![]() | |
![]() Headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, United States | |
Type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Consulting , Analytics , AI |
Founded | 1983 |
Headquarters | Evanston, Illinois [1] |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Pratap Khedkar (CEO) [2] Prabhakarkant Sinha (Co-Founder) [2] Andris Zoltners (Co-Founder) [2] |
Number of employees | 12000 [3] |
Website | www.zs.com |
ZS Associates is a management consulting and professional services firm focusing on consulting, software, and technology, headquartered in Evanston, Illinois that provides services for clients in healthcare, private equity, and technology. The firm was founded in 1983 by two professors at Northwestern University who developed sales force alignment models using the world’s first personal-computer-aided territory mapping system. [4] ZS continues to offer sales force alignment service to this day, in addition to a range of professional services, many of which are supported by advanced analytics. [5]
The firm employs more than 12,000 employees [6] in 35 offices in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. [7]
The company was chosen by Forbes magazine as one of America’s best management and consulting firms in 2019 [8] and has been awarded for its company culture by Consulting magazine for several years in a row. [9] The company has also been recognized by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation for earning 100 percent on their Annual Corporate Equality Index for LGBTQ workplace equality. [10]
ZS Associates was founded by Andris (Andy) Zoltners, Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management [11] and Prabhakant (Prabha) Sinha, a former associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. At Kellogg, Sinha and Zoltners developed a side business advising companies on sales and marketing, which evolved into ZS Associates. [12]
In 1982, Zoltners and Sinha presented their sales force sizing and territory alignment models to their academic colleagues, demonstrating the world’s first personal-computer-aided territory mapping system. [13] In 1983, Sinha joined Zoltners at Northwestern, and the pair founded ZS Associates in their off hours, offering companies increased sales force efficiency using their now-proven territory mapping software. In its first three years, ZS had helped eight of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, including Pfizer, align territories and resize their sales forces. By that time, the 25-member team worked on 100 or more projects in a dozen countries—including the United States, Canada and many European countries.
In 1987, a large American company hired ZS to reorganize, redesign and reallocate their US-based sales force. In addition to deploying their sales territory alignment services, ZS also supported the company in change management, and built tools like incentive compensation programs to support the human resources of the company’s marketing and sales division.[ citation needed ]
Through the 1990s, ZS continued to develop its capabilities, [14] adding data warehousing, market forecasting, market research and analytical services for their clients. The firm also broke into sales force incentive compensation program auditing, design and implementation during these years.
In 2002, ZS added a marketing research practice to the company that would soon expand and evolve into marketing services. 2004 saw Zoltners and Sinha win the Marketing Science Practice Prize from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for their paper, Sales Territory Design: [15] 30 Years of Modeling and Implementation, which explored the “[m]odels, systems, processes, and wisdom [that] have evolved over 1,500 project implementations for 500 companies with 500,000 sales territories.”
ZS regularly publishes original blogs, articles, infographics, whitepapers and video content to its website and in external publications including national media such as Forbes and trade magazines such as Pharmaceutical Executive, In Vivo [16] and Medcity News. [17] Topics range from airline revenue management and customer experience to drug pricing and pharma commercial models.
ZS employees have also written and published dozens of books on subjects including sales compensation and sales leadership. [18]
Founders Zoltners and Sinha have written for Harvard Business Review on many occasions over the past decade, contributing more than 40 articles on a range of sales and marketing topics, with particular emphasis on healthcare marketing and healthcare analytics. [19]
ZS employees have been quoted as experts in the field in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Business Insider, NPR and many others. [20]
ZS operates as a strategic, long-term advisor to its clients, in the following incomplete list of industries: [21]
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information.
Accenture plc is an Irish-American professional services company based in Dublin, specializing in information technology (IT) services and consulting. A Fortune Global 500 company, it reported revenues of $61.6 billion in 2022. Accenture's current clients include 91 of the Fortune Global 100 and more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500. As of 2022, Accenture is considered the largest consulting firm in the world by number of employees.
The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University is the business school of Northwestern University, a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1908 as the School of Commerce, Kellogg is one of the oldest and most prestigious business schools in the world. Its faculty, alumni, and students have made significant contributions to fields such as marketing, management sciences, and decision sciences.
Léger is the largest Canadian-owned market research and analytics company, with more than 600 employees in eight Canadian and US offices. The company was founded in 1986 by the father and son duo Marcel Léger, former environment minister of Quebec, and Jean-Marc Léger, economist. Previously, the company was known as Léger & Léger (1986–1996) and Leger Marketing (1996–2013). It is now led solely by Jean-Marc Léger.
Many countries have measures in place to limit advertising by pharmaceutical companies.
A chief marketing officer (CMO), also called a global marketing officer or marketing director, or chief brand officer, is a corporate executive responsible for managing marketing activities in an organization. Whilst historically these titles may have signified a legal responsibility, for example at Companies House in the UK, the titles are less strict/formal in the 21st Century and allow companies to acknowledge the evolving and increasingly significant role that marketers can play in an organisation, not least because of the inherent character of successful marketers. The CMO leads brand management, marketing communications, market research, product marketing, distribution channel management, pricing, customer success, and customer service.
