[4] The firm was founded in 1983 by two professors at Northwestern University who developed sales force alignment models using the world’s first personal-computer-aided territory mapping system.

[10] ZS Associates was founded in 1983 by Andris (Andy) Zoltners, Frederic Esser Nemmers, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management,[11] and Prabhakant (Prabha) Sinha, a former associate professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management.

At Kellogg, Sinha and Zoltners developed a side business advising companies on sales and marketing, which evolved into ZS Associates.

[13] In 1983, Sinha joined Zoltners at Northwestern, and the pair founded ZS Associates in their off hours, offering companies increased sales force efficiency using their now-proven territory mapping software.

In its first three years, ZS had helped eight of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, including Pfizer, align territories and resize their sales forces.