Marketing 13th Edition by Gary Armstrong, Philip Kotler

تمرين 6

Wheels, Inc. manufactures bicycles sold through retail bicycle shops in the southeastern United States. The company has two salespeople that do more than just sell the products they manage relationships with the bicycle shops to enable them to better meet consumers' needs. The company's sales reps visit the shops several times per year, often for hours at a time. The owner of Wheels is considering expanding to the rest of the country and would like to have distribution through 1,000 bicycle shops. To do so, however, the company would have to hire more salespeople. Each salesperson earns $40,000 plus 2 percent commission on all sales annually. Another alternative is to use the services of sales agents instead of its own sales force. Sales agents would be paid 5 percent of sales.
Refer to Appendix 3 to answer this question. Deter-mine the number of salespeople Wheels needs if it has 1,000 bicycle shop accounts that need to be called on four times per year. Each sales call lasts approximately 2.5 hours, and each sales rep has approximately 1,250 hours per year to devote to customers. (AACSB: Communication; Analytical Reasoning)