Kearney is an American global management consulting firm with offices in more than 40 countries worldwide. Kearney's predecessor firm was founded in Chicago by James O. McKinsey in 1926; he hired Andrew Thomas "Tom" Kearney as his first partner in 1929. After James McKinsey died in 1937, the Chicago office split into its own company, led by Tom Kearney and called McKinsey, A.T. Kearney, and Company. In 1947, it was renamed A.T. Kearney and Company.
IMS Health was an American company that provided information, services and technology for the healthcare industry. IMS stood for Intercontinental Medical Statistics. It was the largest vendor of U.S. physician prescribing data. IMS Health was founded in 1954 by Bill Frohlich and David Dubow with Arthur Sackler having a hidden ownership stake. In 2010, IMS Health was taken private by TPG Capital, CPP Investment Board and Leonard Green & Partners. The company went public on April 4, 2014, and began trading on the NYSE under the symbol IMS. IMS Health was headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut.
Parexel International is an American provider of biopharmaceutical services. It conducts clinical trials on behalf of its pharmaceutical clients to expedite the drug approval process. It is the second largest clinical research organization in the world and has helped develop approximately 95% of the 200 top-selling biopharmaceuticals on the market today. The company publishes the annual Parexel R&D Statistical Sourcebook, operates the Parexel-Academy, and councils all of the top 50 biopharmaceutical and top 30 biotechnology companies.
IQVIA, formerly Quintiles and IMS Health, Inc., is an American multinational company serving the combined industries of health information technology and clinical research. IQVIA is a provider of biopharmaceutical development, consulting and commercial outsourcing services, focused primarily on Phase I-IV clinical trials and associated laboratory and analytical services, including strategy and management consulting services. It has a network of more than 88,000 employees in more than 100 countries and a market capitalization of $49 Billion as of August 2021. As of 2017, IQVIA was reported to be one of the world's largest contract research organizations.
The human resource consulting industry has emerged from management consulting and addresses human resource management tasks and decisions. HR Consultants can fill two typical roles (1) Expert Resource Consultant (2) Process/People consultant. These two roles are defined by Steele F. (1975), Kubr,M. ; Niedereicholz (1996), Curnow-Reuvid (2003) and Kipping, K. and Clarck (2014).
L.E.K. Consulting is a global strategy consulting firm based in London and Boston. Founded in 1983 by three partners from Bain & Company, L.E.K. focuses on corporate strategy, marketing and sales, mergers and acquisitions, and operations. It provides expertise to life sciences and pharma, healthcare services, consumer products, financial services, energy and environment, media and entertainment, technology, travel and transport, industrials, and retail. The firm also has a strong private equity practice.
Sales effectiveness refers to the ability of a company's sales professionals to “win” at each stage of the customer's buying process, and ultimately earn the business on the right terms and in the right timeframe. Improving sales effectiveness is not just a sales function issue; it's a company issue, as it requires deep collaboration between sales and marketing to understand what is working and not working, and continuous improvement of the knowledge, messages, skills, and strategies that sales people apply as they work sales opportunities.
Go-to-market, go-to-market strategy, or GTM strategy is the plan of an organization, utilizing their outside resources, to deliver their unique value proposition to customers and achieve competitive advantage.
The Society for Healthcare Strategy and Market Development (SHSMD) is a U.S.-based professional association and group associated with the American Hospital Association. SHSMD members represent healthcare-specific disciplines such as marketing, communications, public relations, strategic planning, business development, physician relations, sales, and government and public affairs. SHSMD has more than 4,500 members nationally from hospitals, healthcare systems/networks and consulting firms. According to its website, it was formed from the merger of The American Society for Health Care Marketing and Public Relations and the Society for Healthcare Planning and Marketing in 1996. Regional chapters criss-cross the country and are represented in every state, often with their own conferences.
FORVIS ranks among the U.S. top 10 public accounting firms, providing assurance, tax, and consulting services.
Sales operations is a set of business activities and processes that help a sales organization run effectively, efficiently and in support of business strategies and objectives. Sales operations may also be referred to as sales, sales support, or business operations.
Real Chemistry, formerly known as W2O Group, is a global health innovation company that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) for its healthcare services. Founded by Jim Weiss in 2001, Real Chemistry is an American company with global offices in Europe and Canada.
Huron Consulting Group, commonly known as Huron, is a management consulting firm offering services to the healthcare, life sciences, commercial, and higher education industries.
Synygy was a private company with its worldwide headquarters in Singapore and its US headquarters in Chester, Pennsylvania, USA. It provided consulting, technology, and outsourcing services related to incentive compensation management and sales performance management, with a focus on for sales strategy enablement, sales force motivation, sales channel effectiveness, and sales performance insight. The company was founded by Mark A. Stiffler in 1991. Originally named Simulate, it was renamed Synygy in 1997. Synygy was one of the earliest vendors to enter the Incentive Compensation Management (ICM) space, initially in the provision of ICM outsourcing services in 1993, followed by the creation of ICM software products starting in 2002. ICM became the foundation of what is now known as Sales Performance Management.