Improving Sales and Marketing Collaboration

Book excerpt: Sales and marketing are two primary business functions that focus on creating satisfied customers. Due to their complementary orientations and objectives, these two functions are ideally positioned for a fruitful, synergetic collaboration. UnfortuÂnately, the practical reality in many companies is far removed from this utopia. Sales and marketing personnel fail to communicate effectively, resulting in misunderstandings, frustration, and sometimes sabotage. Instead of supporting each other in creating superior value for customers, they often fight tiresome internal battles that are a drain on profits, efficiency and customer satisfaction. Improving Sales and Marketing Collaboration offers the first comprehensive perspective on the functioning of sales-marketing interfaces in business to business (B2B) companies. We explore their complementary roles in creating superior value for customers, problems that occur, the underlying causes of these problems, and potential solutions. These solutions are accompanied by a series of tools that managers can use to diagnose their sales-marketing interface and develop appropriate approaches to improve this relationship. Additionally, the book discusses a number of challenges that companies encounter and the impacts on their sales-marketing interfaces. The discussions and tools presented in this book provide managers with a deep underÂstanding of this critical interface, allowing them to apply these insights to improve their sales-marketing interface, which helps them create superior value for customers.