A vexing problem in managing sales forces occurs when the sales manager does not know the characteristics of a sales territory. In this paper we show how sales quota-bonus plans can be optimally used to learn about unknown territory characteristics over a multiperiod horizon. We demonstrate this process in two scenarios—one in which the sales manager and the rep are symmetrically informed about...

What rewards are important to sales managers? Does the importance of different types of rewards vary across sales management hierarchical levels? Research bearing on these issues has been minimal to date, so these questions have not been answered in the literature. The answers, however, have become increasingly more urgent with dramatic changes in the composition of the workforce. Therefore, th...

T H E BO TTOM LI NE Sales managers have faced the same challenges since long before CRM applications were invented. However, new tools and technologies are making their jobs easier. The future of sales performance management is integrated with CRM and social collaboration. It helps managers provide real-time coaching and motivation in context to drive better sales behaviors and, ultimately, bet...

This paper studies optimal production subsidy in a mixed duopoly with separation between ownership and management. Although many existing literature shows that the first best production allocation is achieved under several economic environments (so-called irrelevance result), we find that this result holds in the following two cases. (1) The owners simultaneously/sequentially decide their sales...

Motivating salespersons is one of the most important aspects of sales force management. The prevalent sales force motivation research stream relies essentially on Vroom’s expectancy theory. In spite of its widespread use, this theory is shown to present a number of shortcomings when applied to many sales force situations. The purpose of this paper is to outline a mathematical formulation of a s...

This paper explores what high-performing firms specifically do to gain the greatest benefits from their IT investments. It identifies several IT-specific factors such as Data/Process Standardization, Systems Integration and Application Integration as practices that are correlated with significant IT impact on a key business performance metric: customer satisfaction. The firms interviewed in thi...

business is business! And business must grow –Dr. Seuss, The Lorax The paper investigates the agency argument that sales growth in firms with free cash flow (and without strong governance) is less profitable than sales growth for firms without free cash flow. It also tests whether strong governance conditions improve the performance of firms with free cash flow and/or limit the investments in u...