Competitiveness and Sustaining Performance: Integrating Sales and Marketing

1. Sales and Marketing Conflict: Major Causes:

1.1. A) Separate Identity: Sales and marketing are usually structured and managed as two distinct departments with independent goals

1.2. B) Conflict of Time-frame:Traditionally, one of the most cited reasons of conflict between sales and marketing is the difference in the time frame they refer to in the processes of goal setting, resource allocation and performance evaluation

1.3. C) Communication Flow Cross-functional integration requires employees from different departments of the organization to communicate and interact, in order to exchange work, resources, and assistance

1.4. D) Goal Difference The significance of goal differences on the effectiveness of the sales and marketing interface was highlighted by Guenzi and Troilo as it is one of the causes of serious lack of trust, conflict and ultimately a wedge between sales and marketing.

2. Enhancing Sales and Marketing Integration: Major Facilitators

2.1. A) Top Management Top management will need to underscore the benefits of over-coming barriers between sales and marketing.

2.2. B) Organization Culture Organization culture helps resolve inter-functional dilemmas that can arise in organizations

2.3. C) IT Infrastructure IT infrastructure serves as a vital backbone linking functional areas throughout the organization and facilitates tighter internal integration

2.4. D) Performance Measurement and Reward System Performance measurement and reward system is an effective internal process for enhancing functional collaboration.

3. The major objectives of this paper are firstly; to identify major issues in sales and marketing relationship; secondly; to study various drivers of sales and marketing integration, and thirdly; to suggest two-stage research framework of sales and marketing integration.

4. Research Methodology

4.1. A) Development of Conceptual Basis Market information needs to be integrated and disseminated back to both sales and marketing to facilitate the organization’s adaptation to changing environments and contribute to greater sales and marketing effectiveness

4.2. B) Development of Sales and Marketing Integration Model 1) Sales and Marketing Integration Model: Symbiotic and Complementary Relationship 2) Sales and Marketing Integration Model: Enhancing Competitiveness

5. How to Achieve Sales and Marketing Integration?

5.1. A) Shared Responsibilities Sales and marketing need to change their mind set by implementing Service Level Agreement (SLA) and understand that they are all on the same side, working together to understand and satisfy the needs of the customer

5.2. B) Identify Key Customers In many organizations, sales and marketing has not focused their joint attention on the most valuable customers and hence become major cause of conflict

5.3. C) Establish Common Vocabulary and Language One of the points of contention between sales and argument is that they speak different languages: sales only care about the numbers, while marketing is about creating leads

5.4. D) Integrate Customer InformationSalespeople, in particular, have an enormous amount of unfiltered customer exposure. Sharing databases and co-locating sales and marketing people are two other ways to facilitate this type of interaction

5.5. E) Job Rotations Job rotation is considered as a meaningful way to improve knowledge sharing across different functional areas

5.6. F) Design Individual and Shared Incentives Binding sales and marketing together with shared incentives can help pull the organization in one direction