Interactive Multiple Objective Decision Support for Sales Force Sizing and Deployment*
提出一个交互式决策工具，用于同时部署销售人员和销售支持人员两种资源，通过多目标规划方法解决客户账户分配和时间分配问题，并应用于工业销售管理案例。
ABSTRACT An interactive decision aid is introduced for the deployment of two sales resources: salespeople and sales support staff. The aid consists of a normative sales resource allocation model with five objectives and an interactive multiple objective programming solution procedure. The specific decision problem addressed involves the assignment of salespeople and sales support people to customer accounts and the allocation of the time they spend on these accounts. The authors contribute to the existing sales resource modeling literature by dealing with the deployment of two sales resources and interactively solving this problem with respect to five short‐run and long‐run objectives of the firm. This approach differs from existing sales force modeling efforts in which the solution is found noninteractively by optimizing a single sales resource model with respect to a single objective, often short‐run sales. An application of the decision aid to the deployment problem of an industrial sales force manager is presented. Furthermore, useful extensions of the basic sales resource allocation model are discussed.