Kirk Bowman

Teaching Statement

Kirk Bowman teaches S351, “Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations”, with Jim Lattin, Robert A. Magowan Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business. Kirk has held executive sales and general management roles in both public and private companies where he has built, scaled, and managed sales organizations. His operational experience includes channel, direct, OEM, and hybrid go-to-market strategies for companies with diverse technology offerings from software to hardware to services. He has run organizations while living in Silicon Valley, Tokyo, Zurich, London, and Boston. Kirk believes that sales strategy is mission critical to a business, but is often a black box to investors, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. He hopes to bring his experience to students while supporting the great work already being done by the Graduate School of Business in delivering a high quality sales strategy education.

Bio

Kirk Bowman is a Lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he teaches a course in sales organization. He currently serves on the board of various private companies, including Atlassian (software development and collaboration solutions), Code 42 (enterprise, SMB and consumer data protection), Sookasa (encryption and HIPAA compliance), Couchbase (NoSQL database software), Grovo (digital learning platform), Semmle (data driven software engineering), and Delphix (data as a service). Kirk also advises several other private companies in sales strategy.

Kirk’s most recent operational experience was as the sales executive at Equallogic, a storage system company, which was acquired by Dell, Inc. in early 2008. In the 20 years prior to Equallogic, Kirk held executive sales and general management positions at VMware, Inktomi, Model N, Object Design, and Parametric Technology Corporation. This diverse background has allowed Kirk to develop extensive industry experience with multiple technologies and associated sales strategies, including: enterprise software, embedded database software, enterprise search software, internet search, storage systems, internet infrastructure, and virtualization software.

Kirk received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University in 1987. His outside interests include golf, and cycling.

Teaching

Degree Courses

2017-18

STRAMGT 351: Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations

The focus of this class is on the challenges and key issues associated with the creation and management of a professional sales organization. Our emphasis is developing and managing the selling effort of business-to-business and business-to-...

STRAMGT 353: Entrepreneurship: Formation of New Ventures

This course is offered for students who at some time may want to undertake an entrepreneurial career by pursuing opportunities leading to partial or full ownership and control of a business. The course deals with case situations from the point of...

2016-17

STRAMGT 351: Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations

The focus of this class is on the challenges and key issues associated with the creation and management of a professional sales organization. Our emphasis is developing and managing the selling effort of business-to-business and business-to-...

STRAMGT 353: Entrepreneurship: Formation of New Ventures

This course is offered for students who at some time may want to undertake an entrepreneurial career by pursuing opportunities leading to partial or full ownership and control of a business. The course deals with case situations from the point of...