Summary. Reprint: R0607E Sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what’s really going on in the marketplace. Marketing people, in turn, believe the sales force is myopic—too focused on individual customer experiences, insufficiently aware of the larger market, and blind to the future. In short, each group undervalues the other’s contributions. Both stumble (and organizational performance suffers) when they are out of sync. Yet few firms seem to make serious overtures toward analyzing and enhancing the relationship between these two critical functions. Curious about the misalignment between Sales and Marketing, the authors interviewed pairs of chief marketing officers and sales vice presidents to capture their perspectives. They looked in depth at the relationship between Sales and Marketing in a variety of companies in different industries. Their goal was to identify best practices that could enhance the joint performance and increase the contributions of these two functions. Among their findings: In this article, the authors describe the four types of relationships Sales and Marketing typically exhibit. They provide a diagnostic to help readers assess their companies’ level of integration, and they offer recommendations for more closely aligning the two functions.
The Idea in Brief
In too many companies, Sales and Marketing feud like Capulets and Montagues. Salespeople accuse marketers of being out of touch with what customers really want or setting prices too high. Marketers insist that salespeople focus too myopically on individual customers and short-term sales at the expense of longer-term profits.
Result? Poor coordination between the two teams—which only raises market-entry costs, lengthens sales cycles, and increases cost of sales.
How to get your Sales and Marketing teams to start working together? Kotler, Rackham, and Krishnaswamy recommend crafting a new relationship between them, one with the right degree of interconnection to tackle your most pressing business challenges.
For example, is your market becoming more commoditized or customized? If so, align Sales and Marketing through frequent, disciplined cross-functional communication and joint projects. Is competition becoming more complex than ever? Then fully integrate the teams, by having them share performance metrics and rewards and embedding marketers deeply in management of key accounts.
Create the right relationship between Sales and Marketing, and you reduce internecine squabbling, enabling these former combatants to boost top- and bottom-line growth, together.
The Idea in Practice
How interconnected should your Sales and Marketing teams be? The authors recommend determining their existing relationship, then strengthening interconnection if conditions warrant.
What’s the Current Relationship?
Should You Create More Interconnection?
Strengthening Sales/Marketing interconnection isn’t always necessary. For example, if your company is small and the teams operate independently while enjoying positive, informal relationships, don’t interfere. The table offers guidelines for companies that doneed change.
Product designers learned years ago that they’d save time and money if they consulted with their colleagues in manufacturing rather than just throwing new designs over the wall. The two functions realized it wasn’t enough to just coexist—not when they could work together to create value for the company and for customers. You’d think that marketing and sales teams, whose work is also deeply interconnected, would have discovered something similar. As a rule, though, they’re separate functions within an organization, and, when they do work together, they don’t always get along. When sales are disappointing, Marketing blames the sales force for its poor execution of an otherwise brilliant rollout plan. The sales team, in turn, claims that Marketing sets prices too high and uses too much of the budget, which instead should go toward hiring more salespeople or paying the sales reps higher commissions. More broadly, sales departments tend to believe that marketers are out of touch with what’s really going on with customers. Marketing believes the sales force is myopic—too focused on individual customer experiences, insufficiently aware of the larger market, and blind to the future. In short, each group often undervalues the other’s contributions.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review.
