ARTICLE REVIEW

Article Review

Article Review - Ending the War between Sales and Marketing

In the minds of people in sales, marketers are out of touch with what's really going on in the marketplace. In the minds of people in marketing, the sales force is too focused on individual customer experiences, insufficiently aware of the larger market, and blind to the future. The two groups undervalue the contributions of the other, causing both to underperform and thereby to hold back the organization as a whole. Despite this, the authors observed that few firms seem to make serious efforts to analyze and enhance the relationship between these two critical functions.

Intent on figuring out the exact nature and causes of the misalignment between Sales and Marketing, the authors interviewed pairs of chief marketing officers and sales vice-presidents to understand their perspectives. By carefully examining the relationship between the two functions in a variety of companies in different industries, they aimed to identify best practices that could enhance their joint performance and increase their contributions.

Their main findings were as follows: The marketing function takes different forms in different companies at different product life cycle stages. Marketing's increasing influence in each phase of an organization's growth profoundly affects its relationship with Sales. The strains between Sales and Marketing fall into two main categories: economic (a single budget is typically divided between Sales and Marketing, and not always evenly) and cultural (the two functions attract very different types of people who achieve success by spending their time in very different ways).

In this article, the authors describe the four types of relationships Sales and Marketing typically exhibit: undefined, defined, aligned, and integrated. They provide a diagnostic to help readers assess their companies' level of integration, and they offer recommendations for more closely aligning the two functions. To ...