Working Paper
Understanding Effects of Customer Assignment to Outside or Inside Salespeople
Apr 3, 2023
Uses two field studies and an experiment to assess two competing approaches to managing the shift toward online B2B buying: (i) cost-matching, or assigning less-developed accounts to low-cost inside salespeople and migrating them to the costlier outside sales channel once the account grows, and (ii) a relationship-driven approach that deploys outside sales to engage newer customers until the account can be migrated to inside sales.