Customer Relationship Management is gaining importance as a business strategy. It seeks to select, cultivate and manage the most profitable customer relationships with a view to increasing long-term profitability, through understanding customers' needs. This requires organisations to understand the information requirements of CRM implementation. Most published work to date focuses on management...

This paper studies the within-model-year pricing, production, and inventory management of new automobiles. Using new monthly data on U.S. transaction prices, we document that, for the typical vehicle, prices fall over the model year at a 9.0 percent annual rate. Concurrently, both sales and inventories are hump shaped. To explain these time series, we formulate an industry model for new automob...

Software-as-a-Service providers have been growing fast while the contemporary research literature has neglected analysis of their business-critical marketing and sales processes. In this paper we collect the key factors characterizing how to market and sell SaaS to business customers into an eight dimensional model. We also use an explorative multi-case study to observe six SaaS providers and v...

W use unique data from 245 stores of a UK retailer to study links among middle (store) manager skills, sales, and manager pay. We find that, of the six management practice areas surveyed, the most important is “commercial awareness,” where abler managers achieve up to 13.9% higher sales per worker. We find that many stores have poor managers on this indicator. However, the company is careful to...

In this paper we consider a multi-item distribution channel subject to supplier’s credit period and retailer’s promotional effort with sales learning curve. We determine the retailer’s promotional effort for each item and the joint replenishment cycle in both decentralized and centralized decision models. We show that the profits for both parties increase under the centralized decision model wh...

Essays in Revenue Management and Dynamic Pricing Soheil Yousef Sibdari Doctor of Philosophy in Industrial and Systems Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Dr. Kyle Y. Lin, Chair In this dissertation, I study two topics in the context of revenue management. The first topic involves building a mathematical model to analyze the competition between many retailers who can ...

Despite much IS research on customer relationship management (CRM) and respective (critical) success factors (SFs), CRM initiatives are still subject to high failure rates. One reason may be that many studies rather exclusively deal with a technological and project perspective and thus focus on CRM-related IT systems and their introduction. As a consequence, no holistic perspective on CRM in th...

Escalating sales costs have prompted organizations to explore avenues for improving salesperson productivity. This has led to a rapid growth of direct marketing in the industrial marketing context. Direct marketing in the industrial context is often intended to play a supporting role for salesperson efforts. In industrial marketing, frequently, the predominant measurable response intended to re...

Because of today's strong competition, most manufacturing organizations continually try to increase their profits and reduce their costs. Accurate sales forecasting is certainly an inexpensive way to meet these goals because it leads to improved customer service, reduced lost sales and product returns, and more efficient production planning (Doganis et al., 2006). Forecasting future demand is c...

Despite much IS research on customer relationship management (CRM) and respective (critical) success factors (SFs), CRM initiatives are still subject to high failure rates. One reason may be that many studies rather exclusively deal with a technological and project perspective and thus focus on CRM-related IT systems and their introduction. As a consequence, no holistic perspective on CRM in th...