to catch / overtake the established incumbent, VMware.

Set in mid-2002, this case illustrates "a day in the life" of a district sales manager of a Silicon Valley company, as the technology market faced a downturn. The case enables a polarized class discussion about the tradeoffs that a new district manager might make relative to hiring / firing and setting quotas, after inheriting a mixed bag of talent in an underperforming district. It also seeks to provide with additional texture about the types of challenges and activities that such an individual would face (different from those faced by a sales representative). The case enables students to engage in discussions about four key dilemmas faced by the district manager: (a) Which representatives should he retain in his district, and which should he fire?, (b) How should he negotiate quotas/goals with his superior (regional manager), and with his representatives?, (c) Should he train an employee who will likely fall short of the company's growth goals, or replace him in hopes of hiring on a better performer?, and (d) What should Jim do about an employee who appears to insist in putting the customer's interests ahead of the company's?

Mark Jacoby, VP of the Americas sales organization at Clearion, a fictional software firm, has missed his quota for the first time in his career at the company. He needs to reevaluate his strategies for setting quotas, allocating headcount, and assigning territories. Describes the changes he makes and asks students to consider making improvements on them.

When a company launches a new product into a new market, the temptation is to ramp up sales force capacity immediately to gain customers as quickly as possible. But hiring a full sales force too early just causes the firm to burn through cash and fail to meet revenue expectations. Before it can sell an innovative product efficiently, the entire organization needs to learn how customers will acquire and use it, a process the authors call the sales learning curve: The company--marketing, sales, product support, and product development--and its customers transfer knowledge and experience back and forth. As customers adopt the product, the firm modifies both the offering and the processes associated with making and selling it. The more a company learns about the sales process, the more efficient it becomes at selling, and the higher the sales yield. As the sales yield increases, the sales learning process unfolds in three distinct phases--initiation, transition, and execution. Each phase requires a different size--and kind--of sales force and represents a different stage in a company's production, marketing, and sales strategies. Adjusting those strategies as the firm progresses along the sales learning curve allows managers to plan resource allocation more accurately, set appropriate expectations, avoid disastrous cash shortfalls, and reduce both the time and money required to turn a profit.

Scalix Corporation, a Linux-based, e-mail and calendaring software company, was founded in 2002 by Julie Hanna Farris while she was an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) at Mayfield, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, CA. Describes the evolution of Scalix's sales model. As a start-up company, it attempted to sell directly to CIOs of large enterprises. After facing an uphill battle in that market and then experiencing a few successful sales to small public sector accounts, the company corrected its course.

Bausch & Lomb (B&L) was in a crisis situation when Ron Zarrella took the helm in late November 2001. Following the departure of the COO in 2000 and the CEO earlier in 2001, Bausch & Lomb had undergone six quarters of restructuring and had laid off 10% of its workforce. A company known for cutting-edge innovation and the ability to evolve to stay relevant to customer needs, B&L had become a company in turmoil. Revenue had been flat for the past several quarters, with margins slowly eroding due to lack of disciplined cost management. The company carried excess overhead from duplicate departments that remained as a result of two large acquisitions made in 1997. A patent infringement lawsuit against B&L's key contact lens product threatened the future revenue stream and B&L's stock had already dropped more than 50%. It was in this environment that the Americas sales region had begun a major reorganization. Zarrella felt that he had no choice but to be cautiously optimistic. The 'Stronger as One: One vision, One goal, One team' reorganization had been underway for several months, merging the region's four sales forces into one. Even though lackluster financial performance indicated the need for change, Zarrella wondered whether 'Stronger as One' would return B&L to its rightful position in the market, or whether such a large reorganization would create more problems than it solved.

Traces the history of Comstar, specifically focusing on the development of the company's channel sales organization. As the company's channel grew by acquisition in terms of number of distributors and VARS (value-added resellers), and the company's product offering became increasingly complex, Comstar was faced with challenges around inventory management and linearity. The company was becoming increasingly insulated from its customers by piles of inventory in the channel and the company's revenues were becoming less predictable.

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Examines three fictional vignettes concerning ethical dilemmas in the sales force, presenting the perspective of the CEO or VP of sales. Lundberg Systems is a fictional company that develops call center solutions, including call distribution systems, headsets, and call center software. The first vignette features a VP of sales who must decide whether to take advantage of a junior employee to win new business. The second vignette looks at the potential sexual harassment of a junior employee by a customer. The third vignette presents a potentially questionable accounting practice.