Exploring Collaboration Between Sales And Marketing

Exploring Collaboration Between Sales And Marketing
-Summary-

Ken Le Meunier-FitzHugh, Nigel F. Piercy (2007) “Exploring Collaboration Between Sales And Marketing” European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 41 No:7/8, pp:939-955

The study seeks to implications of collaboration between sales and marketing and further to identify whether there are benefits in terms of business performance of improving collaboration between sales and marketing.
The authors are faced with the difficulties like the complexity of the interface between sales and marketing, and the limited literature examining the relationship between sales and marketing. To solve these problems they adopt exploratory case studies, and by this way the framework is developed from both existing literature and contextual field data.
The aim of the case studies and examining the existing literature is to investigate the sales and marketing interface, to identify the possible antecedents of collaboration between sales and marketing, and to develop a framework that can be tested through a quantitative survey.
The case studies allow this fuzzy and undefined area to be clarified and existing theories to be empirically tested. To allow the development of a conceptual framework, these exploratory case studies are conducted to clarify the relationship of the various elements influencing collaboration between sales and marketing.
Organisations and customers habitually see sales and marketing as a single function; customers do not usually differentiate between sales and marketing departments and consider them to perform a single purpose. However, in large organisations, sales and marketing are frequently structured as separate and discrete departments and perform different functions.
Three organizations are selected for field studies. These companies are a publisher, an industrial manufacturer and a packaged-goods company. The reasons behind the selection of these companies is that they have separate sales and marketing departments reporting to a single senior manager, and have a vertical management structure. The reason for selecting organisations from different industries was to confirm that similar elements were found in a number of contexts.
The basis for these studies is hour-long personal interviews with three members of staff in each company – the head of sales, head of marketing, and their line manager Senior managers were selected because they provide an overview of the sales and marketing interface and the objectives of the organisation as a whole.
The study identifies that there are three types of factor influencing collaboration between sales and marketing: integrators, facilitators, and management attitudes towards coordination.
There appears to be an established relationship between the level of collaboration between sales and marketing and business performance. The exploratory case studies establish that senior management plays a pivotal role in creating and improving collaboration between sales and marketing, and that there is a positive correlation between collaboration between sales and marketing, and improved business performance.
The role of sales is “to stimulate, rather than satisfy, demand for products”, while marketing “will be structured around major customers and markets, not products, and will integrate sales, product strategy, distribution, and marketing communications competencies and activities”. However, the nature of marketing practice itself varies by organisation and industry. The type of marketing carried out, and how it is managed, organised and delivered changes as the firm co-evolves with its market place. There is often poor coordination between sales and marketing, particularly in planning and goal setting.
This study contends that sales and marketing need to collaborate rather than integrate and uses exploratory case studies to support the development of the framework.
In addition to the findings reached by case studies, the extant literature says that the relationship between sales and marketing does not always operate efficiently or effectively and that their actions are not always well coordinated or collaborative. This lack of collaboration may be caused by lack of understanding of each other's roles, role ambiguity, poor communication, a culture of blame, different perspectives and poor alignment of activities and goals. There is considerable evidence to indicate that improvements in collaborative behaviour between sales and marketing can have benefits in enhanced business performance.
The limitations of this study are that it is qualitative in nature and the conceptual framework needs be tested through a large-scale survey. In addition, the study considers only large UK organisations and, therefore, future research should consider expanding the study to overseas organisations.

Haşim IŞIK (107604140)