Match your sales force structure to your business life cycle

Although companies devote considerable time and money to managing their sales forces, few focus much thought on how the structure of the sales force needs to change over the life cycle of a product or a business. However, the organization and goals of a sales operation have to evolve as businesses start up, grow, mature, and decline if a company wants to keep winning the race for customers. Specifically, firms must consider and alter four factors over time: the differing roles that internal salespeople and external selling partners should play, the size of the sales force, its degree of specialization, and how salespeople apportion their efforts among different customers, products, and activities. These variables are critical because they determine how quickly sales forces respond to market opportunities, they influence sales reps' performance, and they affect companies' revenues, costs, and profitability. In this article, the authors use timeseries data and cases to explain how, at each stage, firms can best tackle the relevant issues and get the most out of their sales forces. During start-up, smart companies focus on how big their sales staff should be and on whether they can depend upon selling partners. In the growth phase, they concentrate on getting the sales force's degree of specialization and size right. When businesses hit maturity, companies should better allocate existing resources and hire more general-purpose salespeople. Finally, as organizations go into decline, wise sales leaders reduce sales force size and use partners to keep the business afloat for as long as possible.     

这个圣诞，在果岭有个约会

<正>品味,属于一个阶层,属于一个巅峰世界。从今天开始,我们将关注这个阶层,洞察这个世界。"品味"栏目将聚焦主流人群的生活,其人、其事、其用……再现名仕风范和品质人生。     

How to identify your enemies before they destroy you

We've all heard the stories about corporate giants who ignored disruptive innovations and paid a steep price: Think what the personal computer did to Digital or Japanese economy cars did to the Big Three automakers. Big companies now spend a lot of time and money trying to make sure they don't get blindsided by their smaller, leaner counterparts. But it's not easy to distinguish genuine threats from also-rans as they emerge. Most of the nascent technologies that typically bombard executives will not amount to competitive threats and deserve to be ignored. As a result, disruptions are usually not taken seriously until they become obvious--when it's often too late. A disruptive innovation is a technology, product, or process that creeps up from below an existing business and threatens to displace it. Usually, the disrupter offers lower performance and less functionality at a much lower price. The product or process is good enough to meet some customers' needs; others welcome the disruption's simplicity. Gradually, it improves to the point where it displaces the incumbent. But, the authors argue, disruption isn't inevitable. They have developed a tool that can help companies detect potential disruptive innovations while management still has time to respond effectively. The tool's decision-making methodology harnesses the organization's collective wisdom to determine how likely it is that a particular innovation will seriously damage an incumbent's business. The methodology has two components: an analytical instrument and an organizational process. There's nothing magical about it--but it gets managers to think systematically about identifying and addressing threats to the core business. And the tool's rigorous approach can spell the difference between flailing around and acting effectively in the face of a serious competitive threat.     

Finance is good for the poor but it depends where you live

I examine whether or not the incomes of the poor systematically grow with average incomes, and whether financial development enhances the incomes of the poorest quintile. Following the methodology of Dollar and Kraay (2002), I find, once extending Dollar and Kraay’s data, their findings are robust to the Lucas critique and economic growth is important for poverty reduction universally. However, in comparison to other authors’ work I show financial development aids the incomes of the poor in certain regions, whilst it may be detrimental in others. This proposes evidence against a “one size fits all” model adding a further contribution to the literature on financial development and poverty.     

Consumerism's sea change: how it will affect your company in the coming years

Consumerism and care management are the cost-containment strategies most employers say they will focus on over the next five years. This article reviews the growth of these strategies and the different ways employers have implemented them. The author then delineates the ten key ways that consumerism may affect companies over the next five- to ten-year time period, as these strategies continue to move health benefits toward greater transparency, flexibility and accountability.     

The sales force as an information transfer mechanism for new service development in the Thai insurance industry

New service development (NSD) is becoming increasingly important as the insurance industry in many countries opens up and becomes more competitive. This paper examines how customer views are integrated into the NSD process in the Thai insurance industry. The qualitative research was conducted using in-depth interviews with top officers, sales managers, senior vice-presidents of marketing and actuary managers in a number of leading life insurance and non-life insurance companies. The interviews investigated how NSD works in the Thai industry, focusing on how customer views enter the process. The results showed that the NSD process in Thailand is not oriented towards developing truly innovative products, but there is much NSD for adaptation of products from other markets. Sales agents act as a main information transfer mechanism, bringing in customer views through the sales managers, who play a role in NSD. Lack of cross-functional teamwork can cause failure in developing new products and services.     

