today’s b2b selling environment is characterized by much complexity. key drivers of this complexity include group sales efforts, multipart sales offerings and multibusiness unit participation on single deals (CFo research services 2010). Furthermore, the selling process is evolving from a transactional focus to consultative and enterpriselevel selling with a corresponding shift in competencies ...

The continued expansion of the casino industry has caused increasing concern regarding the cannibalization of other industries (e.g., state lotteries), an issue of particular importance to policymakers since casinos and lotteries can make a significant impact on state budgets. Although previous papers have found that casinos and lotteries act as substitutes, no previous research has analyzed th...

This study scrutinizes the predictive relationship between three referral channels, search engine, social medial, and third-party advertising, and online consumer search and purchase. The results derived from vector autoregressive models suggest that the three channels have differential predictive relationship with sale measures. The predictive power of the three channels is also considerably d...

Over 25 years, we have developed many sales-force and mod-eling insights through over 2,000 projects with several hundred selling organizations in over 50 countries. Content insights are useful in making sales-force decisions. Examples are that profitability is flat for a wide range of sales-force sizes; phased sales-force growth is rarely optimal; focused strategies dominate scattered strategi...

Motivation and Research Question The plight of the record industry is well known – sales of recorded music have fallen steadily since 2000 as the growth of digital sales has not been fast enough to compensate for the decline of physical cd sales. For example, in 2007 alone physical sales fell 13% to $15.9 billion while digital sales grew by 34% to just $2.9 billion, leading to an overall 8% dec...

The major goal of a pre-sales phase is to provide customers with a compelling offer that exactly fits their needs. For its creation not only sales but also requirements engineering activities take place. The latter are needed to translate the customers’ needs to features, to efforts, and eventually to costs. Although this sounds like business as usual, compared to conventional requirements engi...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to examine the daily variations in sales data for individual food items in a supermarket and to assess the usefulness of the computerized sales data of supermarkets for reliable monitoring and evaluation of shopping behaviour. DESIGN Longitudinal observational study. SETTING The study was carried out in one supermarket in Mikkeli, Finland. Seventy-nine pac...

Clustering is an important data mining technique where we will be interested in maximizing intracluster distance and also minimizing intercluster distance. We have utilized clustering techniques for detecting deviation in product sales and also to identify and compare sales over a particular period of time. Clustering is suited to group items that seem to fall naturally together, when there is ...

Exempting online transactions from sales taxes while taxing their brick-andmortar counterparts is bad fiscal policy for several reasons. First, failure to impose the sales tax on online purchases will cause significant revenue losses for state and local governments that collect more than one-fifth of their combined tax revenues from the sales tax. In addition, different sales tax treatment of o...

In 2004, IBM introduced a set of broad operations research-based initiatives designed to improve the efficiency and productivity of its global sales force. The first solution, OnTARGET, provides a set of analytical models designed to identify new sales opportunities at existing IBM accounts and at noncustomer companies. The second solution, the Market Alignment Program (MAP), optimally allocate...