No abstract

Deployment analysis evaluates the allocation of selling effort directed towards achieving the firms sales objectives. While recent improvements in salesforce automation have resulted in more optimal levels of sales call effort, managerial judgments are still crucial to effectively deploy a salesforce. Moreover, the availability of large databases of target profiles, especially in consumer markets and some business markets like pharmaceuticals, has led to better targeting of accounts. Nevertheless, a robust model is still needed to post-hoc analyze the effectiveness of all these efforts. An analytical framework, based on the user-friendly Portfolio Model, has been found to provide more accurate diagnostic insights when the ideal perfect-knowledge benchmark is used as a comparison. The difference in this approach, which this paper calls the Attraction Model, is in the treatment of the variables. They have been operationalized to take advantage of perfect-knowledge in market shares, growth rates and account usage patterns obtained from a large random sample. In this way the frequency of sales calls, as a measure of the sales deployment efforts, can be scrutinized and the level of success evaluated when compared to the ideal effort. Strategic corrections can then be made for the next promotional period.