Abstract

This article focuses upon one important personal selling problem, the salesman's effort allocation problem, and proposes a decision framework and operational tool for dealing with that problem. Each salesman in a company's sales force has only a limited amount of time on the job. This time must be spent calling on current accounts, developing new accounts, fulfilling administrative responsibilities, and tending to whatever other duties his particular position requires. Salesmen seldom meet the effort allocation problem head on. In practice, their schedules as generally based on comfort, expediency, or some vague notion of the relative worth of an account. While marketing practitioners have in general failed to treat properly the salesman's effort allocation problem, until recently marketing academicians had done little better. This article describes the development and limited testing of another such model--the SCHEDULE model. SCHEDULE is also an interactive computer program which utilizes a mathematical programming structure in solving the salesman's effort allocation problem.