Sales-Force Decision Models: Insights from 25 Years of Implementation

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 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. T wo global firms recently merged and asked us to help them design new sales organizations in each of 40 countries. The integration would affect over 15,000 salespeople. In just two months, over 100 people from our consulting firm used well-tested normative sales-force decision models with strong implementation processes to design and integrate the sales forces. We could not have imagined such an undertaking when we began our careers as marketing modelers in the early '70s.