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Sales organizations are actively pursuing digitalization because they see value through greater efficiency and effectiveness. In this paper, we examine the challenges in implementing sales force digitalization and suggest ways in which organizations can overcome these challenges. We present a sales effectiveness framework and discuss how digitalization affects its key components, including customer strategy, organization design, talent management, customer engagement, and the supporting architecture. We propose a conceptual model for digitalization success which considers the digital readiness of the organization, usage and adoption of digital solutions by the sales force, and actions for driving sustained impact. We map three types of digitalization failure to this model, exploring the causes of slow progress, poor adoption, and low impact. Then, we share success factors for overcoming these challenges. These include getting the right team to lead the effort, using an agile approach, and putting the organizational support elements in place to sustain success. We present these success factors in the form of a checklist of critical dimensions that organizations tend to overlook. Finally, we discuss the value for practitioners, share limitations of the work, and propose areas for further research that can enhance our ideas and improve sales digitalization success rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dating back more than a century, companies have used incentives such as commissions and bonuses to motivate and direct the activities of salespeople. Today, sales force incentives comprise a large portion of sales force pay (approximately 40 percent on average for U.S. companies), almost all of which is linked to each individual salesperson's short-term performance using metrics such as quarterly sales. Yet as selling becomes increasingly complex, motivating the right sales force behaviors using these traditional large short-term individual (LSTI) incentives becomes more challenging. Based on observation of various sales organizations, we suggest two propositions about the use of LSTI incentives in sales forces today. First, these incentives can create undesired consequences, including organizationally unproductive short-term focus among salespeople that leads to a counterproductive culture and hurts company performance. Second, other sales force effectiveness (SFE) drivers are frequently more powerful than incentives for setting the right tone for the sales force, affecting sales force behaviors, and enhancing performance-especially when products and markets are complex. These propositions suggest that sales leaders should break their addiction to sales force incentives and develop a more balanced approach to motivating and controlling sales force effort using other SFE drivers in addition to LSTI incentives. By organizing a research agenda around a holistic Sales Force System framework, researchers can provide insights on the appropriate role for incentives, thereby helping sales leaders create and maintain more effective sales organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a Sales Force Effectiveness Framework that organizes the complexities of sales organizations, providing a holistic approach to defining and assessing sales force effectiveness. Sales practitioners can use the framework to diagnose sales force issues and develop multidimensional solutions, either when responding to external and internal events or when striving to improve. Sales researchers can use the framework to discover ways to expand their research focus to benefit practitioners. The framework is supported by an inventory of sales force effectiveness issues from sales leaders and recent academic publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we identify sales and marketing activities and common impediments to their integration. We then discuss the concept of sales--marketing integration and distinguish it from related concepts such as involvement and communication. Following this, we discuss approaches businesses can use to improve sales--marketing integration as well as their potential costs and drawbacks. The paper concludes with a set of propositions identifying the conditions under which sales--marketing integration has the greatest impact on firm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New developments and trends in selling and sales management are creating demands and opportunities that require adaptation and new approaches on the part of both sales organizations and academic researchers. This paper summarizes critical dimensions of change in the environment that affect the practice of selling and sales management and introduces the papers that follow in this Anniversary Special Issue of JPSSM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors have a wide-spectrum of experience in territory alignment arising from research as well as direct interaction with over 300 sales forces. Based on their experience, they believe Bales territory alignment is one of the most frequently overlooked sales force productivity areas. Many sales forces are losing millions of dollars each year because of territory imbalances. Well-managed companies are overcoming the many obstacles to good territory design by using a cogent process to realign territories. This process ensures that consistent, objective criteria are used to evaluate alignment needs, yet recognizes the importance of incorporating local management judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the inadequacy of the gross margin criterion for pricing a product line during times of resource scarcity. A decision criterion called the contribution-per-resource unit is developed and applied when a firm desires to maintain the product line's current prices. A pricing and product-mix determination procedure is illustrated for firms wishing to analyze the effects of potential price increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many organizations, marketing investment-level decisions precede the associated resource allocation decisions and are based on market-level sales response data, often with no attention to the impact of rules used to allocate resources to submarkets. Such top-down budgeting is commonly based on a perception that aggregate sales and profitability are affected much more by the level than by the allocation of the investment. The authors analyze the effects of different resource allocation rules assuming alternative specifications of submarket sales response functions and show that allocation decisions significantly influence aggregate sales response functions, investment-level decisions based on these functions, and realized profit. The authors also show aggregate sales and profit ore usually more sensitive to improvements in allocation rules than to increases in investment levels and conclude that resource allocation decisions warrant more attention in marketing budgeting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent article described a mathematical programming model and heuristic solution procedure to realign sales territories. This report presents two linear integer programming models for sales territory alignment to maximize profit. Emphasis is placed on the development of models which are easy to implement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Erin Anderson’s contributions to sales force research, this paper focuses on research that utilizes quantitative models to investigate important questions in sales force management. The purpose is to summarize several significant developments in knowledge over the last 40 years and identify major opportunities for impactful theoretical, empirical, and decision model-based research in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offers a look at the global and regional programs initiated by pharmaceutical companies to enhance sales performance. Components of a salesforce effectiveness framework; Categories of salesforce drivers and their impact; Difference of sales from research and development; Common features of sales functions in various countries; Role of regional and global sales groups in improving marketing performance.

Over 25 years, we have developed many sales-force and modeling 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 strategies; most sales territories (55 percent) are too large or too small; and no compensation plan satisfies everyone. Implementation insights concern model building, use, and implementation, for example, a model's economic value can come from such sources as reduced uncertainty, accuracy, increased speed, objectivity, and stakeholder involvement; theory and practice have different and complementary perspectives; experience and wisdom are sometimes better than models; and models provide insights, while people make decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple-choice knapsack problem is defined as a binary knapsack problem with the addition of disjoint multiple-choice constraints The strength of the branch-and-bound algorithm we present for this problem resides with the quick solution of the linear programming relaxation and its efficient, subsequent reoptimization as a result of branching. An implemented version of this algorithm has performed well on a large set of test problems. We cite computational results as well as a comparison with a previously reported algorithm. Several useful applications of the multiple-choice knapsack problem are also suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]