Channel Training Strategies In High-Technology Industries

Overview: This article investigates how optimal sales training strategies depend on firm, industry, and channel structure factors, such as sales training productivity, market growth rates, and competitive externalities of training. It build and analyze two new models that account for the dynamics of market growth and thus provide insight into the optimal amount, timing and organizational level of training. The results show that if training exhibits decreasing returns in each period. A company should focus on training in the initial stages of the product life cycle; training in the early stages of the product life cycle is worthwhile for sales managers; for selling organizations with a small span of control per sales manager, and/or for organizations where retraining is not very effective, optimal training focuses more heavily on the field sales force and less on sales managers. On the other hand, if training exhibits global decreasing returns over time, then the optimal training strategies share some commonalities with the previous results, but also show some important differences. This sensitivity is so extreme that optimal training in a given period is mutually exclusive between organizational levels.

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Format: PDF | Size: 491KB | Date: Jun 2002 | Pages: 52