Revolutionizing Nike’s Global B2B Sales Operations Through Digital Transformation

The Challenge

Nike’s B2B sales process suffered from significant inefficiencies resulting in poor shoe allocation to retailers and excessive returns. The organization’s work was fragmented around data sources rather than user needs, creating complex planning challenges when projects involved multiple stakeholders. Nike Global Sales needed to modernize their entire retailer relationship management system.

Strategic Approach

What began as a simple workshop request evolved into a comprehensive three-year, eleven-project transformation of Nike’s B2B operations. I helped drive the work as a senior team member; an end-to-end revamp of assortment creation, selling, and support processes. We used agile methodology with Lean guidance to produce MVP applications and prototypes for phased pilot program rollouts.

Business Impact

$340 million in savings and increased revenue in the first year. The new Nike Global Sales 2.0 system was rolled out organization-wide, demonstrating measurable improvement over legacy processes.

Leadership & Execution

Comprehensive Process Analysis and Stakeholder Mapping I organized and facilitated workshops to untangle existing organizational assumptions that had teams structured around data sources rather than user needs. For each business group and user type, I documented their seasonal activities, locations, and information flows, compiling this into process maps that laid out people, tasks, products, and interactions across Nike’s entire seasonal sales cycle.

Task-Oriented Framework Development Rather than focusing on existing systems and tools, I led the team to distill key activities into simple verbs and nouns, encouraging Nike to think in terms of actual tasks. Business Planners shifted from discussing “creating spreadsheets” to “analyzing last season’s data.” This information formed ecosystem diagrams that kept stakeholders engaged and informed while defining focused, manageable project scopes.

Systematic Project Architecture & Implementation I created a navigational scheme and roadmap based on user actions (verbs) and objects (nouns)—for example, users “order” what? “Futures.” This framework guided project definition and development priorities. As functional blocks were identified for development, I wrote requirements and statements of work, planned additional workshops, and led design efforts for four of eleven total projects while contributing to the remainder.

Global Deployment and Performance Validation The phased deployment across multiple continents and platforms (desktop to mobile) provided unique opportunities to test new ecosystem performance against legacy processes. Working quickly and iteratively, we incorporated user feedback as tools rolled out globally, enabling real-world validation of our approach and demonstrating clear performance improvements over traditional methods.