IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-00457733.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Should you set up your own sales force or should you outsource it? Pitfalls in the standard analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Frédéric Dalsace

    (GREGH - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion à HEC - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • William T. Ross
  • Erin Anderson

Abstract

Should you set up your own sales force or should you outsource it? The standard analysis is cost based and assumes that the direct sales force is a fixed cost and that the outsourced sales force's cost varies with sales. The standard analysis then calculates the sales volume at which the direct sales force's costs equal the outsourced sales force's costs and suggests that for sales volume above that quantity, firms should use a direct sales force. This analysis has two problems. First, several other cost factors are not considered in the standard analysis. Second, the standard analysis considers only cost, ignoring coverage efficiency and selling effectiveness differences between the two sales forces. Both problems will be detailed and developed in this paper.

Suggested Citation

  • Frédéric Dalsace & William T. Ross & Erin Anderson, 2005. "Should you set up your own sales force or should you outsource it? Pitfalls in the standard analysis," Post-Print hal-00457733, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00457733
    DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2004.10.005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Guenzi, Paolo & Troilo, Gabriele, 2007. "The joint contribution of marketing and sales to the creation of superior customer value," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 60(2), pages 98-107, February.
    2. Perna, Andrea & Cardinali, Silvio & Gregori, Gian Luca, 2013. "Coping with alternatives in sales organisations: Experiences from an Italian company," jbm - Journal of Business Market Management, Free University Berlin, Marketing Department, vol. 6(3), pages 107-122.
    3. Ramos, Carla & Claro, Danny P. & Germiniano, Renato, 2023. "The effect of inside sales and hybrid sales structures on customer value creation," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    4. TANASE, George Cosmin, 2016. "The 6C Model of Social Media and Developing a Viral Marketing Campaign," Romanian Distribution Committee Magazine, Romanian Distribution Committee, vol. 7(3), pages 20-25, October.
    5. Lilian Nanjala Wabwile & G.S. Namusonge, 2015. "Determinants of Outsourcing as a Competitive Strategy in Supply Chain Management of Manufacturing Companies in Kenya (A Case Study of East African Breweries Limited)," International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, Human Resource Management Academic Research Society, International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, vol. 5(5), pages 190-202, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00457733. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.