Andy Zoltners
1945-2023
Andy Zoltners was a scholar, teacher and mentor. But his most impactful contribution came from his imaginative application of models and insights on a large scale to practice.
Andy, along with his colleague Prabhakant Sinha, founded ZS Associates. Through ZS Associates, Andy brought the science of marketing to practice in sales effectiveness and management.
Seenu Srinivasan, ISMS Fellow and Adams Distinguished Professor of Management (Emeritus), Stanford University, reflecting upon Andy’s contributions, “Andy will be remembered as one of the pioneers in transferring academic research to practice in marketing. His joint research with Prabhakant Sinha on sales territory alignment paved the way for the extremely successful firm they founded: ZS Associates. ZS has had huge success in the real world, hiring thousands of employees all over the world.”
After his doctoral work in integer programming under the guidance of late Professor Egon Balas, Andy joined Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where he taught, mentored master’s and doctoral students, made impactful contributions to research. Andy was the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor at Kellogg.
It was here at Kellogg that Andy and Prabhakant found each other and made such a sustained impact in the world of practice. For their contributions, both were inducted into the Chicago Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame in 2005. Andy received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pharma Management Science Association.
Andy’s real world applications were grounded in marketing science. In a poignant tribute, Murali Mantrala, Ned Fleming Professor at the University of Kansas School of Business (and a professor emeritus of marketing at the University of Missouri, Columbia), sees Andy as a true marketing science guru.
As highlighted by Murali, Andy produced important insights in variety of domains: model-based tools for sales force management; optimal sales force sizing; structuring and sales resource allocation models using novel multiple choice knapsack problem solving algorithm; optimally aligning geographic sales territories subject to real-world constraints (SmartAlign); visualizing optimal territories that were based on given data (MAPS, the first territory design system on a personal computer); implementing system-generated territories in practice.
In a moving and personal tribute to Andy’s keen insights that enhanced the efficiency and effectiveness of salesforce management dramatically, Kissan Joseph, Crown/Sherr professor at the University of Kansas Business School, says: “Andy’s ideas and insights have animated many a class session in Lawrence, Kansas. When my students say: “Thank you, Professor Joseph,” I say, “Thank you, Professor Zoltners.”
In recognition of the fact that Andy’s practice-work was an outcome of intellectual work grounded in marketing science, the community recognized Andy with Marketing Science Practice Prize in 2004.
Andy was a gentleman-scholar. Gurumurthy Kalyanaram (GK), a student, colleague, and co-author with Frank Bass and John Little remembers Andy thus. “Andy was a quiet and distinguished scholar, always understated. His impact on the world of practice was monumental. Few scholars have had as much impact on democratization of scholarship in practice as Andy did. His accomplishment in this domain is breathtaking. Through all this, Andy remained accessible and humble.”
Andy’s contributions to knowledge and practice are best summarized by Andy himself in this review publication in Marketing Science (Summer 2005), “Sales Territory Design: Thirty Years of Modeling and Implementation.”
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.1050.0133
Composed by: Gurumurthy Kalyanaram
Date: 6.2024