Transforming Salespeople into Digital Entrepreneurs
How we transformed traditional salespeople into digital entrepreneurs, generating $200M/year in new revenue at Latin America's largest sporting goods retailer.
Context & Challenge
The Challenge
After their IPO, Latin America's largest sporting goods retailer faced an urgent need to innovate and find new growth avenues in a pre-established and highly competitive market.
The traditional brick-and-mortar sales model presented growth limitations, and the company needed to expand its digital presence without losing the competitive advantage of its in-person sales force.
Opportunity
The company had a robust sales force and consolidated physical presence, but underutilized the potential for digital customer relationships and sales opportunities outside the physical environment.
The challenge was to create a digital platform that would amplify salespeople's potential, enabling retargeting, recurrence, and sales outside the store, while maintaining personalized relationships as a differentiator.
My Role
Innovation Strategy Lead
Led innovation strategy from discovery to scale, acting as a bridge between business and execution. Conducted executive workshops, defined growth hypotheses, and structured the progressive experimentation framework that enabled validation of $200M in new revenue.
Discovery & Strategic Alignment
Led the process of deep understanding of business needs, mapping of current service, and identification of innovation opportunities through design strategy and experimentation methodologies.
Key Activities
- • Current service mapping
- • Opportunity analysis
- • Target audience problem identification
- • Value proposition definition
- • Strategic workshops
- • Stakeholder alignment
- • Business hypothesis definition
- • Experiment prioritization
- • Product expansion support
- • Team enablement
- • Metrics tracking
- • MVP evolution
Solution: eMOL Digital Platform
We developed a digital platform that amplified salespeople's potential through three main growth levers.
Smart Retargeting
System for identifying and engaging customers who visited the store but didn't purchase, with personalized offers within 30 days.
Recurrence & Retention
Customer portfolio with personalized offers for reactivation and repurchase, increasing lifetime value and average ticket.
Entrepreneur Salesperson
Sales outside the store through app, eliminating physical barriers and expanding conversion to digital channels (O2O).
Platform Components
Machine learning for personalized offers
Registration, relationships and communication
Management and metrics tracking
Physical and digital store integration
Process & Experimentation
We used a progressive experimentation approach, validating hypotheses at increasing scale before full expansion.
A3 Business Design
Strategic alignment, business hypothesis definition, target audience problem identification, and prioritization of candidate solutions for MVP.
Product/Market Fit
Initial experiment in 2 stores with 20 salespeople. Validation of customer identification, dialogue, retargeting, and sales force engagement.
Channel/Product Fit
Expansion to 20 stores with 180 salespeople. High confidence in business impact, beginning experiments with out-of-store sales and data-driven recurrence.
Scale & Split
National scale to 200+ stores with 1,600+ salespeople. Solution transition to internal team, team composition review, and capacity release for new initiatives.
Results & Impact
Other Achieved Results
- • 200+ stores in operation
- • 1,600+ salespeople enabled
- • High engagement from sales force
- • Smooth transition to internal team
- • Progressive hypothesis validation
- • Scalable technology architecture
- • Insights based on real data
- • Foundation for new initiatives
Key Learnings
Deep strategic alignment with the business is essential. Innovation must be connected to growth objectives and create measurable value from the start.
Progressive experimentation reduces risk and increases learning. Validating hypotheses at increasing scale allows adjustments before full expansion.
Clear metrics and constant monitoring ensure focus and enable data-driven decisions throughout the entire innovation journey.
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