In Match your sales force structure to your company's life cycle, they start by comparing how you should constantly change the sales force you use during the product or company life cycle. There are four factors that companies must specifically change over time: size, role, degree of specialization and commitment. One of the trickiest things with salespeople and customers is that they don't aim for change, but strongly resist it. Both people feel comfortable, which often leads to failure to achieve goals, and that's when they are forced to change. Unlike previous years, companies are able to navigate the four phases much more quickly, which means the sales force must be flexible. As mentioned here, research has shown that companies are more successful when their sales force structures change to loosely match the stages a company product goes through in their life cycle. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay One of the crucial decisions that smart companies focus on is building their own sales forces or simply depending on sales partners. But as companies reach maturity, they need to focus on greater cost efficiency and how to make their sales force more effective. When training your sales force, this could cost a company a lot of money if you don't make the right decisions. Therefore, when you choose to partner with other companies, you do not need to pay any costs for creating and maintaining your sales force. In this way, however, many companies end up depending on their sales partners for too long, since they have no control over the sales activity and cannot rely on customer relationships. When you start a company, it's obvious that your product lines are limited, and you have a small market. When they begin to expand, sales managers need to focus on two things: size and specialization. To succeed as a business, you will need to build a reputation. But just like anything else, companies will reach their period of maturity or decline. When this happens, sellers will try to change the way they sell, companies will have to consider dividing their sales force and forming two groups: those focused on new products and those focused on old ones. By optimizing resources, companies will focus on the effectiveness of their sales force. This means focusing on sellers, not customers since you don't have hard data on which product they will want, yours or your competitor's. What companies should avoid is playing easy by selling easy-to-sell products. Effectiveness doesn't come easy for a business, just like everything else. They will have to find the cheapest ways to get their work done. During the period of decline, this means that the company's customers switched to rivals due to the products losing advantage. It may be possible that periods of decline are temporary, meaning executives focus on the likelihood of a turnaround. These often require a different sales force than the one already present in the company, which almost always means the possibility of scaling the sales force in the short term. After reading this case, I would have to largely agree. I think companies need to constantly change or upgrade their sales force, as convenience never equals success. THE.