Towards a personal relationship-based assignment of client representatives to accounts

Abstract

Business-to-Business (B2B) companies are evolving from selling products towards engaging in long-lasting relationships to co-create value. This shift changes the role of the client rep from being a sales representative to being a value creator and manager of the relationship between both firms. The quality of the established personal relationship between the client rep and the account firms is thereby a critical determinant of future business success for B2B companies. Therefore, leveraging these established relationships is a crucial task in sales management - but can constitute a complex organizational challenge. This paper provides an optimization approach to addresses this organizational complexity in B2B sales organization. We propose an integer programming model for assigning the right client rep to the right account based on the established personal relationships between client reps and accounts in order to maximize future revenue. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.