CasesInnovation Strategy · Centauro

Transforming Salespeople
into Digital
Entrepreneurs

How we built the eMOL platform and transformed 1,600 salespeople into digital entrepreneurs, generating $200M/year in new revenue for Latin America's largest sporting goods retailer.

$200M
Annual Impact
in New Revenue
Retargeting
Improvement
1.6k
Salespeople
Transformed
Context
Client
Centauro
Industry
Sports Retail · Latin America
Model
Phygital · O2O
Period
2020 · 7 months

Post-IPO, Centauro faced a paradox: a robust sales force of 1,600 people across 200+ stores - and no channel to capture value beyond the physical visit.

Growth capped by physical space - revenue ceiling was the number of customers who walked through the door

Post-visit opportunity wasted - customers who left without buying couldn't be reached again

Underutilized sales force - skilled salespeople confined to store hours and floor space

No recurrence channel - no mechanism to reactivate inactive customers or drive repurchase

“We have the best salespeople in sports retail. The problem is they can only sell when the customer shows up. We need to change that.”VP Commercial, Centauro
My role
Position
Innovation Strategy Lead
Deliverable
End-to-end strategy
Duration
7 months
Scope
Discovery to national scale
01

Define innovation strategy and digital growth hypotheses for the sales force

02

Coordinate multidisciplinary squads: Design, Product, Tech, Operations, Commercial, and Data

03

Structure the progressive experimentation framework - from 2 stores to 200+ in 7 months

04

Facilitate executive workshops and align C-level decisions with data, not opinions

05

Ensure complete knowledge transfer to the internal team by project end

Approach
01

A3 Business Design

4 weeks

Deep strategic alignment with senior leadership. Defining growth hypotheses, mapping the sales force's core problems, and identifying the three revenue levers: post-visit retargeting, customer recurrence, and out-of-store sales. Prioritization of candidate solutions for MVP.

02

Product / Market Fit

90 days · 2 stores · 20 salespeople

Controlled experiment in 2 stores with 20 selected salespeople. Product validation: customer identification, post-visit dialogue, retargeting with personalized offers, and sales force engagement. High data confidence before expanding.

03

Channel / Product Fit

90 days · 20 stores · 180 salespeople

Controlled expansion with proven repeatability. Beginning experiments with out-of-store sales and data-driven recurrence. Refinement of ML models for personalized offer targeting at scale.

04

Scale & Split

90 days · 200+ stores · 1,600+ salespeople

National rollout with structured transition to the internal team. Squad composition review, capacity release for new initiatives, and full operational autonomy delivered to the Centauro team.

Results
Retargeting improvement
6% → 18% conversion
2.4×
Digital O2O conversion
0.62% → 1.45%
+12%
Repurchase in 90 days
15.3% → 17.2%

Business impact

$45M in incremental sales via post-visit retargeting with personalized offers within 30 days

$90M in recurring sales - customers reactivated through salespeople's personalized portfolios

$30M in digital conversion - sales completed outside the store via app, no physical barrier

200+ stores live and 1,600+ salespeople enabled within 7 months

“In 7 months we went from zero to $200M annual impact. Progressive experimentation is what allowed us to scale with confidence.”VP Commercial, Centauro
“Salespeople now have their own customer portfolios. That completely changed their relationship with their work - and with their results.”Product Manager, Centauro
Learnings

What worked

Progressive experimentation: validate in 2 stores before scaling to 200

Engage salespeople as protagonists, not just end users

Data as arbiter: each expansion phase was gated by metrics achieved

Internal team transition planned from day one

Clear business hypotheses before writing a single line of code

What I'd do differently

-

Invest in data infrastructure before the pilot for more precise personalization

-

More structured salesperson training on app usage from phase 01

-

Capture qualitative feedback from salespeople more frequently during scale

-

Communicate results from each phase to the entire organization, not just C-level

The platform didn't expand the store.
It eliminated its borders.

From salespeople confined to the store floor, Centauro now has 1,600 digital entrepreneurs with their own customer portfolios, a direct communication channel, and the ability to sell anytime, anywhere.

$200M/year wasn't the objective - it was the consequence of asking the right question: how do you amplify the potential of the people who already have the best relationship with the customer?

Next step

Want to create new growth avenues
for your business?

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