Sales force can be directly linked to revenue generation capabilities of almost all commercial enterprises. It is amazing to note how successful salespeople are effective in adapting their selling approaches specific to the selling situations. In industrial markets where products are approaching commoditization, salespeople play a crucial role in architecting value propositions that resonate wi...

Marketing costs are coming under increased scrutiny, and activity-based costing (ABC) is often the tool used to analyze such costs. ABC is useful because it requires the identification of cost drivers and provides information that is directly applicable to decisions about marketing costs and benefits. This case illustrates the application of activity-based costing to marketing costs in a food m...

We estimate a dynamic structural model of sales force response to a bonus based compensation plan. The paper has two main methodological innovations: First, we implement empirically the method proposed by Arcidiacono and Miller (2011) to accommodate unobserved latent class heterogeneity with a computationally light two-step estimator. Second, we estimate discount factors in a dynamic structural...

Almost all research into the operations and behavior of salespeople has focused on sales at the retail level. But in many supply chains, manufacturers use a sales force to promote sales and improve coordination with retailers. In this note, we add an important piece to the science of sales operations by investigating the impact of two primary tasks performed by wholesale-salespersons: (1) enhan...

Massive actuator arrays found their applications in robotics, pharmaceutics, aerospace, etc. Compared with electrically and/or pneumatically powered actuator array, hydraulic actuator has the comprehensive advantages of higher force density (i.e. force / actuation area), better controllability, and simpler remote control accessibility. This paper presents approaches to construct and control a m...

When the multinational considers the global strategic sales effort, the temptation is to aggregate practices across seemingly similar countries. While this eases administration, it can lead to sub-optimal local practice. This research focuses on the attitudes of a multinational’s sales forces in Australia and New Zealand toward the various practices that are used to train, coach, and motivate t...

This paper studies optimal sales force compensation plans in a multi-period moral-hazard model when the firm wants to implement high effort in every period but only obtains aggregate information on sales. The sales agent chooses effort each period after observing previous sales and his incentive responsiveness might change over time. The paper derives conditions under which a linear incentive s...