Sales effort

Levin8 prepared a survey for research and development R D heads in which they were asked about the effectiveness of different methods for protecting products and processes patents, industrial secrecy, rapidity in the learning curve and sales efforts. The results showed that product patents were considered to be more effective than process patents, but in general all the other methods were regarded as more effective than the protection provided by patents, in a general survey that was not addressed to any particular sector. 

Coordinated sales efforts targeting new retail outlets, resulting in a 50% increase in retail distribution. 

It is important to note that some manufacturers of mill shapes in order to cope with continuing need for greater in-depth material and applications needs of potential customers have augmented the sales effort of their branch service centers with centrally located product... 

IBM s initial MPP sales effort was directed at users in computational chemistry, structural analysis, and the petroleum industry. The company has historical ties to the major third-party chemistry software vendors and plans to offer this software with its MPPs. HONDO, a well-known ab initio electronic structure application, is available from IBM for the SPl system.Certainly,... 

Table 12-43 shows some of the operational parameters associated with specific and typical products. For each of these product groups and any other product, successful drying depends on the proper selection of a plant concept and proper selection of operational parameters, in particular inlet and outlet temperatures and the atomization method. These parameters are traditionally established through pilot-scale test wont, and leading suppliers on the spray diying market often have extensive test stations to support their sales efforts. 

Elizabeth Marting (3) entitled Reporting Sales Data Effectively and, for those who may be interested, this work covers the way companies collect and report sales facts. There are displayed 175 sales forms used by leading companies to insure a steady flow of data on sales results and sales performances. These forms analyze all phases of the sales effort and accompanying texts explain each form or suggest ways they can be adapted to special requirements. 

This market research job was by usual standards entirely adequate for Hercules decision to enter this field. Statistics on production, capacities of competitors, consumption, end-use distribution, and customer potentials were all complete and accurate and even the forecasts of future consumption have since proved reliable. This report was of invaluable help in delineating areas for concentrating our sales effort and in teaching our salesmen how customers used this product. Some eight years later, it is still a handbook to my successor in the sales manager job. 

Technical service and applications research have been discussed as one subject. This approach was taken because both are adjuncts to the sale of products. To delineate properly the functions of these two aids to the sales effort, we must define the terms technical service and applications research. We consider technical service a direct aid to sales because the major portion of its work load comes directly from the customer. The sale of the product very often depends upon the ability of the technical serviceman to solve the customer s current technical problems. 

Tsay and Agrawal (2001) consider a single manufacturer whose end customer market is sensitive to both price and sales effort. The manufacturer must decide whether to sell through an independent reseller, a direct channel, or a hybrid of the two, given each channel s relative supply chain and marketing cost structures, and the tendency of some customers to research the product in one channel but make the purchase in the other. The manufacturer also con-... 

The manufacturer sets the sales effort and selling price for the direct channel, while the reseller controls these decisions in its channel. Regardless of the choice of channel strategy, the demand in each channel is an increasing function of the sales effort within that channel. When both channels are open, each one s demand is increasing in the effort of the other as well, with magnitudes captured by parameters hr and 6. Hence, sales effort exhibits a positive externality across channels. 

The reseller s cost of providing sales effort level s is represented as r]rS whereas the manufacturer would have to spend r dS H to achieve the same effect in the direct channel. Two supply chain unit cost parameters, and Cr, are used to distinguish between the production/logistics methods needed to deliver direct to end customers vs. to an intermediary. 

In this model, system inefficiency results from two factors. One is double marginalization within the reseller channel. Another is the failure of each channel to fully perceive the positive externality that its sales efforts can have on the other channel. 

Another recurring conclusion is that all firms involved can conceivably prefer a hybrid system to any single-channel alternative. A rationale offered by Tsay and Agrawal (2001) is that sales effort in a direct channel can be used to drive traffic to whichever channel is most efficient at fulfillment, possibly ere-... 

A number of costs are likely to be nonlinear. These include the costs of providing customer service or sales effort, and a seller s S H expenditures. 

As a result, by late 1949 Eldorado was running out of radium to sell or rent. It had just started to carry cobalt-60, an isotope produced in Chalk River, as an alternative to radium as a radiographic source, but neither this isotope nor any other had yet supplanted radium in the marketplace. Erringtons sales efforts had been a bit too successful. 

Errington s sales efforts even took him even to the USSR. He and Fred Feiffer, now CPD s sales manager, went to Moscow in the late 1950s to meet with Soviet officials. The Soviets were interested in one of the cheaper BTUs — a model that the two Canadians thought unsuitable for the application the Soviets had in mind. Back in their hotel room, they talked over the matter. The next day the Soviet officials were interested only in the machine that they had endorsed behind closed doors. Like the Chinese, they copied the machine that CPD sold them unlike the Chinese, they bought only one. 

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