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When To Outsource The Sales Force For New Products, Valerie Good, Roger J. Calantone

Peer Reviewed Articles

Executives and researchers continue to seek factors that lead to new product success. While prior research has suggested that outsourcing the selling function can help make the innovation process leaner and limit future liability, outsourcing can also pose risks in terms of safeguarding both customer relationships and confidential innovation capabilities. Moreover, examining the effects of outsourcing has been identified as a key research priority in recent marketing literature. Thus, using privileged access to managers in the biochemical industry, we employed a multi-group analysis of 229 new products to investigate the effect of outsourcing the sales force on new product success. …