resume this in two sentences: One method of specialisation is along product lines. Conditions that are conducive to this form of organisation are where the company sells a wide range of technically complex and diverse products and key members of the decision-making unit of the buying organisations are different for each product group. However, if the company's products sell essentially to the same customers, problems of route duplication (and hence higher travel costs) and customer annoyance can arise. Inappropriate use of this method can lead to a customer being called upon by different salespeople representing the same company on the same day. When a company contemplates a move from a geographically-based to a product-based structure, some customer overlap is inevitable, but if only of a limited extent the problem should be manageable. A move from geographic to a product-based structure raises costs as keeping the same number of salespeople means increased territory size. A variant on the more common product line specialisation is to divide the salesforce according to new and existing products (sometimes called functional specialisation). In industrial selling, companies sometimes separate their salesforces into development and maintenance sales teams. The development salespeople are highly trained in handling very technical new products. They will spend considerable time overcoming commercial, technical and installation problems for new customers. A major reason why companies have moved to a development/maintenance structure is that belief that one of the causes of new product failure is the inadequacy of the salesforce to introduce the product. Perhaps the cause of this failure is the psychological block each salesperson faces in terms of possible future problems with the buyer-seller relationship if the product does not meet expectations. Because of this, the salesperson is likely to doubt the wisdom of giving an unproven product their unqualified support. Employment of a development sales team can reduce this problem, although it is often only large companies that can afford such a team. This approach allows salespeople to specialise in the skills needed to sell new products, ensures that new products receive the attention needed to sell them, and eliminates competition for a salesperson's time between the selling of new and existing products providing clarity of purpose. Some pharmaceutical companies use this form of salesforce organisation