B1183
Title: Fixing Bad Marriages - When Should Firms Reassign Sales Reps?
Authors: Wreetabrata Kar - Purdue University (United States) [presenting]
Abstract: According to a recent survey, over 70% of U.S. consumer organizations engaged in proactive reassignment over a three-year period, where proactive reassignment is the choice of a sales manager to actively move a customer from one rep to another. Despite proactive reassignment being common, existing literature is lacking in studying this practice and its effect on customer outcomes. Our research focuses on quantifying the effect of proactive reassignment on customers and exploring when this practice has a higher likelihood of benefiting the firm. We study a quasi-field experiment where a large, multi-national manufacturing firm engaged in a large-scale proactive reassignment. By leveraging ML, we find that if the reassigned rep has been with the firm for an extended time, the average effect of reassignment on post-period sales is not statistically different from zero. However, by exploring the heterogenous effects of proactive reassignment, we identify specific customer and rep characteristics that highlight when this action increases customer outcomes in the post period. Through a counterfactual exercise, we show that with the customer-rep pairs identified as should-be-replaced by our heuristics, there is more than a 14% improvement in post-period revenue compared to the firms actions. Our approach and methodology should allow managers and researchers to understand and utilize proactive reassignment more effectively.
