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.     

Diversification and tunneling: Evidence from Indian business groups

We provide evidence suggesting an important yet largely unexplored motive for the diversified structure of emerging economy business groups is to facilitate expropriation of minority shareholders by controlling insiders through tunneling. Using firm level panel data from India, and defining the core firm of a group as the one with the largest asset base, we find that the relatedness of the activity of a group affiliate to the activity of the core firm is correlated with the wedge between control and cash flow rights of insiders as well as with the opacity in insider ownership. Firms with ownership-control wedge lower and ownership opacity higher relative to a group’s core firm are more likely to be in activities unrelated to that of the core firm. Our findings are strengthened by evidence of tunneling in the same direction, from affiliates with wedge equal to or higher than that of the core firm to affiliates with wedge lower than that of the core firm. Taken together this suggests an expropriation motive for diversification: affiliate firms are located away from a business group’s core firm to serve as destination points for funds tunneled from the group’s core.     

Determinants of early movers in cross-border merger and acquisition wave in an emerging market: A study of Indian firms

A series of changes in India’s financial institutional regime led to waves of cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) deals spanning various industries. In this article, we explore firm-level determinants that distinguish between early movers and followers in these waves. We tested our hypotheses using data for the 2001–2011 period. Analysis found support for our hypotheses that prior experience (with alliances), firm size, and international embeddedness of business group influence timing of firms’ cross-border M&A. Findings support the springboarding perspective that emerging market (EM) firms engage in preemptive acquisitions to gain first-mover advantage.     

Scoring Sustainability Reports Using GRI 2011 Guidelines for Assessing Environmental,Economic, and Social Dimensions of Leading Public and Private Indian Companies

Sustainability reporting guidelines developed by Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provide a systematic approach for the companies to report their performance on social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability. This study compared the sustainability reports of leading Indian public and private sector companies. Reports were analyzed based on GRI guidelines toward their reporting on sustainability. A numerical score from 0 to 3 was assigned for each of the 84 performance indicators (9, 30, and 45 indicators for economic, environment, and social dimensions, respectively) of the GRI 2011 guidelines based on inclusiveness of sustainability report. The analysis showed that reporting on economic dimension was comparatively better as compared to social and environmental dimensions. Sampled companies did not show much difference in their reporting practices on economic performances. However, considerable difference was observed in their reporting practices on environmental and social dimensions. Reporting practices of Tata Steel were better in all dimensions of sustainability and emerged as a responsible company on sustainability reporting.