TY  - BOOK
AU  - Nair, Unnikrishnan K 
AU  - Purani, Keyoor 
TI  - KHL: Consulting for Managing Sales Force Attrition (B) 
KW  - Sales Force Attrition
KW  - Retention Strategies
KW  - Sales Organization
KW  - System Dynamics
KW  - Vicious Cycle, Management/HR Consulting,
KW  - Pharmaceutical Industry
KW  - Herzberg’s Hygiene-Motivator Theory
N2  - Kalpak Healthcare Limited (KHL), a large pharmaceutical company in the southern part of India, was facing severe sales force turnover in its Life Branded Medications SBU, popularly called the Branded SBU (B-SBU). It became an issue of highest concern to the top management of KHL; so they appointed a team of consultants from a premier management school in the region to study the issue and to recommend possible solutions and strategies. Over a period of six months, the consultants conducted extensive research—studying internal company records, analysing the industry and external environment, gathering qualitative data through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions among KHL employees and executing a division wide quantitative survey labelled as Manpower Mood Meter (M3) among the field executives—to finally come up with recommendations.

The Case is organized as two independent, successive ones—A and B. Case (A) describes the consultants’ engagement with KHL and ends with them pondering over the types of analyses to be done with the huge volume of data they had collected. Case (B) details the kinds of analyses they actually did and the inferences they drew. The set of recommendations that the consultants finally make to KHL top management is given in the epilogue of the teaching note. The critical value of this case lies in its ability to open up the students’ mind to the dynamic interplay of multiple factors—individual, managerial, organizational, industrial-contextual and historical—that holistically affect a phenomenon like ‘attrition’ in organizations. This could perhaps also be one of those rare cases that makes use of the principles of System Dynamics in a real, applied and combined contexts of marketing and human resource management
ER  -