Wieviel Deckungsbeitrag verschenkt man durch eine gleichartige Einteilung der Verkaufsgebiete?

The common approach for aligning territories is the balancing approach which establishes territories that are almost balanced relative to one or more territory attributes like potential or workload. Although this approach has been extremely populär for at least the last 25 years, it has been criticized recently by Skiera/Albers (1994) because it does not guarantee a territory alignment which maximizes profits. As Skiera/Albers (1994) have based their critic of the balancing approach only upon formal reasoning, this paper examines the relevance of their critic by systematically analyzing under which conditions the balancing approach yields re-sults that differ significantly from probt maximization results. Results show that the balancing approach provides on average territory alignments with 9,1% lower probt contribution than the probt maximization alignments. Therefore, this paper supports the relevance of the critic of Skiera/Albers (1994) and underlines the need for companies to search for the probt contribution maximizing territory alignment.