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.
Founded in April 2004 by a former sports agent and a famed blackjack player from MIT, PROTRADE offered an Internet-based stock market for athletes. The start-up company utilized sophisticated algorithms--which were substantively derived from a book and its protagonist--to compute the value of athletes' performance. PROTRADE was targeting primarily two markets: the online sports content market and the fantasy sports market. Tracks the company's progress from idea to launch and focuses on its strategic alternatives for generating revenues.
First conceived as a business plan in Stanford Business School's "Evaluating Entrepreneurial Opportunities" class, the Golden Baseball League is an independent baseball league in California and Arizona. Tracks the development of the business from idea to launch of the first season of play.
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.
A search fund is a pool of capital raised to financially support the efforts of an entrepreneur, or a team of entrepreneurs, to locate a privately held company for acquisition. This study, as well as its predecessors in 1996, 1998, 2001, and 2003, portrays the aggregate profile of search funds and the entrepreneurs who formed them, and evaluates the investment returns generated by first-time search funds to their original investors. Together, these studies reflect changes in the characteristics of search fund entrepreneurs and the performance of their funds over time.
Mother and son tandem Toby and Greg Waldorf started Destination-U, an online college matching service, in April 2004. Greg had a deep background in start-ups and technology companies, most notably as an early investor in eHarmony, an online dating service. Toby had 15 years of experience as a college counselor. With Destination-U's social mission and family ties, the pair was able to raise start-up capital with ease. Although the company had been successful in building a useful matching service and getting visitors to the site by July 2005, it had yet to earn a significant volume of sales from its subscription-based business model. With the busy fall college selection season approaching, Destination-U had to rethink its business model.
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.