Coordinating Marketing and Sales in B2B Organizations

This Handbook is targeted at academics and graduate students who want an overview of the academic state of the business-to-business marketing domain and at B2B practitioners who want to be aware of the current state of knowledge in their domains. This chapter examines alignment of Marketing and Sales groups in B2B organizations. Few managers or academics are against teamwork. But terms like “teamwork” and “coordination” are value-laden words with often unexamined assumptions. In organizations, coordination comes at a cost, and different approaches are implicitly choices about the issues a firm must monitor and manage, especially in customer-facing activities. This chapter provides an historical and literature overview of the topic of aligning Marketing and Sales, including a recurring set of prescriptive advice to practitioners and why this advice seems to have limited usefulness. It then reviews common delineations of marketing versus sales activities in B2B companies and the implications: these groups have inherent interdependencies and necessary differences in required focus, time horizons, data flows, and information usage. The chapter concludes with a sample of what some B2B companies have done to improve coordination between these functions, and suggestions about future research.