Bank capital in the crisis: It's not just how much you have but who provides it

Bank capital is the cornerstone of bank regulation and is considered a key determinant of a bank's ability to withstand economic shocks. In the area of bank capital regulation, the general view is that more bank capital is better, irrespective of who provides it. In this paper, we investigate whether the investment horizon of bank capital providers matters for bank performance during the recent financial crisis. We observe that banks with more short-term investor ownership have worse stock returns during the crisis. Further exploration suggests that this is partially because banks with higher short-term investor ownership took more risk prior to the crisis but mainly because they experienced higher selling pressure during the crisis. Our results confirm the economic benefit of bank capital in helping banks to perform better during crises. However, when we decompose bank capital by the nature of its providers, we show that more capital is associated with worse performance when it is provided by short-term institutional investors.     

Understanding your retirement savings: How the recent economic recession changed advertising in retirement financial services

This study investigates how messages, creative strategies and advertising disclosures utilized by US retirement financial services (RFS) providers changed in response to the recent economic crisis. A content analysis examines a total of 1819 RFS print advertisements published in six national magazines during the period 2005–2009. Three significant findings emerge: (1) the recession led to a change in the use of informational message strategies over transformational message strategies, (2) there were significant differences in the use of message and creative strategies during the five-year period, and (3) the RFS providers increasingly adhered to governmental advertising disclosure guidelines concerning consumer financial welfare. Implications for financial services advertisers and public policymakers are addressed.     

代客境外理财业务新政对我国银行业的影响和对策

2006年4月,经国务院批准,中国人民银行推出了“外汇管理新政”, “外汇管理新政”放行商业银行代客境外理财业务,对我国银行业来说,带来的将是机遇大于挑战。本文在对代客境外理财业务新政解读基础上,对实施代客境外理财业务新政的目的以及对银行业的影响进行了分析,并提出了银行业的应对之策。     

Estimating price trends for residential property: A comparison of repeat sales and assessed value methods

The repeat sales methodology for estimating residential price indices is based on actual appreciation of individual properties. On the other hand, the repeat sales method wastes data, typically discarding a large percentage of all sales. This article explores two issues related to the subsample of repeat sales. First, are paired sales representative of the entire population of properties that sold? Second, is there evidence that sample selectivity biases the price trend estimates? Evidence from five metropolitan areas supports a negative answer to the first question and the second question. It appears that a “lemon” or “starter home” effect causes repeat residential sales to be a biased subsample of all transactions. Cumulative price trends for the repeat subsamples can differ from the full samples over periods ranging from two to ten quarters. While short-term price trends can differ widely, there are no systematic differences among the samples over long periods of time (e.g., three years or more).     

科技创新是经济发展最根本的动力

人均收入成倍增长的动力是技术创新 从经济长期发展的角度来讲,科技创新确实是一个国家经济发展最根本的动力。根据国际知名的经济学家安德森·麦蒂森的研究,18世纪前,全世界最发达的西部地区的人均收入增长只有0．05％,按此换算,1400年人均收入才能够增加1倍。     

Elements of a talent strategy for effective relationship building: A study among bank sales and service providers

This study considers equity sensitivity, emotional labor and organizational commitment as three important variables that play a critical role among sales and service providers at a bank and the effect these variables ultimately have on corporate performance. Using an equity theory perspective, research hypotheses linking the various constructs are formulated. Data are collected from sales and service managers at a community bank and partial aggregation followed by structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses. Results are reported, implications to a bank’s talent strategy are drawn, limitations are noted and directions for future research are indicated.     

Sticking to your plan: The role of present bias for credit card paydown

We use data from an online financial service to show that many consumers fail to stick to their self-set debt paydown plans. This behavior is best explained by present bias. Our empirical approach is informed by a parsimonious model showing that the sensitivity of spending to paycheck receipt reflects a present-biased agents short-run impatience, and that this sensitivity is reduced by available resources only for agents who are aware (sophisticated) of their future impatience. Classifying users accordingly, we find that (i) sophisticated users debt paydown decreases with short-run impatience, and that (ii) planned paydown is most predictive of actual paydown for sophisticated users.     

怎样争取拨款机会

地方援助 地方援助通常包括提供土地和建筑物,或向能够改善当地环境的市内建筑和施工项目提供贷款.对于能够创造或保留就业机会或刺激地方经济发展的项目也提供拨款或贷款.