Turning Math into Cash
Five years ago, Brenda Dietrich started to investigate how IBM's 40,000 salespeople could learn to rely a little more on math than on their gut instincts. In particular, Dietrich, who heads the company's 200-person worldwide team of math researchers, was asked to see if math could help man...
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Published in | Technology review (1998) Vol. 113; no. 2; pp. 58 - 61 |
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Main Author | |
Format | Magazine Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Cambridge
Technology Review, Inc
01.03.2010
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Five years ago, Brenda Dietrich started to investigate how IBM's 40,000 salespeople could learn to rely a little more on math than on their gut instincts. In particular, Dietrich, who heads the company's 200-person worldwide team of math researchers, was asked to see if math could help managers do a better job of setting sales quotas. The mathematicians collected several years' worth of data about every sale IBM made around the world. To spot opportunities the sales teams didn't recognize, the researchers collected external data on IT spending patterns by industry and combined that information with the internal sales data. So the mathematicians advised the sales department to shift its staff around, taking less productive salespeople off the big teams and putting them on teams that had been too small. Sales in the latter accounts quickly grew. The company drew a more general lesson from the experience: it came to believe that its mathematicians' innovations were something for which other businesses would pay handsomely. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 content type line 24 SourceType-Magazines-1 |
ISSN: | 1099-274X 2158-9186 |