Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
---|---|---|---|---|
9719002 | International Journal of Research in Marketing | 2005 | 14 Pages |
Abstract
To have a productive sales force, firms must provide their salespeople with sales training. But from a profit-maximizing perspective, there are also reasons to limit training: training is expensive, it has diminishing returns, and trained salespeople need to be compensated at a higher level since their value in the outside labor market has increased. Due to these reasons, the following inter-related questions are not straightforward to answer: (1) How much training should be provided and how should training be scheduled over time? (2) How should compensation vary with training? (3) Should salespeople be asked to pay for some or all of their training? An analytical model is developed and analyzed using optimal control theory to provide answers to these questions. Thereafter, an empirical investigation is undertaken that broadly corroborates the analytical findings.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities
Business, Management and Accounting
Marketing
Authors
Anand Krishnamoorthy, Sanjog Misra, Ashutosh Prasad,